I.e., the “small family farm”.

Every time I post something about farms, somebody pops up with “my cousin runs a farm, and…”. Yes, there are a lot of racists. And, yes, #notAllFarmers, as Sarah Taber says at https://www.patreon.com/posts/why-do-farmers-122478451 (behind a paywall, but, c’mon, $2/month!). But. The “poor family farmer” that Willie Nelson and all the Band Aid people love so much doesn’t really exist any more. Even the “intermediate” folks with household income of only $62k are sitting on about three quarters of a million dollars in *non-farm* assets (i.e., other than the land and farm equipment).

I don’t want to paint with too broad a brush, but I’m guessing when someone comes up with a farmer who’s actually facing real difficulty and not just throwing a fit on Instagram, it’ll be the exception that proves the rule. And we shouldn’t be making policy based on exceptional cases. (Exceptional cases can be handled with exceptions to the policy, they don’t have to get left behind. And I’m not talking about exceptions for Trump’s people.)

Farm typology:

«The ERS farm typology groups relatively similar farms. The complete typology has eight groups, which are defined by the farm’s gross cash income, the primary occupation of the principal operator, and whether the farm is a family farm (see Updating the ERS Farm Typology, EIB-110, April 2013). The collapsed farm typology combines the seven farm typology groups into three groups:

Residence farms: Farms with less than $350,000 in gross cash farm income and where the principal operator is either retired from farming or has a primary occupation other than farming.

Intermediate farms: Farms with less than $350,000 in gross cash farm income and a principal operator whose primary occupation is farming.

Commercial farms: Farms with $350,000 or more gross cash farm income and nonfamily farms.»

https://www.ers.usda.gov/topics/farm-economy/farm-household-well-being/glossary

Source: https://www.ers.usda.gov/data-products/farm-household-income-and-characteristics

(This opens fine with LibreOffice. I added a little highlighting and changed column width a smidge. Heck, I’ll just attach the original file.

)

You can also find some older info here: https://web.archive.org/web/20210318081753/https://www.ers.usda.gov/data-products/farm-household-income-and-characteristics/ in case your friend and mine, Donald Trump (or, more likely, one of the Project 2025 people making fish soup while he plays with whatever distraction they’ve arranged for him today), has deleted this info from the ERS web site by the time you read these words.

Republicans haaaaaaaate the ERS. That’s why the last time Trump was in office (pause for incredulity), it got moved to Wichita or some such.