Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
sold no agricultural commodities but instead served as stables for horseback-riding urbanites
and suburbanites.
Similar patterns are also evident for plant agriculture, though extreme concentration is
most evident for fruits and vegetables. In 1910, almost 80 percent of American farmers grew
vegetables, half of the farms grew potatoes, 46.8 percent produced apples, and around 20
percent produced other orchard fruits such as peaches, pears, plums, and cherries. As late as
1950, American farms still had a diversified portfolio of fruits, vegetables, and grains. But
like animal enterprises, by 1997 the production of fruits and vegetables had become very
specialized. Today, only 2.8 percent of American farmers are commercial vegetable produ-
cers, fewer than one farmer in fifty grows apples, and fewer than one in a hundred supply the
country with peaches, pears, plums, or cherries.
Not only has American agriculture become more specialized over the past hundred years,
but it has become amazingly concentrated. Take vegetables, for example. There were 53,641
farms that reported vegetable sales in the 1997 Census of Agriculture. But the largest 3,066
(5.7 percent of the total) of these farms, those with annual sales of $1 million or more ac-
counted for 75.2 percent of all vegetable sales in the country. On average, each of these very
large vegetable farms sells about $2.1 million every year. Looking at this from the perspect-
ive of the small vegetable producer, the 50,575 farms with sales less than $1 million yearly
sell on average only about $40,000 of produce each year. Not surprisingly, almost 40 percent
of the million-dollar vegetable producers are found in California. 4 Other states with a sub-
stantial number of million-dollar producers include Washington ( n = 189) and Oregon ( n =
188) in the Pacific Northwest, Minnesota ( n = 113) and Wisconsin ( n = 101) in the Midwest,
and Florida ( n = 210), Georgia ( n = 125), and North Carolina ( n = 125) in the South. Togeth-
er, these states account for two-thirds of the vegetables produced in the United States.
Fruit farms exhibit a similar degree of concentration, with 3.8 percent of all farms account-
ing for 58.6 percent of total sales. Even though there are fruit producers in virtually every
state, a small handful of states dominate production. Of the 3,227 farms in the million-dollar-
plus sales category, California with 1,909 (58.8 percent of the total) leads the list, followed by
Florida with 347 farms (10.7 percent) and Washington with 324 farms (10.0 percent). Aver-
age sales on farms selling $1 million or more a year are approximately $2.3 million. On fruit
farms with sales of less than $1 million yearly, average sales per farm are only $63,000 a
year.
The corn, wheat, and soybean farm sectors still display considerably less concentration
than other farm sectors. These farms form the backbone of agriculture in the American Mid-
west. Not only are there considerably more farms producing corn, wheat, and soybeans, com-
pared with other commodities, but proportionately fewer of them have reached the $1 million
sales mark. Further, the percentages of sales accounted for by those farms with $1 million
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