Counts and dollar figures show how U.S. farming works. You may have heard that all farms are giant factories run by big companies. The numbers say something different. Family farms of various types made up 97 percent of U.S. farms in 2024, and small family farms made up 86 percent. Large-scale family farms, with $1 million or more in gross cash farm income, were about 5 percent of U.S. farms in 2024 but 50 percent of the value of production. As of 2024, the United States had 1.88 million farms, down 8 percent from the 2.04 million in the 2017 Census of Agriculture. The number of U.S. farms peaked at 6.8 million in 1935.

Each farmer can feed more people than before. In the early 1900s an average U.S. farmer produced enough food to feed a family of five, and many of today's farmers can feed that family and about 100 other people. As of 2023, total U.S. farm output had nearly tripled since 1948. Advances in animal and crop genetics, chemicals, equipment and machinery, and farm organization have let farmers combine inputs in new ways that increase productivity. F1 hybrid seeds are the result of controlled, known crosses of plants that produce the same results each time.

During the 1950s and 1960s, scientists created types of wheat and rice that were easier to grow and introduced them into Mexico and parts of Asia; this is called the Green Revolution. Norman Borlaug developed a robust dwarf wheat strain adapted to Mexican conditions, and by 1956 Mexico was self-sufficient in wheat. In the mid-1960s Borlaug introduced dwarf wheat into India and Pakistan, and production increased enormously. Wheat, corn (maize) and rice are grains that people around the world grow and eat.

Wheat grain becomes flour at a mill. Flour for bread comes from wheat grain, and an average 60-pound bushel of wheat yields about 45 pounds of flour (75 percent) and 15 pounds of millfeed (25 percent) at the mill. In tempering, water is added to cleaned wheat to toughen the bran and mellow the endosperm so the kernel parts separate more easily.

Crops are worth a great deal of money, and a few of them carry much of it. Corn and soybeans brought in $104.1 billion, or 43.7 percent, of the $238.4 billion in U.S. crop cash receipts in 2025. In 2023, agriculture, food and related industries contributed roughly $1.537 trillion, a 5.5 percent share, to U.S. gross domestic product. Crops fall into six categories by use: food, feed, fiber, oil, ornamental and industrial crops.

Irrigated area in the U.S. has expanded more than 10-fold from 1890 to 2022, while per-acre water use has declined since 1969. Irrigation brings water to crops through pipes, canals or sprinklers instead of relying on rain alone, and irrigation water comes from groundwater pumped from aquifers or from surface water such as streams, rivers and lakes. Around 5500 B.C., farmers in Mesopotamia developed simple irrigation systems. Drip irrigation puts water right at the plant, which wastes less water than some other methods.

In the early 1800s, scientists discovered that nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium were the most important nutrients for growing plants. Crop rotation means growing a series of different crops in the same field over the seasons, and it helps break the cycle of pests and disease that builds up when one crop is grown again and again. A legume cover crop in a rotation can provide a substantial amount of nitrogen to the crop that follows. Studies show yield increases of 10 to 15 percent in soybeans and corn when crops are rotated. In the open-field system of medieval Europe, one field was planted in spring, another in autumn, and one was left unplanted, or fallow.

Virtually all of the world's seed plants need to be pollinated. Pollen carries a plant's male cells, and pollination helps a plant make seeds. Of the 1,400 crop plants grown around the world, almost 80 percent require pollination by animals, as of November 2026. You may have heard that bees only matter because they make honey. Bees also help fruits, nuts and other foods grow by visiting flowers, and beekeepers get extra honey because bees make more than the colony needs.

U.S. milk output has risen 62 percent since 1985, and the number of milk cows has generally risen since the early 2000s, reaching 9.49 million in 2025. A dairy farm milks cows to get milk. On a dairy farm, milk is cooled as soon as possible, collected in a bulk tank and then transported to a processor. Pasteurization is a heating process that kills potential pathogens in raw milk, and Louis Pasteur, a French chemist and microbiologist, first came up with pasteurization for beer and wine to keep them from souring. Even after pasteurization, milk must be kept cold to stop remaining spoilage bacteria from growing. Milk is bottled or made into ice cream, cheese or other products, then distributed.

The molds and bacteria that cause decay in harvested produce generally need warm temperatures to grow. Cooling fresh produce right after harvest helps it stay good for longer, and cooling lowers its rate of respiration, which can significantly increase shelf life. In the United States, eggs are cleaned and kept cold after hens lay them. The cold chain is a series of refrigerated cooling, storage and transport steps that keeps food at the right temperature from grower to consumer.

Words to know

• hybrid: a planned cross
• tempering: adding water
• pasteurization: heating raw milk
• pollination: seed-making help
• fallow: left unplanted