Are there more small farms or not? Everyone from Reuters to the NYT has documented what appears to be an increase in the number of small farms in the U.S. But blogging ag economist and former USDA Economic Research Service researcher, Michael Roberts disagrees. According to him (h/t Ezra Klein), the supposed increase in small farms represents the USDA potentially fudging the numbers:
USDA has also been working harder and harder to find and count hiding $1000 potential farms. Most of these guys don’t know they’re farms and so they can be hard to find and difficult to entice to return their census forms. So non-response rates are growing, mostly for tiny farms that probably don’t realize they’re farms in the first place.
Non-response? No problem. USDA just uses weights to account for the non-response which boosts the officially reported number of farms.
The important revelation here is that the USDA uses statistical weighting to arrive at the numbers for these micro-farms since many of these people don’t even self-identify as farmers—and so their precision is entirely a question of their methodology, i.e. how they decide to model the presence/frequency of these small operations. Census weighting is, of course, both controversial and necessary. Counting everything by hand can have a larger margin for error than rigorous statistical modeling. Indeed, this "controversy" is right now at the heart of a monumental battle between Democrats and Republicans over the U.S. Census (just ask Sen. Judd Gregg).
That said, there is nothing inherently wrong with the practice. However, even if your overall approach is solid, if you then change your weighting techniques from year to year, comparing annual changes is all but impossible. And that appears to be exactly what the USDA is doing.
The Ag Census is further clouded by politics and wrangling over money. According to Roberts, there was a battle over who got to count farms and even what qualified as a farm back in the ‘90s.
Before USDA took over and the Census Bureau managed the Ag. Census, they wanted to restrict the definition of a farm to a place with $10,000 in sales or potential sales. This was in the mid-1990s. Since this seemingly innocuous change would have halved the number of farms and had a significant influence on the distribution of federal money to the states, it wasn’t going to happen. I’m unsure about the details but I think this is a key reason the Ag. Census moved from the Census Bureau to USDA.
Now we’re getting somewhere. The USDA has further incentive to inflate the number of farms and doesn’t particularly care if this clouds the picture on what’s really going on in agriculture. In fact, Roberts points out that focusing on these micro-farms, which may or may not be growing in numbers, misses the bigger picture: the growing concentration of land in mega-farms at the expense of mid-sized farms. The "growth" in micro-farms can’t be considered "real" and certainly not a trend—unless the USDA opens its books and explains exactly how it counts them from year to year. But the continued expansion of Big Ag? That’s one trend we can count on.
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Comments
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CyberBrook Posted 2:19 am
20 Feb 2009
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Erik Hoffner Posted 2:31 am
20 Feb 2009
The key thing for me though is the importance of these folks in the years ahead. Many new people are getting into ag, and if the number of graduates that these programs turn out every year is any indication, the number is on the rise:
Michael Fields Ag Inst (WI):
http://www.michaelfieldsaginst.org/
Farm Beginnings (MN):
http://www.landstewardshipproject.org/farmbeg.html
The Farm School (MA):
http://www.farmschool.org
Maybe they'll replace and surpass the small farmers retiring now. Just look at the burgeoning number of CSAs as one indicator.
Erik
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Sam Wells Posted 8:57 am
20 Feb 2009
The idea to fudge around the methods to inflate numbers is overtly political, though, because agency budgets depend on (to a limited degree) survey data as a "performance metric." Gotta have numbers, right? Any numbers will do!
Trust me, there are a ton of people who fly under the radar screen, maybe having an acre or less of some kind of crop that is sold with the cash in pocket, or even given away. If it was a good tax shelter I suppose you'd get more volunteer small farm folks to register but revealing data to the IRS about income only greats more headaches. You pick or have people pick you crop and pocket the moolah for more planting stuff next year, maybe a joy ride to the Dairy Queen or something.
It's really a labor of love and the underground market in the "smalls" if probably quite large. Some folks will pick a few hundred pounds of nuts such as pecans, shell some, and sell Christmas presents made from them, some quite ridiculously funny may I add. I folks who have ten grapefruits and when the fruit is ready they sell giant bags for $3, and forget the "organic" designation even if they are organic. It's mostly just a hobby and man years the crop just doesn't work so good.
-sammie
Onward through the fog
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Delay And Deny Posted 3:09 am
21 Feb 2009
Ronald Reagan famously had a few cows on his ranch...for that purpose alone, and in wealthy suburban-rural areas you will often see freestanding cattle and bison...alpacas...
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Sam Wells Posted 1:48 pm
23 Feb 2009
Sure there was an old joke about "one cow and one blade of grass" for an ag exemption but what business is that of yours, or in terms of regional and national policy? You're being a crank, with all due respect sir.
Such small farms have always been known as "supplemental income" and some is underground and some is legit on the larger, more established farms - farms we used to call "truck farms." The point of this train of thought is that the USDA is "cooking the books" to fins these rascals to boost their legitimacy and their budgets.
The interesting thing about all this is, us "green" folks have a great desire for more of these little people, these little farms, and these little amounts of good food. By golly it's darn near a revolution! We want more farmer;s markets, darn it! We want more organic stuff, just no chemicals for three years, dang it!
Without the power of Google I can tell you the Number One fruit or vegetable grown by recreational gardeners are tomatoes. Yet see what they sell ... Celebrity, Big Boy, and fancy hybrids. WRONG. We need to bring back the biodiversity of the American Tomato, including the yellows, the greens, all of the lost ones that had built up a resistance to fungus and all the other maladies. You want a crop where you can set aside some seeds for next year and not but some dang hybrid from Burpee Corporation.
As out country slides into a depression-like economy, I can see people doing this more ... they had been for some time when times were good but it just didn't make any news.
And USDA, stay the hell away from my garden, OK buddies?
-sammie
Onward through the fog
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pubwvj Posted 8:10 am
02 Mar 2009
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http://SugarMtnFarm.com/blog
http://HollyGraphicArt.com
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