Acres & Assets | America’s Farms & Ranches by the Numbers

Mar 12, 2024

With nearly 2 million farms and ranches covering almost 893 million acres in the United States, there is a plethora of data describing the people and land that produce our food, fuel, and fiber.  Seeing the numbers helps us understand agriculture production in the U.S.  Much of the information was obtained from USDA’s Economic Research Service America’s Farms and Ranches at a Glance 2023 Edition by Christine Whitt, Katherine Lacy and Katherine Lim.  Additional information can be found in National Ag Statistic Service’s Farms and Land In Farms 2022 Summary.

The largest amount of ag land in the United States is used for pasture and grazing with approximately 350 million acres.  The thirteen most important commodity crops are raised on 250 million acres with corn, soybeans, and wheat making up 90% of the total.  In the graph below, you can see the overall changing land use trends in the U.S.

 

The graph below shows 170 years of changing farm size and land being farmed in the U.S.  Notice the peak in the number of farms at nearly 7 million in 1935 and the peak in the land in farms after World War II.  The decline in the number of farms has slowed in the most recent years with a diversity of smaller farms.

The most recent data from 2022 gives us better insight into the type of operations and the farmers and ranchers involved.  For the following data, USDA classifies farm size as follows:

Small Family Farms with Gross Cash Farm Income (GCFI) of less than $350,000:

  • Retirement Farms with the operator retired but still farming on a small scale.

  • Off-Farm Occupation Farms where the primary occupation is an off the farm job.

Farming Occupation Farms

  • Low sales with GCFI of less than $150,000.

  • Moderate sales with GCFI of $150-$350,000

  • Mid-size Family Farms with GCFI of $350,000 to $1,000,000.

Large Scale Family Farms

  • Large Farms with GCFI of $1,000,000 to $5,000,000

  • Very Large Farms with GCFI over $5,000,000

Non-family Farms in which the operator and family own less than 50% of the business

As you can see in the table and graphic below, small family farms make up 88% of all farms in the U.S., operate 46% of the land, and generate 19% of the value of production.  Mid-size and large scale family farming operations are only 9.2% of farms, work 46.2% of the land and produce 70.9% of the value.  Note that the vast majority of farms are small operations with 82.8% of farms being retirement, part-time, or low sales.

The following chart is interesting in that it breaks out the value of production for major farm commodities by the size of the farming operation.  

From this information, you can see that American agriculture is diverse in who is farming and ranching whether it be on a small scale or very large scale.  Farmers and ranchers across the country may be supplying local, direct to consumer markets for produce or huge commodity markets for grains and oilseeds.  U.S. agriculture encompasses it all.