Farms are getting bigger, but are still owned by families, and some are aided by corporations

U.S. farms are growing in size, when measured by the average number of acres under cultivation, while the number of mid-sized farms between 100 to 500 acres keeps shrinking, even though most farms remain family-owned, Lydia DePillis reports for The Washington Post. "Part of the reason is that some mega-corporations have moved from direct ownership of cropland into a coordinating role, sourcing product from family-owned pieces of land that they’ve sold off. Also, families are just as capable of operating modern agricultural technology as agribusinesses are." (Graphic by Census of Agriculture: The midpoint acreage of cropland and harvested cropland)

More than 96 percent "of the crop-producing farms in the U.S. are owned by families, and they represent 87 percent of all the agricultural value generated (non-family owned farms are defined as those operated by cooperatives, by hired managers on behalf of non-operator owners, by large corporations with diverse ownership, and by small groups of unrelated people)," Depillis writes. (Livestock on U.S. farms)

"The increase has been driven by several factors, including the development of high-tech equipment, seeds, and pesticides that made farming less labor intensive, increasing the returns to scale," she writes. "Also, the rise of contracts means that farmers could lock in prices for their crops ahead of the harvest, allowing them to invest in that new technology (which may also have been accelerated by farm subsidies and the early-1990s disappearance of quotas that limited production).  Farming got much more specialized, focusing on tremendous production of one commodity, rather than growing all kinds of veggies and livestock." (Read more)