Recently the USDA Economic Research Service released a report on the size and organization of U.S. crop farming. Many aspects of the report apply to Western Pennsylvania farms.

The full report can be reviewed in its entirety at www.ers.usda.gov/media/1156726/err152.pdf but here is a sample.

Large farms now dominate crop production in the United States.

Although most cropland was operated by farms with less than 600 crop acres in the early 1980s, today most cropland is on farms with at least 1,100 acres, and many farms are five and 10 times that size.

This ongoing shift in farm structure raises a host of questions. How extensive is this structural change? What forces have accompanied and contributed to the shift to larger farms? What implications do these structural shifts have for family farms?

The shift of acreage to larger farms is part of a complex set of structural changes in crop agriculture.

The number of midsize crop farms has declined, while farm numbers at the extremes (large and small) are growing.

Because of these changes, average farm size has changed little in the last three decades, even while cropland and crop production have shifted to much larger farms. The report documents the complex nature of modern farm structure and introduces statistics aimed at better tracking consolidation of land and production.

The report introduces a measure of midpoint acreage in which half of all cropland acres are on farms with more cropland than the midpoint, and half are on farms with less.

Midpoint acreage is revealed to be a more informative measure of cropland consolidation than either a simple median. Using this measure, ERS researchers found that:

n The midpoint acreage for U.S. cropland nearly doubled between 1982 and 2007, from 589 acres to 1,105.

n Midpoint acreages increased in 45 of 50 states and more than doubled in 16. The largest increases occurred in a contiguous group of 12 Corn Belt and Northern Plains states.

n Midpoint acreages more than doubled in each of five major field crops (corn, cotton, rice, soybeans, and wheat) and increased in 35 of 39 fruit and vegetable crops, where the average increase was 107 percent.

The shifts were persistent, with a general pattern of increase between each Census of Agriculture conducted between 1982 and 2007.

However, less comprehensive evidence from annual surveys suggests that the pace of consolidation slowed between 2007 and 2011, the last year for which data are available. Data from the 2012 Census will provide more definitive evidence of recent trends.

n Larger crop farms continue to realize better financial performance: average rates of return on equity increased with farm size in five major commodity categories analyzed in this report (corn, soybeans, wheat, fruits, and vegetables).

In turn, larger farms utilize labor and capital more intensively, which provide them with the primary source of their financial advantage.

The long-term shifts in farm size have been accompanied by greater specialization — beginning with a separation of livestock farming from crop farming in the latter half of the 20th century.

As crop and livestock production separated, full-time crop farmers could devote more time to crop production and manage more cropland. At the same time, the number of production and marketing contracts to govern the sale of products has increased. Contracts covered 32 percent of crop production in 2011, compared with 23 percent in the mid-1990s.

Larger operations are more likely to use contracts, which can reduce the price and marketing risks faced by farmers.

Technology also plays an important role in driving increases in farm size, by allowing a single farmer to operate and manage more acres.

Labor-saving innovations — from bigger and faster capital equipment to information technology, chemical herbicides, seed genetics, and changing tillage techniques — have substantially reduced the total amount of labor used in agriculture and facilitated the shift to larger crop farms.

While the above conditions may have facilitated the shifts toward larger farms, family farms continue to dominate crop agriculture.

In 2011, 96 percent of U.S. crop farms were family farms, and they accounted for 87 percent of the value of crop production.

Luke Fritz is executive director of the Butler County Farm Service Agency.