Record numbers of American farms are going bankrupt, while small farms and Black farmers are among the hardest hit — again, according to the 2022 Census of Agriculture, a comprehensive snapshot of the state of America’s farms and farmers published every five years by the Department of Agriculture. USDA data. Yet industrial factory farms, raising thousands of animals in captivity, have expanded into rural America, acquiring smaller farms, raking in taxpayer subsidies and wreaking havoc on the environment.
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The agricultural census is a massive data collection effort involving more than a million farmers, tracking the number, size and types of farms in different sectors, as well as farmers and financial situations – at national, state and provincial levels . It provides insight into the impact – good and bad – of government programs on farmers, workers, land use, animals, waterways and the climate, and should inform future policy. The latest data set covers the Covid pandemic – an extraordinary time when global food prices, government agricultural subsidies and food insecurity have all soared.
There’s a lot to digest in the 700-page report, but here are some of the key points:
The number of farms and the amount of farmland continues to decline sharply, but mega-farms are flourishing
The number of farms has fallen by 7% to 1.9 million over the past five years – down from a peak of almost 7 million in the mid-1930s and 2.2 million in 2000. About 20 million hectares of farmland went into production in the same period lost because the fields were lost. road for urban expansion, solar parks and other industrial development.
The decline is certainly not stable across the board. The strongest decline – 17% – occurred among the smallest farms with less than 10 hectares. America’s globalized agricultural system favors large corporations and corporate operations because smaller farms are more likely to experience boom and bust prices, extreme weather events linked to the climate crisis, and access to government subsidies and other credit.
Large farms—which include mega-operations with hundreds of thousands of acres—represent only 4% of total farms, but control two-thirds of U.S. farmland. The largest – with sales of $5 million or more – accounted for less than 1% of all farms but 42% of all sales. The consolidation of U.S. agriculture continues despite a commitment from USDA Secretary Tom Vilsack, a former executive of a major dairy company, to support small- and medium-sized farming operations.
Another sharp decline in the number of black farmers
The number of black farmers has fallen 8% over the past five years, the largest decline among all ethnic and racial groups. This is yet another setback for Black farmers, who have been driven out of farming by decades of discriminatory USDA policies that systematically denied them access to low-interest loans, grants and other assistance. The number of black farmers has fallen from a peak of almost 1 million in 1910 to 41,807 in 2022.
It may be too early to pass judgment on the Biden administration, which has implemented policies to help Black and other “disadvantaged” farmers, but so far Black farmers have little to cheer about. White supremacy among farmers has grown from 89% in 2017 to 95% in 2022.
There is good news: the number of farmers in Hawaii and the Pacific Islands has increased by 13%, with a whopping 50% increase (1,509 in 2022 compared to 1,007 in 2017) among new producers. This may partly reflect a revival of native Hawaiian agricultural practices and land reversion.
Climate-smart agriculture and conservation remain rare among American farmers – despite government programs
The number of farms participating in USDA conservation programs, which pay farmers to vacate ecologically important areas such as wetlands, fell 7% between 2017 and 2022. Smaller farms saw the sharpest declines, which is likely due to high commodity prices on the global market driving short-term economic gains, said Anne Schechinger of the Environmental Working Group (EWG). Increasing financial support (USDA rents) for long-term conservation projects, such as 30-year wetland conservation, could attract more farmers and maximize climate and environmental benefits, Schechinger said.
An incentive scheme to encourage cover cropping – a regenerative agroecological technique that helps reduce fertilizer use, improve soil health and save water – is showing mixed results. The number of farms participating in the program has stagnated at about 153,000, but there was a 17% increase in cover crops overall, largely due to larger farms planting more nutrient-dense cover crops between cash crop growing periods.
Large farms and corporations benefit the most from tax dollars
Government payments to farmers have skyrocketed 17% to $10.4 billion since the last agricultural census – largely thanks to Covid-era subsidies, which pushed some farmers’ incomes to record levels between 2020 and 2022. But the number of farms receiving taxpayer subsidies fell dramatically by 25%, and it was the larger, wealthier (non-struggling small farms) that benefited the most. Farms with the highest turnover (at least $50,000) received 64% of total grants – despite representing only 11% of beneficiaries. The smallest farms account for almost half (48%) of those who have received some financial support, but only 4% of the total money.
America’s agricultural industrial complex is raising more animals on industrial farms than ever before
Over the past five years, the US has lost 34% of dairy farms, 9% of hog farms and 7% of beef farms, but livestock numbers have remained more or less constant. That means fewer, but much larger, concentrated plots of land – which are linked to a range of harmful impacts including water and air pollution, poor animal welfare, labor abuse and climate impacts. As it stands now, 1.7 billion animals – mostly pigs, cattle, chickens and sheep – were raised on US factory farms in 2022 – a 6% increase since the last census in 2017 and a 47% increase since 2002. This includes 7,406 chicken farms with half a million additional birds by 2022 – an increase of 17% over the past decade.
According to an analysis by Food and Water Watch (FWW), 24,000 factory farms produce a whopping 940 billion pounds of manure annually – double the amount of sewage produced by the entire U.S. population. This is 52 billion pounds more greenhouse gases emitted by concentrated manure than in 2017, the equivalent of creating a new city of 39 million in the past five years.
Small and medium-sized dairy farms have fared the worst. Nearly 7 million dairy cattle – 75% of the total – are now confined to industrial farms, each with 2,000 or more cows. “As industrial restrictions push family farmers off their land… the benefits flow into private coffers while our communities and the environment keep the burden on,” said Amanda Starbuck, FWW research director.
“America is really a factory farm country these days.”