A mid-size family farm in the United States averages 1,582 acres – 2.4 square miles – in size and rings up $645,000 in annual sales, says the Agriculture Department’s “Farm Typology” report. There are 118,340 mid-size farms, predominantly grain and soybean operations, although more than 40 percent also raise cattle and 5 percent have hogs. Only 5.6 percent of the 2.11 million farms in the country meet USDA’s criteria for a mid-size family farm, which is from $350,000 to $1 million in gross cash farm income (GCFI).
Numbers really do tell the story in the 717-page Typology report, which fills 17 pages with 10 columns of data to parse farms by an exhaustive array of metrics on a national basis and then applies the same approach to each state. The report is based on the 2012 Census of Agriculture and uses a 2013 rubric for sorting farms into nine categories. The report adopts GCFI as its revenue gauge and uses $350,000 GCFI as the cut-off for a small farm, up from the previous $250,000 “to reflect increases in commodity prices;” two of the reasons USDA says the new data are not comparable to earlier publications.
Nationally, 88 percent of farms are small family farms with less than $350,000 GCFI. They cover nearly half of the 914.5 million acres of U.S. farmland.
But 12 percent of farms – the 248,087 mid-size and large operations – account for 80 percent of agricultural sales. Some 8,500 farms exceed $5 million in sales and government payments.
Mid-size and large farmers rent nearly as much land as they own – 214.3 million acres rented vs 262.7 million acres owned. Small farmers are much more likely to own land than to rent it.
Among livestock, cattle are the universal animals for U.S. agriculture. Some 740,978 farms reported sales of cattle and calves in the 2012 census vs 50,556 dairy farms, 55,882 hog farms, 114,746 farms with sheep and goats, 137,541 poultry farms and 114,255 farms with horses, donkeys, ponies, burros and mules.