Opinion: In American Agriculture, Size Matters

[TTL News 308]

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Small farmers are struggling. For decades, they’ve been told to “get big or get out,” an imperative levied against them by both public and private forces. 

Recent statistics on American agriculture reveal a decline of 200,000 farms between 2007 and 2022. Since 1935, we’ve seen a decrease of 4.8 million farms—to 2 million from 6.8 million. As agriculture has industrialized and become more capital-intensive, leading to dominance by wealthy, large-scale producers, much of the decline has come at the expense of small and midsized farmers.

This phenomenon isn’t just happening in the United States. New researchpublished in Nature Sustainability projects that, if trends continue, the number of farms across the world will be sliced in half by the end of the 21st century as consolidation of land, wealth and power reshapes our farming and food landscape. 

The marginalization of smaller-scale farms has severe consequences. When farms are continually consolidated—when there is one 5,000-acre farm in a community, for example, instead of 50 100-acre farms—fewer people remain in rural areas. That decreased population leads to social and economic impacts, with ripple effects that harm small businesses, school systems and other community institutions. 

It’s even worse when the owners of large-scale farms don’t live in or meaningfully contribute to the community. Recognizing the value of farmland and the fact that, as a popular phrase goes, “they’re not making any more land,” investors are buying up agricultural acreage. These investors vary from agri-business “farmers” who manage operations from far-away offices to private equity firms. Their deep pockets price out new and underserved farmers looking to purchase land and root into a community. Data shows that land access is the biggest challenge faced by aspiring next-generation agrarians.

 

Read the rest here.