The government estimates there are 2.084 million farms in the country, down nearly 1 percent from last year due to a drop in the number of the very smallest farms, those with less than $10,000 in annual sales. That category lost 27,000 farms, while other categories of farms showed increases, according to the USDA’s annual “Farms and Land in Farms” report. As usual, Texas has the largest number of farms, 245,500, followed by Missouri with 97,700 and Iowa with 88,000.
One-fourth of the 913 million acres of farmland is owned by the 3.9 percent of farms with sales of more than $1 million a year. Half of U.S. farms have less than $10,000 a year in sales and hold 10 percent of the land. For the report, farms are defined as “any place from which $1,000 or more of agricultural products were produced and sold, or normally would have been sold, during the year.”