The big are getting bigger. That’s coming up on This Land of Ours.
USDA’s annual Farms and Land in Farms Report shows the country’s largest farms with sales of $1 million or more operate nearly 26 percent of U.S. farmlands. The agency also says there were 2.003 million farms in the nation during 2022, a drop of 0.5 percentage points from 2012. Around 88,660 farms, or 3.9 percent of the total, had sales of at least $1 million.
Ten years ago, three percent of farms made that category. The average size of the largest farms, by sales, was 2,927 acres or 4.6 square miles in 2022. In 2012, farms with $1 million in sales were an average of 2,481 acres in size. USDA says the average farm size for 2022 was 446 acres, up from 445 acres in 2021.
While the size of farms in the $1 million or more sales class increased, farms in every other sales class either decreased or remained the same size.
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Sabrina Halvorson
National Correspondent / AgNet Media, Inc.
Sabrina Halvorson is an award-winning journalist, broadcaster, and public speaker who specializes in agriculture. She primarily reports on legislative issues and hosts The AgNet News Hour and The AgNet Weekly podcast. Sabrina is a native of California’s agriculture-rich Central Valley.