U.S. Losing Farms

A new government report shows that the United States now has 2.2 million farms after losing 11,630 farms last year.

The National Agricultural Statistics Service’s annual snapshot of farms released Tuesday also pegs the total land in U.S. farms at 914 million acres. That is 3 million acres fewer acres when compared to the previous year. The average farm size is 421 acres.

But the numbers for the nation’s biggest farms with $500,000 or more in sales jumped by 8.6 percent to 145,190 farms. The agency said that higher commodity prices contributed to the increase in that category.

Small farms with fewer than $10,000 in sales fell by 2.5 percent to 1.17 million. The numbers for farms falling in the remaining categories also increased about one or two percent.