There aren’t really nearly two million farms as we are told, but the government likes to say there are. Half of the so-called farms make little or no money and produce little or no food. They are lumped in with the large polluting farms. It allows the big polluters to skate.
People can call their land a farm if they produce or sell $1,000 or more of agricultural products. Even making no money can qualify as a farm with all the tax breaks if they have points. You can get points for acreage or animals or bees. The idea is they could make money so it counts.
I have a computer so I could be a computer scientist. I own a car so I could be an Uber driver.
The point system came about in the 1970s to include farms that just had a bad year.
According to the USDA, 25% of farms have no sales in a year.
“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 not a farm.
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 from the 1.9 million claimed by the USDA.
The result is fewer and fewer big corporations own more and more of the farms.
The vast majority of farmed animals are raised indoors in massive warehouses. No more little red barns.
Policymakers and lobbyists are lying to us.
Half a Million Farms Lost Since 1980
Dr. St. Onge says we have lost half a million farms, one in five farms, since 1980. The government has given corporate farms unsurmountable advantages.
While the number of farms in America are in freefall, corporate farms and Wall Street are growing exponentially.
19% of Corporate Farms Produce Nearly 2/3rds of US Food
Corporate consolidation has driven the average farm size to 466 acres. That’s three times what it was a century ago. Currently 19% of corporate farms are producing nearly 2/3 of America’s foods. Since 1980 alone we’ve lost 89% of dairies and 91% of big farms, all replaced by corporations. It’s going to get worse with farmers losing money by farming some foods.
Corporations use farms as tax shelters that equal the size of Iowa. It’s a loss of 300 million acres that could be farmed.
The regulations and mandates are driving it. Corporations have financial privileges, water advantages and land banking tax shelters that private farms don’t. They never die so they don’t have to pay the death tax.
Define “corporate farm”?
If by “corporate” you mean Del Monte’s Hawaiian pineapple plantation owned by a publicly traded multinational, Tyson, Smithfield, etc., fine. But if you’re talking about row-crop production in the Midwest—corn, soybeans, wheat—you’re painting with the world’s sloppiest roller brush. Because here’s the reality: 99%+ of the operations I’ve stepped foot on, whether 1,000 acres or 20,000, are owned and run by a family. Mom, dad, kids, maybe a couple cousins. Sometimes grandma’s still doing the books.
I’ve been on hundreds of these farms. Guess how many were run by Wall Street? Zero. The “corporation” is usually “Smith Farms, Inc.,” an S-corp created by an accountant to make tax season less painful. That’s not “Big Ag Monopoly Inc.” That’s a family keeping Uncle Sam at arm’s length.
Now, let’s talk machinery, because here’s where size actually matters. You don’t buy equipment like this with pocket change. In 2025:
Assumptions
Totals (seed only)
Add treatment (if used):
Now picture a 15,000-acre farm. You can’t cover that ground with a lawnmower and optimism. You need multiple combines, sprayers, and tractors—meaning $5–10 million in iron just to get the job done. Scale isn’t a luxury; it’s survival.
You mentioned poultry and pork. That’s where the “corporate” story really applies. Vertical integration plus regulations pushed those sectors into consolidation. But even then, I worked with a family who ran about a 40,000-sow operation producing 800,000 piglets annually. And guess who owned it? Mom, dad, and the kids. Not Goldman Sachs. Not BlackRock. Actual people with muddy boots. Even the billion dollar processor they sold to was a privately held third generation family owned company.
Here’s the kicker: if the day ever comes when row-crop farming in America is actually controlled by Fortune 500s, that’s a national security problem. You really want our food supply in the same hands that manage TikTok ads and quarterly earnings calls? Families, not faceless conglomerates, are the ones you want growing the backbone crops of this country.
So when folks read “corporate farms” and picture of Darth Vader’s Death Star already having vacuumed up Iowa, they’re being sold a myth. What we really have are family businesses that happen to operate at a large scale—because that’s what it takes when your tools cost more than most people’s homes.
Let’s stop lumping hardworking multigenerational farms into the “evil corporation” bucket just because they farm thousands of acres. They’re not Wall Street. They’re Main Street with a bigger mortgage…and far more risk.
I’ve known dozens of successful farms to share how they have gone two or more years with little to no profit. I knew one to lose $1.7M last year on less than 5000 acres because of bad grain prices and the worst drought in decades. God bless the family farm, whether it has an “Inc” in the name or not!
Most farmers I know focus on corn and soy beans, mostly leased land, minimum is a 1000 acres, 1500 is much better. SE WI.
I believe it. I remember the farms of my youth in my old home town. All gone today. Replaced with housing developments, shopping centers, highways. I remember corn fields 8 feet high so green they looked blue in the sunshine. Wasted fertile fields.
“Corporate Farms’ are almost always a family affair for tax and liability purposes. The number of farms isn’t the story. How may acres under cultivation? Yields? Price of fuel, labor, equipment and facilities? It takes big companies to cushion what the weather throws at the farmer. Add in international politics, storage, shipping and risk on investment and it’s a marvel how it works as well as it does.
A corporate shill if there ever was one is what you are.
You could care lees about American farmers. Everything that you’ve enthusiastically stated is what’s wrong with the broken system. That’s what’s destroying American family farming. If you look at what you’ve stated without the spin that you’ve attempted to put on it. For one, international policies? and politics?, Where did that come from?
We’d have more than enough than we knew what to with from American farmers to supply everyone in the united states, indefinitely. If we didn’t import 80% percent of our food supply to begin with, and we didn’t let corporations grow GMO corn on corporately owned farms for ethanol; our food supply wouldn’t be garbage that no one wants to eat because it has been grown on contaminated soil.
Contaminated by corporate farming, latent with pesticides and GMO’s. No one in their right mind wants to eat that crap is why we import 80% of our food supply. You’ve got everything all ass backwards, by design. You’re not fooling anyone with your double talk accept for the extremely naive.
Politics gone wrong is the problem, coming and going, kick backs for dumb ass greedy politicians on the take, corporate shills like you and lobbyists. That’s why the family farms are diapering at an alarming rate.
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