The meat and dairy industries — along with the farms that grow corn and soy for animal feed — are some of the biggest polluters in the US. Yet they’re largely exempt from environmental regulations. An argument that industry lobbyists and allied politicians often make is that there are simply too many farms to regulate.
In 2022, when asked why farmers aren’t required to reduce their pollution, then-Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack told reporters that farms aren’t as straightforward to regulate pollution as, say, factories. The US has “millions of farms,” Vilsack claimed. “So as you think about regulation, the reality is, it’s not as easy as you might think to enforce.”
Around that same time, as the Supreme Court prepared to argue a highly consequential case concerning the Clean Water Act, industry groups contended in a brief to the Court that stricter water pollution regulations would place too heavy a burden on America’s legion of farmers. The brief’s first sentence reads: “There are more than 2 million farms and ranches in the U.S. …”
Two million farms is an impressive-sounding number, and it’s regularly invoked to not only thwart proposed pollution limits but also to pass beneficial tax laws and subsidy programs for farmers.
Farmers hold a vaunted status in the founding mythology of the US that persists today, so arguing against or in favor of a given piece of legislation from a position of helping 2 million farms has been an effective talking point for the industry. But there’s just one problem with it: It’s not true.
Around half of America’s farms make little to no money and produce little to no food, but they’re often lumped in with the country’s largest and most polluting farms — a verbal sleight of hand that is rarely questioned and provides political cover for the biggest polluters to continue business as usual.
How many farms are there in the US, really?
The US Department of Agriculture defines a farm as “any place from which $1,000 or more of agricultural products were produced and sold, or normally would have been sold, during the year.” When the USDA conducted its last farm census in 2022, it counted 1.9 million farms.
But “normally would have been sold” is doing a lot of work here.
A property can be counted as a farm if it makes $1,000 or more, but if it doesn’t — or even makes zero dollars in sales — it can still be counted as a farm if it earns enough “points.” The agency has a system that gives landowners a certain amount of points based on factors like acreage or number of animals to estimate how much money they could make in theory. The original intent of the point system, which was introduced in the 1970s, was to capture actual farms that just had a bad year due to weather, crop diseases, or other problems. But it’s expanded to even include “some small acreages and homes, such as a large yard in a subdivision,” according to the Texas Farm Bureau, “despite having no agricultural production.”
It’s like saying that because I have a laptop and a strong wifi connection, I could, in theory, develop software even though I’ve never written nor intend to ever write a line of code.
According to the USDA, more than 25 percent of US farms have no sales in a typical year. This is because they’re not, in fact, what you might picture when you think of a commercial farm. A lot of people claim their land as a farm to benefit from various tax advantages, including lower property taxes, but they might only have a small pasture for some cows or horses, a small bee colony, some berry bushes, or backyard chickens for eggs — more of a hobby than an enterprise.
“More and more of these people are being counted as farmers, even though they never intend to be farmers in terms of being a commercial operation,” said Silvia Secchi, a professor and natural resource economist at the University of Iowa who recently published a paper on the issue in the journal Agriculture and Human Values. “These really small operations provide political cover for the really large ones.”
The USDA also gives points to landowners who receive government subsidies to “retire” farmland for conservation purposes. It’s a good thing for landowners to do, but it’s explicitly not a farm if it’s not used for farming.
On top of the quarter of farms with zero sales, at least another 30 percent of farms generate $1,000 to $10,000 in sales, which means just a few thousand dollars in profit. Remove these two categories, and the number of US farms drops to around 800,000.
Statistically speaking, Secchi said, the government doesn’t inflate numbers like this for other professions. It’s akin to categorizing America’s 1.2 million craft beer homebrewers as alcohol manufacturers. In her paper, she doesn’t attempt to be the arbiter on exactly which properties should be counted as farms and which shouldn’t. But a starting point, Secchi told me, would be simply excluding farms that don’t intend to become commercial enterprises, because “a lot do not intend to make money. … They, in fact, intend to lose money so they pay less taxes.”
To draw a line somewhere, what if an operation had to sell $100,000 in agricultural products to be considered a commercial farm?
It’s a fair line to draw because for one, almost all agricultural sales come from farms with $100,000 or more in sales. And the USDA says a profit margin over 25 percent in farming is a good one, so a well-operating farm would need to bring in $100,000 in sales (and/or subsidies) to generate a modest profit of around $30,000. Setting that as a baseline would mean the US is home to only 390,000 farms — around just 20 percent of the 1.9 million figure. But 390,000 sounds a lot less rhetorically powerful than two million.
This is conservative, as the USDA considers a farm to still be “small” if it has up to $350,000 in sales. And it’s really the bigger operations — those categorized as midsize, large, and very large, that are of most concern for environmental pollution. An agricultural census that more clearly separates commercial farms from hobby farms, conservation projects, and land that is merely categorized as “agricultural” for tax advantages would take away the agricultural lobby’s powerful “2 million farms” talking point and allow for more honest and accurate policy debate.
And the 2 million farm count isn’t just symbolic, Secchi told me. Some of the federal money doled out for agricultural research and other activities is tied to the number of farms or number of people living on farms in a state.
What the government’s farm classification system leaves out
Counting operations that produce little to no food alongside America’s midsized, large, and megafarms also distorts average farm sizes, masking just how concentrated the US agricultural sector has become and how hard it is for small- and mid-sized farms to compete with the biggest players.
Take egg farms, for example. According to the USDA census, there are 240,530 egg farms, which means the “average” egg farm has around 1,600 hens. But the vast majority of “egg farms” are tiny, raising just a couple dozen hens — backyard chicken hobbyists, essentially. Meanwhile, just 347 egg farms — the top 0.14 percent, which have 100,000 or more birds — produce 75 percent of the nation’s egg supply.
Similarly, the top 6 percent of pig farms — those with 5,000 or more animals — produce 75 percent of US pork. Yet the National Pork Producers Council — a trade group that pushes for factory-style farming practices — often says it represents America’s 60,000 pig farms, when more than almost three-quarters of those farms have under two dozen pigs.
This intense concentration in farmland ownership and wealth has been driven in large part over the last half-century by a combination of “get big or get out” USDA and congressional policy and large producers and companies buying up small- and midsized competitors.
Yet the winners of agricultural consolidation frequently invoke its economic losers — America’s small farms, many of which have gone out of business or are struggling to survive — to score political points. They also invoke the iconography of small farms in their marketing and packaging: little red barns or animals on pasture when, in reality, the vast majority of farmed animals are raised indoors in massive warehouses.
“The sector has shrunk so much that the industry is really hanging on for dear life to these rhetorical devices,” Secchi said.
Agricultural policy debates get little attention from the public, but they shape our food system and affect our tax base. They decide the fate of hundreds of thousands of farmers and farmworkers, billions of animals, and the health of millions of Americans who live near polluting farms. Policymakers and agribusiness lobbyists get away with regularly deploying a misleading statistic because it sounds nice to help 2 million farms and it creates the illusion of a sizable voting bloc. But it’s intellectually dishonest at best and politically corrosive at worst.
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