If land becomes marketable commodity – even without the scam being included as part of this plunge — and ownership will eventually pass into the hands of the very few.
Moreover, I say that the situation in the USA is an example of scandalous concentration of agricultural land ownership – which also prevails in most other market economies, and indicates inadequacies of regulation. Specifically, I shall refute the allegations that my saying so is off-base. The stakes are high, and clear understanding is essential.
First of all, my observation (March 9 op-ed, "Biggest heist of Ukraine’s riches in the making with land sales") that most farmland in the USA is cultivated by large agribusinesses is in line with the US census data as presented by the Economic Research Center of the US Department of Agriculture (“Farm Characteristics” presentation that can be found on Yahoo). Agribusiness is a generic word, and it does not imply “large corporation” as one critic would have it.
For starters, understand the semantics in the USDA language — which has a whiff of a slight confusion. Officially, of the 2.2 million farms in the USA, 1.9 million are routinely called “family farms” because legally they are not corporations or partnerships (as are the rest approximately 0.3 million).
Most of the 2.2 million farms (about 85 percent have acreage less than 500 acres) are the colloquial “family farms” in the sense that they are usually operated by family members with little, if any, hired help.
On the other hand, large farms, with over 1,000 acres and much more are actually agribusinesses, owned by gentlemen farmers (or landed gentry if you will) and operated mostly by hired labor. They own a lion’s share of agricultural land.
What about the actual numbers? The Department of Agriculture websites present many useful tables, but are not explicitly showing the percentages of total agricultural land (which stands at 922 million acres) owned by large and small farms.
But do not despair. Using some simple arithmetic, the facts emerge, for instance for the year 2007. Here goes:
352 million acres (38 percent of total) belongs to 3.6 percent (three point six) of farm owners, with farm size over 2,000 acres.
678 million acres (73.4 percent) belongs to 7.8 percent (including also the above), with farm size over 1,000 acres.
845 million acres (91.6 percent) belongs to 14.6 percent (including also the above two brackets), with farm size over 500 acres.
The remaining 77 million acres (8.3 percent) are owned by the bottom 85.4 percent, with farm size less than 500 acres.
Similar results can be obtained — indicating the concentration of income – by computation from USDA tables that show gross sales from various size farms. This exercise is left to the student.
Interestingly, 59 percent of all farms have annual gross sales less than $10,000. This is as close to a wipeout as one can get. Total number of farms has declined from 7 million in 1935 to the present 2.2 million; 355 families are leaving the farm each week.
Boris Danik is a retired Ukrainian-American living in North Caldwell, New Jersey.
