@Concerned
See my above post. Less than 25% of production comes from small family farms.
Farmers are great at playing the sympathy card. Have been for decades. Its one reason we are all putting a ethanol mix in our cars.
Like I said up thread it depends on what you are growing. You can't pay for the equipment to farm out here on fewer than a couple of sections (two square miles, 1280 acres), and commonly those growing wheat will farm upwards of seven sections, just to make it pay a decent living when the costs and depreciation of equipment are considered. It can easily take over a million dollars in tilling and harvesting equipment, and seed loans of 100 grand are not unheard of (for seed, fertilizer, etc.), just to put the crop in.
The value of the equipment and farmland alone mandate incorporation, in order to protect the family's farm from inheritance taxes. If the owner died, he would not be able to leave the farm to a relative without the government stepping in for its share of that multimillion dollar inheritance.
How you calculate it, by separate operations, in which that 5 acre vegetable farm counts the same as that seven square mile wheat farm, both as one, there are likely more smaller operations considered family farms because they aren't worth enough to incorporate to avoid the death tax. If you want to talk about the family farms flying their own corporate flag, and include those, that acreage is huge in the midwest, and although the farms are family owned and operated, they are corporations.
If you want to count up the acres under tillage, I'd say the larger operations, family owned or not, tend to be incorporated for the reason stated above, even if they aren't owned by ADM, Monsanto, or Dekalb, they are still corporations. Which likely puts more acreage under a corporate plow.
