“…Many rural towns nationwide are collapsing because of the loss of family farms. More than half of U.S. cropland is controlled by farms larger than two thousand acres, while the country loses forty acres of farmland every hour. As our small and medium-sized farms are increasingly unable to compete with industrial agriculture or developers and disappear, we lose not only land but also entire communities.” Letter to The New Yorker in The Mail, November 27, 2017 Issue

How ignorant is this letter-writer? Let me count the ways:

  1. "Family farms of various types together account for 99 percent of all farms, and those account for 89 percent of the production as of 2015." America's Diverse Family Farms, 2016, USDA
  2. "Most million-dollar farms (90 percent) are family farms. Only 3 percent are nonfamily corporations, and 80 percent of these corpo­rations report no more than 10 shareholders." America's Diverse Family Farms, 2016 USDA
  3. "There were nearly 100,000 more farms with 1-49 acres of cropland in 2011 than in 2001, as the count of small farms in USDA statistics increased sharply." Farm Size and the Organization of U.S. Crop Farming, 2013, USDA
  4. "…the largest farms (at least 2,000 acres of cropland) accounted for 34.3 percent of cropland in 2011..." Farm Size and the Organization of U.S. Crop Farming, 2013, USDA
  5. "Between 1982 and 2012, the aver­age acres of cropland and harvested cropland changed little." America's Diverse Family Farms, 2016 USDA
  6. "The rural-urban poverty gap has narrowed since that time, from 17.0 percentage points in 1960 to 3.6 percentage points in 2016." Rural America at a Glance, 2017, USDA
  7. "The seasonally adjusted nonmetro [rural] unemployment rate stood at 5.4 percent in the 2nd quarter of 2016..." Rural Employment and Unemployment, updated 2017, USDA
  8. "Boosted by high farm income and, in some areas, booming gas-extraction activities, farming-dependent counties have seen job growth for the first time in many years, growing during and after the recession." Rural America at a Glance, 2017, USDA
  9. "Between 2001 and 2015, the industries that have driven job growth and loss were fairly similar across the metro and nonmetro United States. Manufacturing employment, in particular, declined sharply..." Rural Employment and Unemployment, updated 2017, USDA
  10. "Since reaching a trough in November 2016, manufacturing employment has grown by 156,000." Current Employment Statistical Highlights, Nov 3, 2017 Bureau of Labor Statistics

Bottom line: We are not losing family farms or small farms. A little over a third of US cropland is controlled by the largest farms (>2000 acres). Cropland acreage has pretty much stabilized in recent years (although I think it would actually be a good thing for crop acreage to decrease - more land for forests and wild critters).  Rural America is doing better than The New Yorker's letter writer suggests.

Further Note: The mega-farms tend to grow corn, hay, soybeans, and wheat, which accounted for over 83 percent of harvested crop acres in 2007. But harvested acres don't correspond closely to cash receipts for crops. Three high-value crop categories—vegetables and melons; fruits, nuts, and berries; and greenhouse/nursery crops—accounted for nearly 37 percent of all cash receipts from crops in 2007 but less than 4 percent of harvested acreage. Size matters but it isn't everything. Farm Size and the Organization of U.S. Crop Farming, 2013, USDA.