Venture agriculturalism

Francis Zierer on farming returns.

There’s a romance to farming. Every yuppie has been party to a conversation about leaving whatever city behind and buying a farm. This romance is most often idle fantasy: The United States has lost some 286,780 farms since the turn of the century—a 13.2% total loss.

My family are farmers. I grew up on a small farm in Northern California, which is still my 70-plus-year-old parents’ sole source of income. It’s around eight acres and employee count (besides them) peaks around five in the spring-summer growing season. They’ve been in the field for over 40 years. Since the early 2000s, their annual “gross cash farm income” (GCFI) has usually landed them in midsize family farm status (between $350,000 and $1 million), sometimes dipping into the smaller tier.

According to a 2021 survey by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, small family farms—smallholdings—make up 89% of American farms. The USDA defines this category by income: a small family farm has a GCFI less than $350,000. Small family farms make up 45% of agricultural land and contribute 18% of national production value. 

Large-scale family farms ($1 million-plus GCFI) make up 3% of all farms nationally, use 27% of agricultural land, and contribute 46% of production value. Nonfamily farms make up 2% of farms, 10% of agricultural land, and 17% of production value—the smallest share in all three categories, though with an outsize production contribution rate.

I once asked my parents why they became farmers: because that’s what they were doing when they decided to get married and start a family. Baby on the way; need to feed and clothe it.

“You can’t eat technology,” as mycologist and technologist Adam DeMartino called his 2024 essay explaining why he and his co-founder resigned from their mushroom farm startup, Smallhold, which filed for bankruptcy earlier that year.

The company peaked around $17 million in annual revenue with a post-money valuation of roughly $90 million, supported by $58 million in angel investors, institutional VCs and debt, according to DeMartino. 

To most people, “startup” is synonymous with “technology company,” but a couple of humans working a plot of land is a startup, too. This describes many in the farming community I grew up in, where my parents and their back-to-the-land-generation peers bought small plots in the Northern California mountains in the final decades of the 20th century.

This also describes companies like Smallhold, Square Roots, and Bowery Farms.

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