Lamenting the loss of Iowa’s midsized farms

• Samuel Fromartz

In an editorial, The Des Moines Register lamented the decline of midsized farms, which it said are vital to local economies, small towns, and school districts all over rural Iowa.

“In Iowa, about 16,200 farms are considered midsized (farming 800 to 1,000 acres and making gross cash income between $350,000 and $1 million). Of the state’s 20,525 commercial farms, the midsize dominate, with 52.6 percent of agricultural sales and 68.2 percent of farmland,” the paper said.

But these farms are getting squeezed. Their net on-farm income has fallen 44 percent from the farm economy’s peak in 2012 to 2015, and debt levels are rising, the paper said.

With an average income of $108,000 in 2015, these midsized farms “cannot compete with the state’s largest producers,” which made $3 million per operation, the Register said.

It wasn’t the “free market” at work, the editors explained. “Farm policy has encouraged this consolidation. Take the 2014 farm bill, signed by President Barack Obama. The final deal in conference committee rejected bipartisan reforms to limit farm program payments and crop insurance premium subsidies to the nation’s largest and wealthiest farms.”

The editorial said the state’s lawmakers could help correct the situation in the 2018 farm bill by:

• Funding rural development, which creates off-farm job opportunities for midsized-farm families.
• Reinvigorating trade deals, lest other nations take away export markets that have benefited U.S. farmers.
• Helping beginning farmers, by giving them access to land. One idea: “Provide incentives for larger farmers to rent environmentally sensitive land — such as strips near rivers — to small farmers to grow alternative crops,” the paper said.