Family Farms Remain the Cornerstone of U.S. Agriculture

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by Virginia Harris, Demographer, National Agricultural Statistics Service 

As you can imagine, Census of Agriculture is a virtual data gold mine for an agricultural demographer. And as we celebrate U.S. agriculture this week, with the help of the Census data we can focus on the key element of our nation’s agriculture – family farms.

Of the 2.1 million farms in the United States in 2012, 97 percent were family-owned operations. Eighty-eight percent of all farms were small family farms. This group included farms such as retirement farms, farms with operators working part-time off-farm, as well as farms with less than $350,000 in gross cash farm income.

Now I know that even $350,000 seems like a lot of money, especially for a small operation, but let’s not forget that this is based only on income. There are also many input costs that go into farming. In fact, out of all of these small farms, only 41 percent reported positive income from farming.

[EasyDNNGallery|1500|Width|450|Height|450|position|left|resizecrop|False|lightbox|False|title|False|description|False|redirection|False|LinkText||]While small family farms represent an overwhelming portion of all farms in the country, not surprisingly they cover a significantly smaller portion of U.S. farmland. In 2012, small farms operated just under half (48 percent) of all farmland and owned 47 percent of the value of farm real estate, which includes land and buildings. They accounted for 20 percent of agriculture sales and 5 percent of the country’s net farm income in 2012. They held 40 percent of the U.S. cattle inventory and 89 percent of the horse inventory, and grew 64 percent of all acres in forage production.

On the demographics front, the youngest farmers among all groups were operators whose primary occupation is off the farm, with an average age of 52.8 years. Retirement farms and low-sales farms had higher proportions of female principal operators (17 and 18 percent, respectively) than did all U.S. farms (14 percent).

This small sampling of the millions of data points starts to show how diverse and important family farms are to the economy and rural America.  Yet it barely scratches the surface of available information. There are always new findings and new trends hidden behind all of the numbers. So feel free to peruse the Census data on your own.

 

 

Source:  USDA

 

20130620-RD-LSC-0120 by USDAgov, on Flickr
Creative Commons Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic License   by  USDAgov 

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