Farm Size – Bigger Isn’t Always Better

By: Jodi Henke

Your neighbor could be buying more land every year to farm, but bigger doesn’t always mean better.

Greg Ibendahl is an associate professor of ag economics at Kansas State University. He and another researcher reviewed 10-years of data from the Kansas Farm Management Association to develop a ranking of several hundred farms based on their economic performance and how much they grew over those ten years. He says instead of just looking at the overall farm income, they looked at net farm income per-acre. They also considered investment in machinery, machinery operation and maintenance costs, and the allocation of acres to given crops. A key in this study – the higher your debt level was, the lower you tended to rank.