Less than 1/5 of land in US is of "high quality agriculture use."
About 1/3 of Tompkins County land is farmland. In other words, about 100,000 acres are farmed here.
Tompkins County has more than 580 farms, each averaging about 185 acres.
The market value of farm products in the county is about $60.1 million, and the leading products are: Milk & Dairy, Grains & Dry Beans, Cattle & Calves, Nursery & Floriculture, and Vegetables & Potatoes.
About 46% of farm owners here rely on farming as their main employment and income, their average age is 55.4 years, and their median household income is about $44,300.
There's a fascinating survey of dairy farms over the past 100 years at http://aem.cornell.edu/research/researchpdf/rb/Cornell_AEM_rb802.pdf if you want even more data. It's just one kind of farming, but seeing data on a century is amazing.
ReplyDeleteWhoops - that should be rb0802.pdf to make it work...
ReplyDeleteAh, yes, I see: http://aem.cornell.edu/research/researchpdf/rb/Cornell_AEM_rb0802.pdf
ReplyDeleteThanks for sharing that, Simon. It'll take me a while to sift through it all!
I also recently learned that the History Center has tons of archives on agriculture in our region. Although it's all hardcopy, it does make for some really interesting reading. http://www.thehistorycenter.net/