Not surprised there are vastly more small farms than large farms, but what does it look like in terms of acres?
Acres don’t actually matter, especially for people who (a) have little idea what an acre is; (b) have little idea what an acre can produce. It’s not uncommon for a small farm that sells direct to consumers to net > $25k per acre while a commodity farmer might be lucky to hit $1k. And that’s the problem with the USDA numbers around “production value” in that report - I need to find a source for this but when last I dug into it, it turned out they treat everything as commodities at wholesale value and don’t use the actual retail sale value because they don’t have that data. IOW if I sell potatoes for $2/lb cash they will tend to see it as maybe $0.75 / lb. Meaning production value for direct-to-consumer is vastly under-reported.
All this said, 45% of all agricultural land in the US is “small family farms”.
Acres don’t actually matter, especially for people who (a) have little idea what an acre is; (b) have little idea what an acre can produce. It’s not uncommon for a small farm that sells direct to consumers to net > $25k per acre while a commodity farmer might be lucky to hit $1k. And that’s the problem with the USDA numbers around “production value” in that report - I need to find a source for this but when last I dug into it, it turned out they treat everything as commodities at wholesale value and don’t use the actual retail sale value because they don’t have that data. IOW if I sell potatoes for $2/lb cash they will tend to see it as maybe $0.75 / lb. Meaning production value for direct-to-consumer is vastly under-reported.
All this said, 45% of all agricultural land in the US is “small family farms”.