Most Illinois farmland is not owned by farmers

> Farming is a terrible business. My few hundred acres (maybe worth $5M) will only churn out a few hundred grand in profit

Well, it is ultimately a real estate business. The "hundred grand" in profit is really there only to support the mortgage payments — meaning that's what other farmers are counting on, so they're going to drive the prices down to that point. It is like a tech startup. You are counting on the assets increasing in value when you exit. That is where the profit will eventually come from, hopefully. It is not a business for everyone, but I like it.

> Many of the buyers keep growing their farms because it's a status symbol.

And because the fun parts of the job end too quickly when you don't have enough acres. I'd at least like to double my acreage. That is where I think I'd no longer be in a position of "That's it? I want to keep going!" and instead "That was fun, but I think I've had enough."

That said, the machines keeps getting bigger, whether the farmer likes it or not, so perhaps in that future I'll need even more land to satisfy the pangs.

I was just looking at a GIS map yesterday for my area and noticed that nearly every field was owned by an LLC and/or trust. Didn't think much of it at the time until I read this.

> Farming is a terrible business. My few hundred acres (maybe worth $5M) will only churn out a few hundred grand in profit -- not even better than holding t-bills.

Non-judgmental curious question: why do you keep doing it? (As opposed to selling the land and buying tbills.)

It's buried in a figure legend, but the Tribune does acknowledge this too:

> Note: The 12 selected counties had some of the highest cash rents in the state. For the purposes of this analysis, a business entity was defined as an organization with an LLC, Inc, LTD, Co, Corp, LP or LLP tag. This land is not necessarily owned by large conglomerates and investment firms. Corporate structures are also attractive vehicles for family businesses.

Edit: apparently not that buried...

I don’t know how to say this without seeming rude, but a few hundred acres is very small. 500 acres is less than a square mile. Is there something about your community that makes farms of that size more common than normal?

Edit: my (extended) family has a farm, and they cultivate X0,000 acres every year, though they own far less. They do plant a larger area than most for their community, but they’re not planting 20x their neighbors.

My dad also had a farm in the UK owned through a company for tax reasons. Farming was a loss maker, land appreciation made loads of money.

Ouch. Better in some ways and worse than others than the restaurant business, I reckon.

My mom's relatives have a long horn "farm" complying with the minimum requirements to claim various tax exemptions. :sigh: Their family business is aviation real estate, services, equipment, and aircraft.

I can walk to where sorghum and field corn is grown here in hill country because that's the major trade in these parts, apart from selling land for new housing developments.

This is probably similar in UK - although this is pure speculation.

A limited company owning the "land" which is then leased to the "farm" business that works it.

Possibly a "group" parent company is owned by the actual farmer.

I'm sure there will be good tax and legal protection reasons to structure farms in this way, not forgetting various government schemes which bring in revenue via grants and tax breaks.

>Most farms are not owned by farmers, most housing is not owned by tenants, most airplanes are not owned by airlines, etc., etc..

Sounds nice but it's not true in the US. A majority (60%) of US land in farms is owner-operated.[1] US homeownership is 65% meaning most housing units are owner-occupied.[2] And 60% of North American airplanes are owner-operated not leased.[3]

[1]https://www.ers.usda.gov/topics/farm-economy/land-use-land-v... [2]https://www.advisorperspectives.com/dshort/updates/2025/07/2... [3]https://www.iata.org/en/iata-repository/publications/economi...

Have you seen how expensive a tractor or combine is? The economies of scale are real in farming.

You need ~$1M worth of equipment to farm 80 acres (~$1M worth of land), but that same equipment can basically farm 800 acres (~10M worth of land). An equipment issue can destroy a years worth of work with 800 acres (e.g. frost damage from delays), but with 8000 acres you can have spares / avoid the loss with some overtime.

Fertilizer and pesticides aren't neatly contained. If you farm different crops than your neighbors, overspray can kill your yield (e.g. weeds spray for corn kills soybeans). Laws around who can grow/spray what and being big helps make that better

If you carpool for money, you're a taxi. And if you take a friend on your plane, and he gives you x€ afterwards for gas money, how is that illegal?

I'm sure you're right about the compliance thing in general, but I don't get your example.

In the US, home ownership rates usually hover around 60%.

So most homes are owned by the occupant. I suppose if you want to be pedantic and say mortgaged homes are owned by the bank, sure I guess?

But I think homes should not be included in your list here.

> On the other hand, if they were flying in a small airplane owned by one of them, it's illegal to split the costs of wear on the airplane, unless its a rental or air taxi.

This isn't true:

https://www.faa.gov/documentLibrary/media/Advisory_Circular/...

That AC and the regulations cited in it couldn't be clearer-- if you and the pilot are both going to $destination for $reasons, you and the pilot can definitely split the cost of the fuel.

Moreover, this is perfectly analogous to the carpooling example as you stated it-- two people both having a stated purpose traveling to a destination, both sharing the cost of gas/wear.

There of course could be ways to carpool where the passengers pay the total cost of the driver's gas/wear/etc. You can't do that in your airplane. But again, I think the reasons for this are glaringly obvious-- keep silicon valley from attempting to create an unregulated taxi service in the sky. (In fact, IIRC there was someone who tried over a decade ago-- perhaps these laws are a response to that?)

> Because of this, and other similar effects of FAA regulations, many small airplane owners own a company that owns the airplane, instead of owning it outright, and rent the airplane from themselves, whenever they use it.

I mean, the pilots I know who do that are either a) multiple people owning a single plane, or b) single owner literally running a rental taxi service. Who isn't covered by those two categories?

Yes, regulation often inadvertently creates both barriers to entry and economies of scale.

Government should focus on making it easier for new companies to compete as that is what generally yields better and/or less expensive products.

Most housing is not owned by tenants? That surprises me quite a bit. Would you supply a source for that?

Yeah. I think it's important to think about whether or not you want millions of dollars of assets tied up in land that you can farm. For example, I don't know how to farm, and I don't wish my 401(k) was land and structures... I am happy to have higher exposure to the wider economy.

Obviously there are recessions and having your own vegetable farm and place to live is nice... but most of the time there isn't a cataclysmic recession, so you're leaving money on the table. Meanwhile, it's pretty easy to have a bad year farming. Weather. Pests. Having a lot of assets doesn't help you when they're not liquid and plants won't grow for a year.

It’s because it’s still mom and pop because 72% of farms are still fully owned by people but they tend to be smaller in size and only account for 30% of the total farm land. And majority of farms are still under a 1000 acre size. The problem is that there are about 27000 farms that are hyper giants of 5000+ acres which are the consolidated operations that account for a huge portion of the US farmland.

Also, farming is mom and pop highly optimized operation. Those two don’t need to be separate things. Once you understand that running a farm can be hundreds of thousands of dollars if not millions, you can understand the disconnect.

There is a lot of national security benefit to propping up the domestic agricultural industry. We've probably overstepped that line, but just "leave it to the free market" is a really bad option, too.

Unfortunately "the farmers" is simply a marketing gimmick along the lines of "the children". It is used to evoke a specific image and implied set of ideals. And because of that we have to deal with all kinds of crap legislation tied to it.

Yes, cannot emphasize this enough. Farming is an industry, and we have take it seriously as one and stop romanticizing it.

Of course, the irony is that now we romanticize industry too.

The special treatment of farmers is about food security. We generally trust farmers to keep delivering us food and we're willing to allow them a lot of special treatment because of that.

> an outdated relic kept alive by the electoral college.

And yet, farmers are a vocal and critical political bloc in every other EU country, too.

Farming is just important. Not as much because it employs a large portion of the population, but because it keeps a large portion of the population alive. It is the original industry that's "too big to fail" - if you let it, you get famine.

The country wouldn't even exist without the electoral college. It was pivotal in uniting the states under a federal government, and is working as intended. Maybe the USA should be abandoned, and all ties between the states renegotiated, but you shouldn't be able to unilaterally change the terms of the deal.

The highly optimized manufacturing operation has made farming into a powerful tool of statecraft internationally. Other countries become dependent on our beans and corn to [indirectly] feed their people or for inputs for their own industries. That gives us diplomatic leverage.

Once you start thinking about that, a lot of the mystery or 'inefficiency' of farming in the USA makes more sense. For example, the subsidies to grow corn and soy but not kale and squash or whatever was in the article- growing kale and squash isn't a strategic priority.

In addition, government handouts. Also known as corporate welfare. Also known as subsidies.

A report on NY farms and farmland, covering the 2012-2022 period.

https://www.osc.ny.gov/files/reports/pdf/profile-of-agricult...

It's interesting how little of NY state is farmland (21.6%).

"When the extended family of the farmer is taken into consideration, 94.6 percent of New York farms are family-owned."

I'm not from the US, so no idea if Thomas Massie would be anything approaching what you described? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Massie

Thanks. Got a plain made: “The content is not available in your region”. I’m actually happy the website content is a simple html document instead of JavaScript bloated with capitalism surveillance trackers

Selling the land that had been in the family for generations is what happened recently in my family. My dad (wealthy retired 80 year old engineer) unfortunately decided he wanted the money, instead of keeping it in the family. It has been in our family 150 years. None of us are farmers in the current family, but we had relatives who were still renting the land in the area. They couldn't afford to buy the land either. So no farmers in the family today doesn't make it obviously something that we can keep - still I was disappointed with the outcome.

We sold it to some outside group. Apparently the best way to sell land today is an online action. You announce it ahead of time, there is a minimal amount to start bidding, and then like an ad auction, there is a minimal increment to go up by, fixed time limit of like a week to bid.

I was really sad that it left the family. The sale price of the midwest farm land ended up about $10k an acre for cropland. The amount of money that renting brought in didn't seem like it would be enough for any young person to actually buy land at current prices. I am sure they'd have a lot of tax deductions but can they get a million dollar loan? I expect there will be houses put on the land eventually. I had an idea for how to keep it suitable for future farmland, which was to put solar power on it with a 20 year contract with a local power company (with everything removed after).

How does a farmer who doesn't inherit land ever afford the land?