US Agricuture Secretary Concerned About the State of Agriculture Mother Jones [Video]

On Tuesday, Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack helped unveil his agency’s Census of Agriculture, a huge quinquennial report that covers 6 million data points and gives the current state-of-the-state of American farms and farmers.

In a presentation at the Department of Agriculture (USDA), Vilsack underscored his main takeaway: The number of American farms and farmers continues to decline, a fact that has broad consequences, he argued, beyond farming itself.

“I’m concerned about the state of agriculture and food production in this country,” he said, before ticking off a few numbers to make his point.

In 2017, the year the previous report covered, the country had 2,042,220 farms. In 2022, it had 1,900,487. In that same span, the number of farmed acres dropped from almost 900 million acres to 880 million—a loss in area the size of all the New England states, minus Connecticut, Vilsack noted.

The drop, Vilsack argued, has caused ripple effects across rural America, resulting in the loss of schools, businesses …