The inevitable outcome, the experts predicted, would be their farm-income doughnut, with few or no middle-size farms.Īnd it’s true, the big-picture statistics did look pretty bleak for the mid-size category. As commodity producers, their economies of scale would give them so big an advantage that medium-size operations simply wouldn’t be able to compete. The big operations grossing over $1 million a year, meanwhile, would be economic juggernauts.
Smaller farmers grossing less than $250,000 a year would still exist, but they’d be producing niche crops and livestock, and they would boost their margins via marketing to stores and to consumers.
