Off Farm Work Climbing and Ag Economy Shutters More Farms

Off Farm Work Climbing and Ag Economy Shutters More Farms

Bob Larson
Bob Larson
From the Ag Information Network, this is your Agribusiness Update.

**The 2022 Census of Agriculture showed about 40% of

American farmers worked 200 or more days off the farm.

93% of the 3,078 counties for which data was reported had at least 30% of producers working 200 or more days off the farm.

Agricultural Resource Management Survey data says over half of family farms weren’t profitable in 2022, and 84% of farms earned at least half their income off farm.

**Across the country, skyrocketing prices, wages and operating costs have shuttered hundreds of thousands of American farms.

MSN reports in the past five years alone, over 140,000

American farms have tilled for the last time.

Going back to 1950, 66% of all U.S. farms, 3.75 million farms in total, have stopped producing.

The number of acres farmed has dropped by 323 million, which is roughly double the size of Texas.

**Despite the cattle inventory plummeting to the lowest level in 73 years, the number of cattle on feed remains surprisingly strong.

Cattle and calves on feed for the slaughter market for feedlots with a capacity of 1,000 or more head totaled 11.6 million on October 1st, slightly below the inventory from a year earlier.

The inventory included 7 million steers and steer calves, up 1% from the previous year.

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