Friday, February 01, 2019

ERS on US Agriculture: the Case of Hay

Farm Policy has a post summarizing a recent ERS report on the characteristics of farms in the US.

There's the points which are not new to me: when considering total value of production the dominance of the family farm, except in the case of very high value crops and beef, especially what are known as "large-scale family farms", which are the modal and median farms in the ERS categorization  Except, except in the case of hay and poultry.

Because poultry is, I think, dominated by contract farming I won't comment on it.  But hay is interesting--I suspect in part it representatives the last gasp of small scale dairy farms, where the production pattern is harvesting hay in the summer and feeding the hay in the winter.  But dairy itself is dominated by the large-scale family farms, likely meaning their cows don't graze the pastures, but have their feed delivered to them in their barns/feed lots.   In that context a small farm can find a niche space--growing and harvesting hay is not that difficult to combine with getting income from elsewhere, like social security or off-farm employment.  And the the big dairies provide a market.

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