Farms Prosper, Farm Sector Nationally In Good Health

Since 2002, the number of farms in the US has increased, from 2.1 million to 2.2 million. While most of the farms sells less than $10,000/year of products, farm income has increased since 2000, from about $50 billion to about $87 billion in 2008, because of the rise in commodity prices. Since 2005, government payment to farmers declined 50% from 2005 to 2008, because most payments are price-triggered and prices rose. It would be interesting to identify the new 100,000 farms and study how they have fared. (Emmeline Zhao, "Farms Get Smaller, Less Government Support", The Wall Street Journal, WSJ
Blog: Real Time Economics, July 13, 2010.)