Monday, January 20, 2014

Inequality down on the farm. This explain a lot regarding the power of Big Agriculture.

Big versus Small Agriculture in one graph.

Look at the 2 left most dark and light blue bars.  Approximately 50% of US farms are between 1 and 49 acres in size, representing about 4% of cropland in the US.

Look at the 2 right most dark and light blue bars. Approximately 5.6% of US farms are 1,000 acres or more in size, representing 53.7% of US cropland.

Source: USDA ERS
The data below from the US Census puts a broader face on the graph above even though it is from 2007.  The numbers are different but that could be because of the way each agency measures the data or from 2007 to 2011 the market could have changed.  Probably a little of both explains the different numbers.

However, the point remains the same:  There is a huge gap between small(ish) and Big Agriculture.

Source: US Census

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