77% of Farm Household Income Comes from Off the Farm

An American Farm Bureau Federation Market Intel report found most of the U.S. farm household income is from off-farm sources. “Seventy-seven percent of income that farm households receive comes from those off-farm sources, meaning only 23 percent comes from farm-related income,” said AFBF Economist Daniel Munch. “When we look at the median on-farm income, in 2023, farmers in the United States had a loss of $900.” Munch admits that the data is a bit skewed by the number of small farm operations within the dataset. “One of the caveats to the data always is USDA’s definition of a farm, and that includes any operation with more than $1,000 in ag sale products, so that encompasses a lot of very small farms and lifestyle farms, hobby farms, that aren’t meant for primary income.” Larger farms are not exempt from this. “Even looking at some of the bigger classes of farms, we found that farms with over $1 million in market or gross sales, 41 percent of them still reported working off the farm at some point during the year.”