Report: Family Farms Are Still Backbone Of U.S. Agriculture

By Growing Produce Staff|March 17, 2015

A report from USDA’s National Agricultural Statistics Service (NASS) says that family-owned farms remain the backbone of the agriculture industry. The data comes from the Census of Agriculture farm typology report.

“As we wrap up mining the 6 million data points from the latest Census of Agriculture, we used typology to further explore the demographics of who is farming today,” said NASS Statistics Division Director Hubert Hamer. “What we found is that family-owned businesses, while very diverse, are at the core of the U.S. agriculture industry. In fact, 97% of all U.S. farms are family owned.”

The “2012 Census of Agriculture Farm Typology” report is a special data series that primarily focuses on the family farm. By definition, a family farm is any farm where the majority of the business is owned by the operator and individuals related to the operator, including through blood, marriage, or adoption. Highlights from the report include the following five facts about family farms in the U.S.:

97% of the 2.1 million farms in the United States are family-owned operations.
88% of all U.S. farms are small family farms.
58% of all direct farm sales to consumers come from small family farms.
64% of all vegetable sales and 66% of all dairy sales come from the 3 percent of farms that are large or very large family farms.
18% of principal operators on family farms in the U.S. started within the last 10 years.

The “2012 Census of Agriculture Farm Typology” report places all farms into unique categories based on three criteria: who owns the operation, whether farming is the principal operator’s primary occupation, and gross cash farm cash income (GCFI).

Small family farms have GCFI less than $350,000; mid-size family farms have GCFI from $350,000 to $999,999; and large family farms have GCFI of $1 million or more. Small farms are further divided based on whether the principal operator works primarily on or off the farm.