Number of Iowa farms declines

by | Feb 17, 2017 | 5 Ag Stories, News

The number of farms in 2016 in Iowa dipped slightly from 2015. The total number of Iowa farms in 2015 was 87,500 dropping to 87,000 in 2016.

The number of farms in the United States for 2016 is estimated at 2.06 million, down 8 thousand farms from 2015. Total land in farms, at 911 million acres, decreased 1 million acres from 2015. The average farm size for 2016 is 442 acres, up 1 acre from the previous year.

Farm numbers and land in farms are differentiated by six economic sales
classes. Farms and ranches are classified into these six sales classes by
summing the sales of agricultural products and government program payments.
Sales class breaks occur at $10,000, $100,000, $250,000, $500,000, and
$1,000,000. Producers were asked during the 2016 mid-year surveys to report
the value of sales based on production during the 2015 calendar year.

Point Farms are farms that did not have the required minimum $1,000 in sales
for the year to qualify as a farm, but had sufficient crops and livestock to
normally have sales of $1,000 or more. Point Farms are assigned a sales class
based on the sum of the agricultural point (dollar) values assigned to the
quantity of commodities produced but not sold. The 2012 Census of Agriculture
showed that 428,810 farms or 20.3 percent of the 2.11 million farms were
Point Farms. These Point Farms operated 63.0 million acres or 6.9 percent of
the 914.5 million acres of farmland.

Number of farms declined by 8 thousand from 2015. The number of farms in
Sales Class $250,000 – $499,999 increased while all other sales classes
declined slightly. Fifty percent of all farms had less than $10,000 in sales.
Eighty percent of all farms had less than $100,000 in sales. Eight percent of
all farms had sales of $500,000 or more.