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That is defined in the link. Anyplace that generates more than $1,000 income per year through agricultural activity. Yes, I believe it includes conventional market livestock. No idea about things like horses or alligators or puppies, but they wouldn't be enough to skew the numbers.
If you include puppies, Missouri would shoot to the top.
I am surprised to see that my state (Washington) has more farms than my home state where I grew up (South Dakota). South Dakota is covered in farms, it is pretty much all farmland except for areas in the western part of the state that are ranch land. Washington on the other hand is mountainous and much more heavily populated-- the only thing I can think of is that the farms in SD are so much bigger? It seems farmers back there talk about their land in terms of hundreds or thousands of acres, I don't think any farms here in WA are anywhere near that scale.
CA is the #1 agricultural state but clearly ranks pretty far down on the list for # farms considering that. Some of the cattle farms you see off I-5 between Northern and Southern CA in the Central Valley are disgusting. Happy cows don't come from CA as they are usually wading around in their own excrement.
There is a really gnarly one off I-5 that looks like a concentration camp for cows. You can smell it from like 15 miles away.
I had the pleasure of driving through Iowa during planting season in April. It was beautiful farmland....
Iowa has changed so much the past few decades. Back in 1950 there were over 200,000 farms in Iowa. Today there are less than half that amount. The rural population has gone down by hundreds of thousands since 1980, while the urban population has increased by even more. The state has also grown more diverse with 300,000 minorities. Back in 1980 there was basically just a few hispanics and a small urban black community.
My grandparents grew up in Iowa on farms in the 1920's. Back then there were 20,000 to 25,000 people in a lot of these rural farming counties. Much more dense than they are today. Today many of those areas struggle to have even 10,000 people, and the average age in them is very high. I go back to the town of 6,000 where my family moved from in the 1950's (western Iowa) and it's pretty sad. Not much going on in town, and damn near everyone is elderly.
The average age of a farmer is now almost 60 years old. Only 5% of the state's population now lives on a farm.
It's been a real struggle to transition, especially in the state's politics. The influence and money devoted to rural areas has had to go down as a fairly large majority of the population is now in urban cities. That never use to be the case.
California is the number one agricultural state by virtue of crop value (double that of Texas - the next largest state in crop value). Veggies, fruit and nuts pull in a lot more money per acre than grain crops. Yields can be huge per acre for the same crop too (benign climate and dependable irrigation). The average farm size here in acres is about the same as it is in Iowa or Minnesota - they just put out a lot more revenue due to specialty crops that don't grow or grow as well in other places.
I wonder how skewed these numbers would be by drawing comparisons between small family farms and large scale farming/ranching.
I had the pleasure of driving through Iowa during planting season in April. It was beautiful farmland....
Is that NW Iowa? Beautiful rich black soil.
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