The Slow Death of the Family Farm

When you say the words “family farm,” most people imagine a similar scene: a farmhouse, surrounded by a few fields, a barn and maybe some pasture with a few cows. There’s a reason we all conjure the same image: These small, diversified farms were once the backbone of U.S. agriculture. But as a combination of farm policy and corporate pressures have pushed farms to get bigger and bigger, these idyllic family farms are going under quickly — from 2017 to 2024, the number of farms in the country declined by 8 percent, or 160,000 farms. Most of those that have closed in recent years are the smallest, with the country losing more 153,000 farms with sales under $50,000 between 2017 and 2022. In the same time period, the number of large farms has increased 36 percent.

In common parlance, people talk about that consolidation as “the death of the family farm,” usually assuming that the industrially scaled operations that replace them are run by corporations. While it’s true that most of the money in agriculture is quickly funneled away from rural communities towards large corporations, there’s an important detail this narrative misses: As the American Farm Bureau Federation (AFBF) and other lobbyists for Big Agriculture are quick to point out, the bigger and bigger farms that dominate U.S. agriculture are family farms, too.