The food system has gains and costs, and the gains are easy to see in farm output. 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.
You may have heard that all farms are giant factories run by big companies. 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.
The order of crops in a field matters. 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. Crop rotation order matters: corn or sorghum grown before wheat can increase the incidence of fusarium head blight in wheat. 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.
Irrigation water comes from groundwater pumped from aquifers or from surface water such as streams, rivers and lakes. 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. Drip irrigation puts water right at the plant, which wastes less water than some other methods. The Aral Sea shrank from 68,000 to fewer than 17,000 square kilometers after rivers feeding it were diverted to irrigate crops in desert regions of Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan.
Some chickens on farms, called layers, lay eggs. In the United States, eggs are cleaned and kept cold after hens lay them. Eggs in much of the European Union are neither washed nor refrigerated, unlike in the U.S., Canada, Japan and Scandinavia. In the U.S., about 60 percent of eggs sold come from processors that pay for USDA grading, which lets cartons carry a USDA Grade A or AA shield, as of November 2026.
You may have heard that fish only come from the ocean or from rivers. Some fish and shellfish are raised on farms, which is called aquaculture. Aquaculture, the breeding, rearing and harvesting of fish, shellfish and algae, can happen in marine or freshwater settings. In 2024, U.S. marine and freshwater farmers produced an estimated 561 million pounds of seafood valued at $1.3 billion.
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. 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 chilled and distributed.
The cold chain is a series of refrigerated cooling, storage and transport steps that keeps food at the right temperature from grower to consumer. The molds and bacteria that cause decay in harvested produce generally need warm temperatures to grow, and cooling fresh produce right after harvest helps it stay good for longer. Refrigerated trucks, rail cars and containers allowed California, Florida and other states to become nationwide suppliers of perishable produce, dairy and other foods.
In 2019, EPA estimated about 66 million tons of wasted food were generated in the food retail, food service and residential sectors, and about 60 percent went to landfills. The cold chain depends on energy, which makes it hard to build in developing countries and rural areas where electricity supply may be unreliable or unavailable. FAO data show 526 million tonnes of food, around 12 percent of the global total, are lost or wasted due to insufficient refrigeration, as of November 2026.
Words to know
- aquaculture: farming fish
- pasteurization: heating raw milk
- fallow: left unplanted
- diverted: turned elsewhere
