Large family farms generate 42 percent of U.S. agricultural production
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.
“I’d like to cock him one”
Sixty years after the Double T dairy farm went into business in California's Central Valley, owner Tony Azevedo sold his cattle, partly due to unrelenting drought and partly out of frustration over disagreements with his son on transfer of the business to a new generation.
Are older farmers a sign of multi-generational operations?
One of the most-reported statistics about American agriculture is the rising average age of farmers - 58.3 years in the 2012 Census of Agriculture, an increase of 1.2 years from the 2007 census, writes economist David Widmar at the blog Agricultural Economic Insights.