Though that page also says:
Very large family farms (101,265) gross over $500,000
Large family farms (86,551) gross between $250,000 and $500,000
Small family farms (1,925,799) gross under $250,000
So the largest number of “family farms” are tiny.
How tiny? Growing up, a lot of local farmers in my area had 40 acres. Now 160 acres seems more common, but with disconnected fields it’s hard to say just how many pastures one particular farming family is running.
About 15 years ago, when I had ADM as a client, I did a lot of interviews with grain farmers (mostly corn and soybeans) in various Midwestern states, including Wisconsin. What I learned was that all of them had farmland which they owned (and farmed), but that that most of them also farmed land that they leased – typically, land which had been a different family’s farm, but the farmer had passed away, and while the kids still owned the land, none of them were farmers (and they usually didn’t live there anymore, either).
I also learned that, for most of them, they had to farm somewhere between 1000 and 1500 acres in order for the finances to work out, particularly the costs of machinery.
Grossing less than a quarter million a year sounds tiny to me.
Well, cows would. Most of the Midwest is corn and soybeans, and almost all of that is fed to livestock.
California grows a vast array of crops. On the Central Coast, where I lived, the main crops were artichokes, strawberries, cane berries, brussels sprouts, cauliflower, broccoli, lettuce, and spinach. High value crops like almonds, walnuts, wine grapes, table grapes, peaches, tomatoes, etc are more inland of there. Oranges, lemons, grapefuit, avocados, more southerly. You can grow almost anything save true tropical crops in California–as long as you irrigate it. As kids when we went on road trips we used to guess what crops were in the fields whizzing by. That would be a boring game in the Midwest.
Cite for “almost all of that is fed to livestock.” As per USDA’s ERS, in 2019 the corn crop was roughly split in thirds as to its ultimate use:
1/3rd to livestock
1/3rd to ethanol production
1/3rd to human consumption (very little directly in the form of edible “sweet” corn, but corn is a major ingredient in many foods, either through sweetener made from corn, corn flour is used in a number of products, and products like corn oil which are frequently used in more industrial cooking applications due to some of its properties being advantageous)
The numbers of soybean are more tilted towards animal feed–about 70% of the soybean crop (also as per USDA ERS) goes to animal feed. Still not sure I’d even categorize that as “almost all.” Almost all while a bit squishy, feels like you’re saying something like 95% or similar.
This is also true here in central Kansas. I have a good friend who farms about 1100 acres (he owns perhaps half of that and leases the rest.) The size of his operation is typical for the region, which is predominantly wheat and soybeans, although more and more corn is being planted, as our rainfall amounts have been increasing. He does okay, but he hasn’t bought a new piece of equipment in several years.
When I was growing up, the typical operation was 300 to 500 acres.
I’m surprised that a ‘very large family farm’ only grosses a half million. I can only hope that they net a good chunk of that. Even my small mom and pop type store nets a considerably more than that and we’re not putting in the back breaking labor the farmers I know do.
Side note: I always think it’s a bit amusing when someone asks if our corn is ‘sweet corn’. I want to say ‘as opposed to what’, though I usually just confirm that it is. Without getting overly nitpicky, any corn on the cob that you see in the produce section of the store is sweet corn.
As opposed to sweet and sour corn, highly prized in Asian fusion cuisine. 
Well, here’s another USDA article, which states:
About half of U.S. farms are very small, with annual farm sales under $10,000; the households operating these farms typically rely on off-farm sources for most of their household income. In contrast, the median household operating large-scale farms earned $350,373 in 2019 with most of that from farming.
So half of all US farms are ‘hobby’ farms, which certainly skews all figures and percentages.
Minneapolis is to food what Detroit is to cars, and Minneapolis cabbies are some of the most erudite I’ve ever been driven by (compared to San Diego cabbies all being retired navy seals). Nobody can fill the 90 cubic feet of a sedan’s interior with vitriol on the topic of crop diversion from food to fuel than they.
Couple that with starting a job in an area from a much different part of the socio-economic spectrum and I learned about diversity real quick.
What? You didn’t work at Pandl’s or the country club like most of my Fox Point/Whitefish Bay friends did?
Good for you!
I still remember the Milwaukee news interviewing the first black family to move into Whitefish Bay, and the dad turned it into a comedy routine: "Well, first thing we’re going to do is, I got one of these [shows black-skinned jockey lawn ornament], and I’m gonna paint him… white!" “Pretty soon they’ll be calling it Greyfish Bay.”
I didn’t. I also didn’t work at Sendiks like half the high school. Just yesterday I was going to my parents house and I was thinking that since we moved to that house 25+ years ago, I’ve been in Pandl’s once, maybe. Considering we’re only about a block away from it, it seemed odd.
My family has a business on the other side of town, over by the airport. That’s where I started working when I was 12…it’s where I’m sitting right now typing this.
Even now Whitefolks Bay still holds up. Very, very few black residents live in the city and even all the other (racial) minorities can’t possibly be very high. Checking my guess on wiki, the 2020 census says WFB is about 2% African American. It works out to about 268 out of 14,000 people. That’s actually more than I thought it would be. If someone told me there were 20 Black families (or even just 20 Black People) in WFB, I wouldn’t have thought anything of it.
No? You go by plenty of fields where you try to guess what they’re growing.
As an adult, I wonder how California is going to handle water shortages and crops.
You are surely not the only one.
20 years ago it was the opposite. WI, MI, IL, MN, PA were reliably blue and places like OH and IA were swing states. The south was pretty much solid red other than FL which swung.
Supposedly its all due to the education gap among whites. College educated whites reject racism and authoritarianism while high school educated ones are more likely to embrace it. Rust belt states have lower education levels.
I personally think we’re in a 7th party system now.
The education gap (among whites), gender gap and age gap in politics is changing politics. The midwest and northeast is going more red while the urban south and southwest is going more blue. Also I wonder if WFH becomes mainstream if that’ll change anything. Someone made the argument that a lot of liberal whites in the midwest move to places like Chicago for careers. if they can WFH and stay in Wisconsin, Ohio, etc. it may change politics a bit.
A post was merged into an existing topic: RangerLoops troll posts
I wonder if those are bullshit farms made for farm subsidies, as you sometimes hear about. Some token garden or raising a few chickens and suddenly you get subsidies and tax breaks.
That’s what I was thinking as well. But my other thought is that it’s people that have income from, what is technically, a farm. If they have a few acres, not enough to make real money, but enough to grow a few rows of apple trees or a few thousand pumpkins or something else similarly small and they want to keep the income above board, they may have set it up as a real business. I don’t think anyone would argue that the business type is a farm and now this small family farm that lets people pick their own apples or sells a few trailer loads of pumpkins to local stores or farmer’s markets is counted as a farm and gets grouped in with all the other farms, even if they’re only bringing in a few thousand dollars a year.
There’s a good deal of this. Also, a number of farms are little more than land-holding companies. The main crop they’re farming is property-tax breaks. This keeps the land in family hands until the actual value can be realized in the form of a subdivision, industrial park, or casino.