It took a little while, but the 2022 Census of Agriculture is out and Georgia looks like it has come out in good shape. The Census of Agriculture (COA) is conducted every five years by the U.S. Department of Agriculture National Agricultural Statistics Service (NASS), increasingly online, with more 40 percent of responses done online for 2022.
The total amount of farmland in the U.S. declined by about 20 million acres from 2017 to 2022, with 1.9 millon farms covering about 880 million acres. In Georgia there were roughly 39,200 farms reported, down from 42,500 in 2017. Actual farmland loss was not that much though, only down 14,400 acres to 9.939 million acres from 9.953 million in 2017.
“We saw similar changes in other states,” said Anthony Prillaman, director of the USDA NASS Southern Region, which covers Georgia, Alabama, Florida and South Carolina. “In terms of farm numbers, the census data showed that most of the decline occurred in farms that have less than 180 acres.”
A couple theories may help to explain the loss of so many farms but little land loss. One is that farmers have retired but are renting or selling their land to other farmers, resulting in fewer farms but the same amount of land.
“I want to thank all the farmers and ranchers who responded to the 2022 Census of Agriculture,” said Prillaman. “The Census of Agriculture remains the only source of uniform, comprehensive, and impartial agricultural data for the U.S. The data will inform decisions about policy, farm and conservation programs, rural development, research, technology development, ag education, and more over the next several years.”
The average age of a farmer in Georgia is 59. There are 26,700 farmers older than 65, 35,000 between the ages of 35 and 64. There are only 5,000 under the age of 35. More women are getting into farming, increasing in Georgia by more than 500, while more than 1,500 males left farming. Interestingly, there may be some trend for more career switches into farming. As a share of producers, beginning farmers – those with less than 10 years of experience – increased as the share of all farmers. The average age of beginning farmers in the country was 47. Georgia ranked 7th in the country for its percentage of farmers that are beginning, more than 34 percent.
The worrying trends are the increasing size of farms and the decline in numbers of Americans being involved in food production. As farms get bigger, more technical and require fewer employees, rural areas may continue to lose some population. And as farms grow, if one farm has a problem or goes towards monoculture (only producing one product), a problem can magnify quickly without a diverse set of smaller farms.
“Today’s Census of Agriculture Report underscores it’s imperative that we continue to deliver agriculture policies that create multiple streams of income and new, more competitive models for small- and mid-sized farms,” U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack said in a statement following the release of the 2022 Census of Agriculture. “A combination of trade wars, the pandemic and policies that furthered a ‘get big or get out’ mentality pushed more people out of farming in the five years since the last Census, more than in any other Census period this century. America, and especially our rural communities, cannot afford this trajectory toward larger, but fewer, farms.”
