What's Happening to Farms in America?

A few notes from the USDA 2022 Ag Census.

Every five years, the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) conducts a census on agriculture in the United States. The forms they ask farmers and landowners to fill out (yes, there are separate forms for each) are surprisingly long and extensive. When I filled mine out back in 2022, it took up the better part of an afternoon. I had to provide details for every acre of pasture and woodland we manage and not just own, each dozen of eggs and pound of meat or vegetables sold, as well as what role each member of my family played in the production and maintenance of our little farm business. At least once I got confused and had to call the FSA office for clarification. It’s a weighty, complicated document.

Fifteen months later, the USDA has finally released some preliminary findings from the 2022 census. The data are bleak: according to the census, the US lost a staggering twenty million acres of farmland from 2017 to 2022. As Tom Vilsack, the US Secretary of Agriculture, put it, that’s the size of every state in New England except Connecticut. 142,000 individual farms– nearly 7% of all total farms in 2017—disappeared and will be removed from the Farm Service Agency map forever. As Modern Farmer points out, we now have the lowest number of farms in America since 1850. Meanwhile, the average size of farms increased 5% to 463 acres per farm. And while average farm incomes improved (was it COVID? inflation?), the majority of farmers report an off-farm occupation to supplement their on-farm income. 

As some have pointed out, the 2022 numbers fall in line with longstanding trends in American agriculture. The number of US farms was at its highest (6.8 million) in 1935; land in farm production peaked in 1950 at 1.2 billion acres. With the advent of mechanized agriculture, the number of individual farms declined precipitously until evening off in the 1970’s. Meanwhile, the average farm size ballooned to 440 acres by 1970. Since then, that number has creeped up by an acre or so every year until the Census spike from 446 (2021) to 463 acres (2022). 

The problem with the 2022 data is with scale. I can’t recall anyone expecting such an exaggerated loss of farms and farmland. And it’s especially worrisome given other data collected by a different branch of the USDA, the Economic Research Service. ERS reports that in 2023, net farm income is expected to drop 18.9% in 2023 and another 27.1% in 2024. 

In the coming weeks, I’m going to be spending more time sifting through this and other data specific to North Carolina. I won’t pretend to be a statistician, but the data is out there on the USDA and NCDA websites for the public to look at. It seems worth stepping in for a moment and asking what these numbers might portend.

More soon.