More Large Ranches
Be it our phone company or our food store it seems our choices are becoming more limited as powerful monopolies are becoming the norm. I’m Susan Allen when Open Range returns I'll be back with why we are hearing the terms corporate and monopoly more and more in conjunction with ranching. Yes it is a fact that there are fewer farms today and those that remain are in fact larger. New numbers recently published by the respected Drover’s Cattle Network from the USDA found that operations with beef cows dropped slightly last year while the average size of operations increased. The USDA’s report on Farms, Lands and Livestock Operations estimates the number of farms currently in the US at 2.2 million, There is currently 917 million acres being farmed and again it’s a decrease of nearly 2 million acres from 2010. The average size farm in the US is 420 acres. What’s interesting, and obviously the terrible drought conditions in the Southwest played into this, but the decline in beef cow operations occurred in only small operations. The number of farms and ranches with one to 49 cows dropped slightly yet the number of operations with 100 to 499 cows grew to nearly 38.2 percent of our US herd. Small business, small farmers, it’s always tough to compete and while small cattle producers took some bad economic hits due to weather last year farms with $500,000 or more in sales increased by 2.5 %.
