An honest count...

A reader asks the Agricultural Sphinx Riddle:

Love your blogs, read them daily. I have an FFA speech-giving daughter that needs a bit of help.
She needs to know the % of the US population actively engaged in production agrigulture. It's 2% or less, but she needs a link or some such to cite in her works. I've plowed-no pun- through all the USDA stuff I could stomach, to no avail....

And here we go...

First, we don't agree on what "production agriculture" means. While farm organizations and the USDA love to bloat the number like cat fur before a fight to make themselves seem representatives of enormous constituency, we know the vast majority of farm output comes from very few farms.  So if we're counting for political reasons, the number includes apparently anyone with a tomato plant.

That said, the emergence of a vigorous agrarian or artisinal sector sector (local, organic, etc.) should not be entirely dismissed IMHO.  They do produce ag products, just not nearly as much as most folks think.

Now notice that Farm Bureau uses the weasel-term "member families".  The more accurate term is "insurance customers".   No help there.

Furthermore, all my career farmers themselves have been wrangling about what the necessary qualifications for being a "real farmer" are. No progress on that front, so I've moved on.

So my rule of thumb is to use some arbitrary benchmark of say, 80% of [insert crop/product here] is produced by X thousand growers. An example:

In terms of farm sales, 125,000 farms account for 75 percent of production, compared to 144,000 farms accounting for 75 percent of production in 2002. [More]

 What this allows is an accurate, and I hope non-judgmental measure of product originators.  These numbers can be parsed out from USDA (2007 Census of Ag) production numbers and for program crops from the EWG database, since subsidy payments are a pretty good analog for farm size/output.

As as for the concept of active engagement, that is currently a subject of intense legal scrutiny.

Gentle readers: please feel free to help this young lady with her homework or pose a different angle in how to count farmers.  Honestly, I really don't know the "right" answer.  Put you suggestions and links in the comments.


I do know it ain't "2%" of the population.  Crimony, that's 6 million people!

Bottom line:  you can make the number anything you want to fit your purpose. But the reality is not very many and rapidly getting less. 

Update:  The original sender came up with this from the Census and NASS:

Without the beating of the proverbial dead horse, here it is straight from the horse's mouth, or typing little hooves:
From the Census Bureau we had 303,824,650 souls living in the US in 2007. So, doing the math, it comes to .726%  of the US population "actively engaged in production agriculture"  [my quotes].
 

Thank you for your inquiry to the National Agricultural Statistics Service (NASS) regarding the percent of the population involved in agriculture.  According to the 2007 Census of Agriculture, there are 2, 204,792 farm and ranch operators engaged in production agriculture.

You would need to contact the Census Bureau to find out the number of the entire population.  Regrettably, NASS only captures crop and livestock statistics for the U.S.  We hope this information is useful to you.  Please send our best to your daughter with her speech.

Thanks for the additional input, Mark!