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Number of farms in New York down for fourth straight year
Monday, February 4, 2008

Farm numbers in New York state dropped for the fourth consecutive year, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
Stephen Ropel, director of the New York Field Office of the USDA’s National Agricultural Statistics Service, said the number of farms for 2007 was estimated at 34,200, a decrease of 800 from 2006. Land in farms held steady at 7.50 million acres, however, raising the average farm size to 219 acres, 5 acres more than the previous year.
New York state agricultural numbers
To view more detailed statistics on New York state farms, including county-by-county data, click here.
Farms with sales of more than $500,000 increased by 50 to 1,350, and farms with sales between $250,000 and $499,999 rose by 150 to 1,750. The area of land operated by farms in these two groups totaled 2.57 million acres, 5 percent more than a year ago.
The next smaller sales class, farms with sales between $100,000 and $249,999, increased by 200 to 3,000, while land operated by these farms dropped by 50,000 acres. Average farm size as a result fell from 446 acres to 400 acres.
There were 11,300 farms with sales between $10,000 and $99,999, compared with 10,700 a year earlier. Land they operated totaled 2.09 million acres.
There were 1,800 fewer small farms with sales between $1,000 and $9,999 in 2007, at 16,800. Land in farms for this class decreased 110,000 acres from the previous year to 1.64 million acres, for an average farm size of 98 acres.
The number of farms in the United States in 2007 is estimated at 2.08 million, 0.6 percent fewer than in 2006. Total land in farms, at 930.9 million acres, decreased 1.5 million acres, or 0.16 percent, from 2006. The average farm size was 449 acres during 2007, an increase of 3 acres from the previous year.
The decline in the number of farms and land in farms reflects a continuing consolidation in farming operations and diversion of agricultural land to nonagricultural uses, Ropel said.