Big farms produce most of the food in the United States, but the latest government census suggests small-scale operations are making a comeback.
The U.S. Department of Agriculture, which does the census every five years, counted 2.2 million farms in 2007, up from 2.1 million in 2002.
The number of farms reporting sales of $1,000 or less was up significantly, to 688,833 in 2007 from 570,919 in 2002, according to the count released earlier this month.
Sally Worley, a spokeswoman for Practical Farmers of Iowa, said the increase reflects the growing demand for locally produced foods.
“Farmers are trying to start operations to meet that demand,” she said.
Mike Duffy, an economist at Iowa State University, said the trend toward very small farms was not entirely clear.
To economists such as Duffy, farms with sales of $1,000 or less hardly qualify as commercial operations.
The Department of Agriculture census takers may have found some small farms that were already there but not counted previously, Duffy said.
At the same time, the agriculture census showed that the bulk of U.S. food production is coming from ever-larger farms.
In 2007, there were 55,509 farms with at least $1 million in sales. That represents an increase from 28,673 in 2002.
Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack said he was heartened by the growth of small-scale farms nationwide, but he is concerned that medium-size operations continue to disappear.
“The health of rural communities depends on us maintaining those small and midsized farms,” Vilsack said.
Increased payments to farmers for land-conservation measures should help keep smaller operations in business, and those farms also could get checks in the future for reducing carbon emissions, he said.
