U.S. farm numbers continue to drift lower, dropping to 2.048 million according to a USDA survey conducted last June, only a shadow of their peak during the Depression. At the same time that the total falls, the portion of land operated by the biggest farms, the powerhouses with more than $1 million a year in sales, continues to grow, now covering a quarter of all farmland.
The annual Farms and Land in Farms report said there are 12,000 fewer farms than in 2016 and 100,000 fewer than at the start of this decade. Farm numbers have fallen slowly for nearly half a century, the coda to a dramatic realignment of the agricultural sector that began in the Depression era.
Farm numbers spiked to 6.8 million in 1935, a time when four of 10 people lived in rural America. Some people took up subsistence farming for lack of jobs in the city. The number of farms fell steeply from the 1940s through the 1960s due to mechanization and adoption of hybrid seeds, chemical pesticides and synthetic fertilizers, as well as to the booming urban economy.
In its new farms report, the USDA says half of the 2.048 million farms generate less than $10,000 worth of crops and livestock in a year — too small to be more than a part-time occupation. At the other end of USDA’s typology, 83,000 farms have sales of more than $1 million a year. They are 4 percent of U.S. farms and operate 220 million of the 910 million acres of farmland. The amount of land controlled by the biggest farms increased by 1.3 million acres in 2017. Last March, USDA economists said the $1 million farms generate 42 percent of U.S. agricultural production.
Only two of USDA’s six classes of farms, defined by annual sales, showed an increase in numbers in 2017, the very largest farms, with an increase of 400, and farms with sales of $100,000-$250,000 a year, up by 200 farms.
The average U.S. farm size grew to 444 acres last year, up 2 acres from 2016. The average disguised the vast range in the size of farms. The smallest class of farms, with less than $10,000 a year in production, are an average 84 acres; farms with more than $1 million in annual sales were an average 2,660 acres.
Texas has the largest number of farms, 240,000 or 12 percent of the U.S. total, followed by Missouri with 97,300 farms. The state with the least number of farms is Alaska, with 760. Rhode Island is next with 1,240 farms.