Vilsack Calls Ag Census a Wake-Up Call

With your Southeast Regional Ag News, I am Haylie Shipp. This is the Ag Information Network.

The USDA released the 2022 Census of Agriculture this week. Ag Secretary Tom Vilsack says some of the results were concerning, especially the number of farms and total amount of farmland across America…

“In 2017, when we did the survey, there were 2,042,220 farms. Today the survey reports we have 1,900,487 farms. So doing a little quick math, that's 142,000 fewer farms in five years. The survey tells us that in 2017, we had a little over 900 million acres of land in farming. Five years later, we have 880 million acres, so we've lost 20 million acres.”

Vilsack called it a wake-up call…

“This survey is essentially asking the critical question of whether as a country are we okay with losing that many farms? Are we okay with losing that much farmland or is there a better way? That's the importance of this survey. It allows us to take a snapshot in time, allows us to compare what has occurred over the five-year period, and begin to ask ourselves questions about the policy formation and the direction that we need to take in order to correct or deal with some of the challenges that the data presents.”

Ag Secretary Tom Vilsack.