By far, the family-owned-and-operated farm is the prototype of U.S. agriculture: 99 percent of U.S. farms are family farms, say USDA economists. Increasingly, large family farms are the leading source of production; only 2.9 percent of them have more than $1 million a year in gross cash farm income but they deliver 42 percent of U.S. production.
Production has shifted toward large farms for many years, write economists James MacDonald and Robert Hoppe in Amber Waves, a USDA magazine. “The shift has come at the expense of small farms.” In 1991, small farms, whether family-owned or under other ownership structures, such as partnerships or corporations, accounted for 46 percent of production. In 2015, their share was less than 25 percent.
There were approximately 65,000 farms with more than $1 million in gross cash farm income in 2015. Some 90 percent were family-owned. The remaining 6,300 farms included 1,760 corporations, and almost all of the rest were partnerships, cooperatives or were operated by managers on behalf of trusts, estates, families or institutions. Most of the corporate farms had 10 or fewer shareholders. “Large corporations play an important role in setting procurement standards and organizing supply chains for farm products but they directly operate very few U.S. farms,” say MacDonald and Hoppe — a few hundred out of more than 2 million farms.