What Counts as a Farm? Bringing Real-World Conditions into Agricultural Policy
AFPC co-director Bart Fischer explains how his center decides which farms actually matter to federal policy, and why that choice quietly determines what every statistic about the farm safety net really means.
The federal government spends billions of dollars a year trying to keep farms solvent through drought, crashing prices, and swinging input costs. But before Congress can write a check, or write a policy, someone has to answer this question first: what does help actually look like for a working farm? The Agricultural and Food Policy Center (AFPC) at Texas A&M University, is part of that work. On the latest episode of Clearing the Air on Agricultural Policy, AFPC co-director Bart Fischer walked the panel through how his center actually measures the U.S. farm safety net, and why the same statistic about American farms can mean almost nothing or almost everything, depending on which farms you're counting.
Fischer has spent his career on both sides of that measurement problem. He spent more than eight years on the U.S. House Committee on Agriculture, finishing as deputy staff director and chief economist under then-ranking member Mike Conaway of Texas, where he helped write both the 2014 and 2018 farm bills. He is also fifth-generation on his family's wheat, cotton, and cattle operation in southwest Oklahoma, ground he still works and says he'd return to full time "if I didn't have this very unique opportunity." Today he co-directs AFPC alongside Joe Outlaw, part of a line of agricultural economists that includes his own PhD advisor, James Richardson, who have run the center since it was founded in 1983.
Fischer joined the show's regular panel, Jennifer Ifft of Kansas State University, Mark Edelman of Iowa State University, and Brad Lubben of the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, for this month's installment of Clearing the Air on Agricultural Policy, hosted by Eric Atkinson. Clearing the Air is a monthly collaboration between the Barry Flinchbaugh Center for Ag and Food Policy and Smoke and Mirrors (#SmokeAndMirrorsPod), Jennifer Ifft's podcast on agricultural policy.
The Safety Net Runs on Numbers Congress Rarely Sees
AFPC has advised Congress and USDA on farm policy since 1983, working alongside two sister centers, one at the University of Missouri and one at North Dakota State University, that split coverage of different regions and issues. The center's focus, in Fischer's words, is "farm level impacts": what a proposed change to reference prices, crop insurance subsidy rates, or estate tax rules actually does to a working operation's bottom line.
Most of that work stays out of public view. It is directed by specific requests from congressional committees, and much of it stays confidential unless a member decides otherwise. Recent public examples include reports for the House on the farm-level cost of fertilizer, and a joint request from Senators John Thune and Amy Klobuchar on fertilizer price transparency that fed directly into legislation the two senators introduced together. A larger, mostly unpublished body of work fed into the reference-price increases in last summer's budget reconciliation bill and into the cost-of-production estimates used to calibrate several rounds of disaster aid. That's one reason, Fischer noted, why the farm bill's remaining work is mostly catching up on other provisions rather than racing a funding deadline.
The center is also explicitly nonpartisan: rather than splitting the difference between parties, it stays out of the judgment call entirely. Fischer takes requests from both parties and says a change in House or Senate control mainly changes who is asking, not what AFPC does with the question.
"We try to keep the opinion out of it and just let the results speak for themselves, and then let the people who are actually elected to do the jobs make those decisions." — Bart Fischer
How AFPC Builds a "Representative Farm"
AFPC's core tool is a network of roughly 90 representative farms spread across about 30 states, built from a panel of more than 650 producers. In each location, a local extension staffer convenes four to six growers who negotiate, in real time, what a "typical" operation in their area actually looks like: cropping mix, owned versus leased land, lease terms, equipment, input costs. AFPC's team builds that consensus into a full financial statement, then returns every two to three years to recalibrate, extrapolating between visits using price projections from the Food and Agricultural Policy Research Institute (FAPRI) at the University of Missouri.
The data is kept confidential and used exclusively for Congress and USDA. Fischer describes the method as a deliberate trade against pure aggregate statistics: it can't capture every possible farm, but it reflects what growers who live with the numbers agree is realistic for their region, a more grounded check than policy built on national averages nobody actually farms.
"Everything we do and all the analysis we do is ground truth." — Bart Fischer
What Counts as a Farm? Why the Same Number Can Mean Two Different Things
Panelist Mark Edelman raised an old debate that shows exactly why this matters: a proposed change to the estate tax and stepped-up basis rules. AFPC's analysis, built from its full-time, commercial-scale representative farms, found that more than 90 percent of them would face a substantial new tax burden. A separate, broader statistic on the same legislation, built from the full Census of Agriculture, put the share of unaffected farms at 90 percent as well.
Both figures were accurate. They described different farms. The Census counts all roughly 2 million U.S. operations that report any farm income, the overwhelming majority of them small or part-time. AFPC's representative farms are deliberately built around the minority of farms, the full-time, commercial-scale operations, that produce the great majority of U.S. agricultural output, the group Fischer says Congress is almost always asking about when it asks how a policy will "affect farmers." Neither the 90 percent facing a burden nor the 90 percent facing no impact was the wrong number. The question that actually matters is which farms a given statistic is describing, and AFPC exists specifically to answer that question for the operations doing most of the country's actual farming.
"My denominator can be 200, 250,000 farms that are doing 90% of the production. Or my denominator can be 2 million farms. And depending on which one I pick, I can completely change the message. You've got to read closely on all of it." — Bart Fischer
By the Numbers: Who Actually Grows the Country's Food
The scale of that gap is larger than it sounds. According to USDA's Economic Research Service, midsize and large-scale family farms made up just 11 percent of all U.S. farms in 2024, but accounted for 68 percent of the total value of agricultural production. That 11 percent lines up closely with the slice AFPC builds its representative farms around, because it's close to the slice federal farm policy is actually written to support.
It's also why a policy that looks negligible against all 2 million U.S. farms can be existential for the operations actually producing most of the food and fiber those farms grow. Getting the denominator right isn't a footnote to AFPC's work; it's most of the argument.
"Large-Scale" Doesn't Mean Corporate
One reason that 11 percent figure is easy to misread is that "large-scale family farm" sounds like a euphemism for something closer to a corporation. Fischer pushed back on that instinct with a simple point about equipment cost: a modern combine can run $650,000; a specialized cotton stripper can top $1 million. Reaching the scale needed to justify that kind of investment, on top of land, seed, fertilizer, fuel, and labor, doesn't make an operation less of a family farm. If anything, it's what it now takes for a family to farm full time as its primary livelihood, which is the exact group AFPC's representative farms are built to represent.
Why Simpler Farm Policy Isn't Free
Panelist Brad Lubben pushed Fischer on a recurring complaint: growers often don't know which part of the safety net a payment came from, or why the timing works the way it does. Fischer agreed the system is complicated, and said every attempt to simplify it runs into the same wall: complexity is usually there because it's solving a specific, real problem for a specific group of growers.
He pointed to a debate from the 2013 negotiations over what became the 2014 farm bill, when House members seriously considered folding the Title I safety net entirely into crop insurance and dropping the separate PLC program. It went nowhere politically. He also defended one of the more technical provisions he worked on directly in that same bill: yield exclusion, which prevents a run of bad-luck years, like a drought or a hailstorm, from permanently dragging down a farm's insurable yield history. Growers pay a higher premium for the protection, but they don't get penalized on how much of their crop they're allowed to insure going forward.
"Since I wrecked my Cadillac, it doesn't mean next time I can only insure a Corolla. I can still go buy another Cadillac and insure it. ... It's complicated, but it's also accrued significant benefit to the grower." — Bart Fischer
The broader point applies well beyond crop insurance: asking whether farm policy could be simpler is a fair question, Fischer said, but it isn't a free one. Cutting complexity usually means cutting protection, targeting, or precision along with it, and the honest version of that conversation has to weigh both sides.
That's the actual function AFPC serves: not deciding who deserves help, but deciding, on purpose and out loud, which farms a given policy question is really about. Every farm statistic makes that choice somewhere. Most of the time, nobody says which one.
Fischer joined Clearing the Air on Agricultural Policy, hosted by Eric Atkinson of Kansas State University with regular panelists Jennifer Ifft, the Flinchbaugh Agricultural Policy Chair at Kansas State University; Mark Edelman, professor emeritus and longtime agricultural and rural policy specialist at Iowa State University; and Brad Lubben, agricultural and public policy specialist at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln.
Clearing the Air is produced as a monthly collaboration between the Flinchbaugh Center and Smoke and Mirrors: Ag Policy Unfiltered, Jennifer Ifft’s podcast on agricultural policy.
Watch the full conversation with Bart Fischer, co-director of the Agricultural and Food Policy Center at Texas A&M University.
About Clearing the Air
Clearing the Air is a monthly podcast brought to you by The Flinchbaugh Center in partnership with the Smoke and Mirrors podcast. Hosted by Eric Atkinson, the show offers thoughtful, fact‑driven conversations for anyone interested in the intersection of agricultural economics, policy, and real‑world decision‑making. Each episode features insights from Jennifer Ifft, Mark Edelman, and Brad Lubben, along with a rotating monthly guest.
Comments