Robert A. Hoppe

Small Farms in the United States: Persistence Under Pressure

Ninety-one percent of U.S. farms are classified as small—gross cash farm income (GCFI) of less than

Updating the ERS Farm Typology

250,000. About 60 percent of these small farms are very small, generating GCFI of less than

Characteristics of Women Farm Operators and Their Farms

10,000. These very small noncommercial farms, in some respects, exist independently of the farm economy because their operators rely heavily on off-farm income. The remaining small farms—small commercial farms—account for most small-farm production. Overall farm production, however, continues to shift to larger operations, while the number of small commercial farms and their share of sales maintain a long-term decline. The shift to larger farms will continue to be gradual, because some small commercial farms are profitable and others are willing to accept losses.

Exploring Alternative Farm Definitions: Implications for Agricultural Statistics and Program Eligibility

The USDA’s Economic Research Service (ERS) farm typology was originally developed to classify farms into relatively homogeneous groups based on their gross farm sales, the primary occupation of their operators, and whether the farms are family farms. Nearly 15 years have passed since ERS first released its farm typology; in this report, we update it to reflect commodity price inflation and the shift of production to larger farms. We also make a technical change, switching the measure of farm size from gross farm sales to gross cash farm income (GCFI), the total revenue received by a farm business in a given year. After the price adjustment, small farms are defined as those with GCFI less than

Defining and measuring poverty in the nonmetropolitan United States using the survey of income and program Participation

350,000, up from the original

The value of symmetric and asymmetric indices of segregation constructed from MCD data

250,000 cutoff. To adjust for the upward shift in production, two groups are added to the typology for farms with GCFI of

Structure and Finances of U.S. Farms: Family Farm Report, 2007 Edition

1 million or more, and a midsize group is added for farms with GCFI between

Farm Size and the Organization of U.S. Crop Farming

350,000 and

ERS Farm Typology for a Diverse Agricultural Sector

999,999.

Decoupled Payments in a Changing Policy Setting

Over the past three decades, the number of women-operated farms increased substantially. In 2007, women operated 14 percent of all U.S. farms, up from 5 percent in 1978. Women-operated farms increased in all sales classes, including farms with annual sales of