US Farm size is difficult to label in a quantitative way.  When a measure is easy to derive, it is not very relevant.  While moving toward unpacking cellular agriculture in the next few posts, there are formative steps to cover before that cellular food production nut can be cracked.

The US produces and increasing quantity of food through microbial processes.  USDA, ERS posted a fascinating report last month, “The Economics of Cellular Agriculture.”  The most popular flavors of microbial production are erupting in commercialization.  These new technologies will allow safe, healthy food to be grown without crops and livestock.

• Will these new facilities become farms?
• Or is the label ‘farm’ reserved for a specific type of business?
• If the microbial and cellular technologies happen on a traditional farm with other crops and livestock are the tanks with cellular transformations also farms?

So many questions.

Humans have been fermenting and modifying food microbially for centuries. While serving as a young agronomist in the remote nation of Nepal 40 years ago, I found a copy of the National Academy of Science publication, “Microbial Processes: Promising Technologies for Developing Countries,” 1979.  It was another ‘back to the future’ moment.  The idea of moving forward using ancient technologies was exciting to me.  Topics covered included:

• Food and animal feed
• Soil microbes in plant health and nutrition
• Nitrogen fixation
• Microbial insect control agents
• Fuel and energy
• Waste treatment and utilization
• Cellulose conversion, and
• Antibiotics and vaccines

Looking back over the last 45 years, this has become a to do list of biological technologies.  Many of these microbial technologies occur on farms today.

Before diving into to the USDA ERS findings on promising cellular commercial agricultural microbial conversion technologies, it makes sense to talk start with similar operations on today’s US farms using the USDA, 2022 Census of Agriculture, 2 million farms.  US farms are already growing indoor simple plants like mushrooms and aquatic plants.

Biomass Rules has already looked to the Census of Agriculture for other compelling trends.  One of the most popular summaries has been the new data on hemp production.  The 2022 Census of Agriculture has also highlighted energy production on farms for their own use, and as utility-scale power projects.  The land base of farms over the last few decades has shifted out of pastured livestock resulting in hog farms becoming more densely populated with happy pigs.  US farms are always changing.

Today’s table of data comes from the 2022, Census of Agriculture, Volume 1, Table 39. Floriculture and Bedding Crops, Nursery Crops, and Propagative Materials.  This table collects some very non-traditional farm crops into a single location and provides the production data in the context of acres under glass.  Area under glass is effectively indoor crop production.

Table 39 provides production resources in the context of greenhouse facilities for mushrooms, food crops, hemp, floriculture and bedding, propagative materials, nursery crops, and sod.  While not identified in the table, aquatic plants (and algae) are included in the nursery crop data.  Mushrooms are commercial fungi production, mostly for food from fungi.  These two industries, algae and fungi, are much, much larger than agriculture.  But here they are, right in Table 39 of the 2022 Census of Agriculture.

Uneasy Question #1: What makes these algae and fungi facilities recognized “farms” by USDA? (Mostly they produce food products, but non-food products use similar facilities).

The other interesting data in this chart (included in Table 39) is total area under glass in square feet.  This table only includes acres under glass.  There are 43,560 square feet in an acre, so it is only a matter of converting square feet to acres to provide acres.  The value of production for each of these industries in Table 39 is only provided for the combined total of acres under glass and outdoor acres.  It is not possible to look at the revenue from acres under glass compared to revenue from the crop acres.

It is possible to sum both types of farm acres and divide sales by total acres.  This is the last column, Value $/acre.  Mushrooms have no reported outdoor acres.  The $1.4 billion in sales is divided by 767 acres under glass to yield a per acre revenue of $1.9 million per acre.  Recall that a 1-acre building has an expansive internal area of 43,560 square feet (not a regular farm building).  Also, all these numbers represent US numbers.  This is not news.  Nearly all animal agriculture has moved indoors in the last 30 years, because management control increases and other risks decline.

There is a direct connection the value of these crops and the concentration of area under glass relative to outdoor crop acres.  The top two crops, mushrooms and food crops, have no outdoor acres.  At the other extreme, sod, has no indoor area under glass.

Table 39 provides seven unique crop information that include 76,000 farms with a cumulative value of production of $21.7 billion dollars.  This works out to be 4 percent for both farms (1,900,000 farms) and value of production ($543 billion for the US in 2022).  These crop industries are not large, but they are not insignificant.  A quick summation of the value of production of dairy, poultry, and swine value of production on US farms in 2022 reveal a total of $165.7 billion, or 30 percent of total value of production.  In addition to the 4 percent of value of production in Table 39, and indoor farm production accounts for 34 percent of the nation’s farm value in 2022.

Clearly high valued crops and livestock merit investment in buildings that cost more than land per area basis.  Traditional farms are densifying their facilities.

Uneasy Question #2: With traditional farm production moving indoors, what measurable parameter differentiates farm production from non-agricultural manufacturing industries using similar technologies. (Is fermentation of microbes in an anaerobic manure digester different than fermentation of yeast for plant-based meat substitutes?)

This is not an easy answer.  Yogurt, cheese, beer, wine, pickles, and many other microbially processed foods are not considered farms.  But without healthy discussion today, tomorrow’s more industrial food production will simply move inside manufacturing firewalls.

Does the definition of a US farm center on the biological transformation?  Or is the focus of a farm only on transformations that include crops and livestock?

US Farms already do more.  Stay tuned.