Farms increasing in size, decreasing in number, says USDA report

Farms are increasing in size but decreasing in number, says the U.S. Department of Agriculture in its September Agriculture and Food Statistics report. The number of U.S. farms fell from nearly seven million in 1935 to around two million in 2012, Roberto Ferdman reports for The Washington Post. "Meanwhile, the average farm size has more than doubled, and the amount of total land being farmed has, more or less, remained the same."

"At first glance, it might seem like this is the simply a story of big, corporate farms," Ferdman writes. "And in many ways it is—the big farms have only gotten bigger over the years. As of 2011—much as is true with the country's wealth—the vast majority of America's farm land was controlled by a small number of farms. The top 10 percent of farms in terms of size account for more than 70 percent of cropland in the United States; the top 2.2 percent alone takes up more than a third. What's actually happening is that while a number of farms continue to grow on one end of the spectrum, the rest are shrinking on the other, leaving fewer and fewer mid-sized farms."

Farm with sales less than $10,000 account for 53 percent of all farms, but only 1 percent of production, the report says. Corn, cattle and soybeans made-up 39 percent of the farm value of U.S. agricultural production in 2013. Export to China increased from $13.1 billion in 2009 to $25.9 billion in 2013. Meanwhile, food prices have posted annual increases of between 0.8 and 5.5 percent over the past decade. (USDA map: About 46 million people, or 15 percent of the population, live in rural areas. Non-metro areas make up 72 percent of U.S. land and are home to 57 percent of farms)