America’s Diverse Family Farms Report

America’s Diverse Family Farms Report

Maura Bennett
Maura Bennett

The USDA has released its annual America’s Diverse Family Farms Report.

The report includes statistics on U.S. farms, including production, financial performance, and farm household characteristics by farm size.

Christine Whitt, of the Economic Research Service, authored the report.

“ We found that 98 percent of U.S. farms are family farms. They accounted for 86 percent of farm production. Although small farms make up 90 percent of the farm count, large scale family farms had the largest share of the value of production at 44 percent. Small farms count for almost half of the value of poultry and hay production. "

Whitt says small family farms have gross cash farm income less than $350,000 and account for 22 percent of production.

“In 2019 about 43 percent of farm households had income below the median for all US households and 3 percent had well less than the US median.”

For the first time this year, researchers looked at women in agriculture, ( women are operators in more than half of farming operations) direct sales ( 9 percent of operations sold commodities direct to consumers), and succession planning (17 percent of principal operators plan to retire in the next 5 years, 52 percent do not, and 30 percent don’t know.)

The full report is found https://www.ers.usda.gov.

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