Abstract
In nine of the last 10 years, the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) has reported that the average funds generated on-farm for farm operators to meet living expenses and debt obligations have been negative. This paper pieces together disparate data to understand why farm operators in the most productive agricultural systems on the planet are systematically losing money. The data-driven narrative we present highlights some troubling trends in US farm operator livelihoods. Though US farms are more productive than ever before, rising input costs, volatile production values, and rising land rents have left farmers with unprecedented levels of farm debt, low on-farm incomes, and high reliance on federal programs. For many US farm operators, the indicators of a “good livelihood”—stability, security, equitable rewards for work—are largely absent. We conclude by proposing three axes of intervention that would help US agriculture better sustain all farmers' livelihoods, a crucial step toward improving overall agricultural sustainability: (1) increase the diversity of people, crops, and cropping systems, (2) improve equity in access to land, support, and capital, and (3) improve the quality, accessibility, and content of data to facilitate monitoring of multiple indicators of agricultural “success.”
Highlights
United States (US) agricultural systems excel at producing food, fuel, and fiber
The data narrative presented in this paper merges available data with related research and theory to paint a picture of the state of farm operator livelihoods in the US
Though many farm households have incomes comparable to the US average, much of this revenue comes from off-farm activities
Summary
United States (US) agricultural systems excel at producing food, fuel, and fiber. The focus on producing calories and consumer goods as cheaply as possible, has meant that the true costs of food production have been externalized—whether through the reduced nutritional content of food (Mayer, 1997; Davis et al, 2004), environmental degradation (Tscharntke et al, 2012; Allan et al, 2015; Clark and Tilman, 2017), unethical labor practices (Snipes et al, 2017; Klocker et al, 2020; Soper, 2020), or, as we review in this paper, the livelihoods of those who operate US farms. We summarize the factors underpinning the economic decline of US farm households to situate the trends we identify within the scholarship on their drivers
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