I am in IL. I don’t know a farmer without a side business or a wife with a job/healthcare in town. You saw the stats, no?
There are only 43K farms with gross, not net, but gross income of $1 million or above. The majority of farmers, the vast majority are just scraping by. It’s always been a tough business.
Corporate farming or niche farming is the only way to turn a reasonable profit given all the work and risk. My point is that farm subsidies benefit the 1100 or so corporate farmers. The numbers are broken out to hide that.
Accurate. Most family farms barely break even.
I own property in a farming county in Iowa.
300,000 acres, 700 farms.
Not even a half-dozen collect more than token amounts for wildlife and runoff acres.
Quite a few more have crop insurance, but I’m not sure the farm bill kicks in much for that, I believe it’s mostly self-supporting.
That said, the land is worth $5k-$10k per acre, and farmers make at least $300-$400 per acre.