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Missouri ranks second in number of farms

Missouri has the second highest number of farms in the U.S. behind Texas. The 2017 Census of Agriculture says the state has more than 95,000 farms on nearly 28 million acres. The number of farmers is lower than in the prior census, but there are more people operating individual farms, according to Bob Garino, statistician at the USDA’s National Agriculture Statistics Service office in Missouri.

“With a family farm, maybe a husband and wife or son or daughter are involved,” Garino told Brownfield Ag News, “but they’re all part of the cropping and livestock decisions as well as bookkeeping and other things too.”

The average age of the Missouri farmer increased by one year to 59.4 years, but the state’s hog, dairy and poultry producers are younger. Soybeans, corn, cattle, poultry and hogs account for 88 percent of Missouri agriculture product sales, but specialty crops like elderberries, honey, mushrooms, sheep and goats, among others, also thrive.

“Just for Missouri alone there’s, I think, about 800 or 900 pages worth of data in there,” Garino said, “so there’s a lot of information in those census records.”

The Census of Agriculture is a once-every-five-year count of U.S. farms and ranches that have sales of $1,000 or more.