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USDA’s latest census of agriculture: not an encouraging picture

Food Politics

It summarizes the highlights: Number of farms: 1.9 million (down 7% from 2017) Average size: 463 acres (up 5%) Total farmland: 880 million acres of farmland (down 2%), accounting for 39% of all U.S. Farms with sales of $50,000 or less: 1.4 million (74% of farms); they sell 2%. For example: What more to say?

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The Financials of Profitable Small-Scale Farming

Modern Farmer

Just a Few Acres Farm in Lansing, NY has nearly 500,000 subscribers on YouTube, where seventh-generation farmer Pete Larson posts videos with titles like “The basics of cutting hay” and “Playing in the Dirt with Pregnant Pigs”. Pete Larson on his farm. Photography courtesy of Pete Larson and Just a Few Acres Farms.

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On the Ground with the Farmers Producing Antibiotic-Free Meat

Modern Farmer

Nearly four decades ago, Ron Mardesen and his wife Denise stopped using antibiotics on their hog farm, A-Frame Acres, in Elliot, Iowa. As the owner of a multi-generational farm, Mardesen has seen industrial agriculture and factory farming take increasing control over meat production in the last few decades.

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Book Excerpt: Commodities and Consolidation

Food Tank

That’s why less than 10 percent of farms still have animals. Previously, it was cost-effective for farmers to graze their cattle or grow their own feed. Meanwhile, Black ownership of farmland has declined significantly, from 16–19 million acres in 1910 to fewer than 3 million today.

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Opinion: To Find the Future of Food, We Need to Look to the Past

Modern Farmer

Catastrophe loomed everywhere I looked: in the dust bowls on the once-fertile plains of central Turkey, in the vanishing lakes of Mexico City, in the fetid cesspools outside the factory farms of North Carolina, in the disease-ravaged olive trees of Puglia, in the rapid wiping away of diverse food webs in every biome.

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Understanding the farmer protests 

Sustainable Food Trust

Worse still, many of them have invested large amounts of money in huge buildings to house factory farmed animals, and they are financially exposed with no alternative deployment for the infrastructure they have borrowed on. This is typical of quite a large number of farmers around here.

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As the Number of American Farms and Farmers Declines, Agriculture Secretary Urges Climate Action to Reverse the Trend

Daily Yonder

In 2017, the year the previous report covered, the country had 2,042,220 farms. In that same span, the number of farmed acres dropped from almost 900 million acres to 880 million—a loss in area the size of all the New England states, minus Connecticut, Vilsack noted. The farm then creates a second source of income.”