Number of NY Farms Remains Stable; Number Decreases in US

Here is the latest release from the New York office of the National Agricultural Statistics Services. This is good news, considering how the number of farms has decreased in the past:

The number of farms in New York for 2012 remained the same as a year earlier, said King Whetstone, director of USDA’s National Agricultural Statistics Service, New York Field Office.

The number of farms for 2012 is estimated at 36,000. Land in farms was 7 million acres.

Farms with sales more than $500,000 increased by 100 to 1,900 while farms with sales between $250,000 and $499,999 remained at 1,300. The area of land operated by farms in these two
groups totaled 2.55 million acres, up 50,000 from 2011.

The next smaller sales class, farms with sales between $100,000 and $249,999 increased by 300 to 3,500 while land operated by
these farms increased to 1.20 million acres. There were 11,300 farms with sales between $10,000 and $99,999 compared with 10,800 a year earlier.

Land they operated totaled 1.9 million acres. There were 900 fewer small farms with sales between $1,000 and $9,999 in 2012,
at 18,000. Land in farms for this class dropped to 1.35 million acres.

The number of farms in the United States in 2012 is estimated at 2.2 million, down 11,630 farms from 2011. Total land in farms, at 914 million acres, decreased 3 million acres from 2011. The
average farm size is 421 acres, up 1 acre from the previous year.

Farm numbers and land in farms are differentiated by five economic sales classes. Farms and ranches are classified into these “sales classes” by summing sales of agricultural products and
government program payments. Sales class breaks occur at $10,000, $100,000, $250,000 and $500,000.

Farm numbers in the $500,000 and higher sales class increased by 8.6 percent, to 145,190 farms. Higher commodity prices and larger value of sales contributed to changes in the number
of farms within these sales classes.

Meanwhile, the number of farms in the $1,000 - $9,999
sales class decreased by 2.5 percent to 1,172,200. Farm numbers increased slightly in the $10,000 - $99,999 sales class to slightly more than 600,000 farms.

The number of farms in the $100,000 - $249,999 and $250,000 - $499,999 sales classes increased 1.9 and 1.1 percent,
respectively.

Land in farms increased in the largest sales class while decreasing in all other sales classes. Land operated by farms in the $500,000 and higher sales class increased 3.7 percent, to 317.1
million acres.

Land operated by farms in the $1,000-$9,999 sales class decreased by 3.9 percent, to slightly less than 97 million acres. Land in farms in the $10,000 - $99,999, $100,000 - $249,999 and $250,000 - $499,999 sales classes decreased by 1.4, 2.6 and 2.4 percent
respectively.