Beginning farmers and ranchers have some unique characteristics, including more education and more off-farm jobs, compared with established farmers and ranchers.

American farms encompass a wide range of sizes, ownership structures, and business types, but most farms are still family farms. Family farms account for 98 percent of farms and 85 percent of production. Although most farms are small and own most of the farmland, production has shifted to very...

We use a large sample of Kansas Farm Management Association farms for eight different crop/practice combinations (dryland and irrigated corn, sorghum, soybeans, and wheat) for 1994 through 2006 to evaluate the determinants of relative yield performance and explore the ability of financial...

Marketing and production contracts covered 39 percent of the value of U.S. agricultural production in 2008, up from 36 percent in 2001, and a substantial increase over 28 percent in 1991 and 11 percent in 1969. However, aggregate contract use has stabilized in recent years and no longer suggests...

Most U.S. farmers prepare their soil for seeding and weed and pest control through tillage—plowing operations that disturb the soil. Tillage practices affect soil carbon, water pollution, and farmers’ energy and pesticide use, and therefore data on tillage can be valuable for understanding...

This report is a primer on the use of debt by U.S. farm businesses for policymakers, researchers, and others interested in the financial well-being of U.S. agriculture. It presents data on basic debt-use patterns by farm businesses (in 2011, over 900,000 farms operated as farm businesses based...

This paper uses microlevel data from the Agricultural Resource Management Survey to examine the changes in the distributions of household wealth and to assess the role farm subsidies play, among other factors, in affecting these distributions. The empirical analysis relies on the concept of the...

The current $2.5-million income cap on eligibility for farm program payments affects only a small number of farm program payment recipients each year. A reduction in the cap to $200,000 would affect a larger number of farm households but still only a small share of recipients. Based on IRS tax...

This paper uses microlevel data from the Agricultural Resource Management Survey to examine the changes in the distributions of household wealth and to assess the role farm subsidies play, among other factors, in affecting these distributions. The empirical analysis relies on the concept of the...