this is much more complex than i would like. you have to really sort of try to piece a lot of stuff together to get a picture that fits my perception of farm economic demography. and in doing so, it's likely that one's preconceptions influence how you fit things together.
here's the link.
http://www.ers.usda.gov/media/184479/eib66_1_.pdfhere's what i think that is both in the article and fits with my perception.
- a smallish % of extremely poor farmers (less than 10% - i think it says 2-8, depending on how defined).
- a fairly large % of farmers who either entirely lease land or own a bit and lease a lot more. some of these make good money, but many do not. unfortunately, this dataset doesn't seem to break out the incomes and net worth of farm operators by land ownership.
- a fairly substantial % of old farmers who earn very little farm income and have very little disposable income. many (most) of these farmers own land assets that value more than the national mean/median net worth (although if viewed as their retirement funds, i would still consider many (most ?) to be well below what in my mind would be necessary for a secure retirement.)
- a smaller % of younger farmers who farm a little land and basically derive all of their income from non-farm sources.
- a largish number of non-operator farm owners. mostly wealthy.
- substantial % of of farm owners with substantial acreage. almost by definition high net-worth, and mostly above average income.
because of the overlap between categories, fuzziness of some categories, and simply divergence in opinion of classification (i think of old farmers with low incomes and modest, but above national average, net worth as more poor than not. i can certainly see arguments that they are not poor, but think there is a rational argument that they are. young farmers with very low farm income, and near median non-farm income are even harder to classify, at least for me) it is hard to say from this whether there are "lots" of poor farmers or not. i know i've been exposed to a fairly high % (high % that i would classify as poor or at least non-wealthy) among farmers i know or have interacted with. probably a higher % than is true of the overall farm population. even accounting for that bias, they seem to me to be a fairly substantial proportion of farm operators. somewhere in the 20-25%ish range.
