Small farms grow a large portion of the world’s food
It’s quite amazing. Small farms are still growing a large portion of the world’s food. In our recent study, we collected data from 55 countries and found that farms under 2 ha (5 acres) — the size of two American style football fields — are growing between 30–35% of all food produced (click the pic to explore our interactive app).
When we crunched these numbers, we were surprised by the results. After all, farms are getting huge. In the US the average farm is 175 ha — the size of two 18-hole golf courses or about 90,000 bowling alley lanes if that’s your sport. In Australia, the average farm size is a whopping 3200 ha (about the size of Central Park in NYC). But in many low-income countries, farms are incredibly small. The average farm in India and China is around is 1.25 ha (less than 2 soccer pitches).
This brings us to the first reason why small farms produce so much globally: all these small farms add up. Of the estimated 580 million farms in the world, 80% are under 2 ha and they occupy 24% of the world’s cropped areas.
The second reason is that smaller farms grow more crops used for food. A large volume of crops end up in processed goods like biofuels, used or sold as seed or animal feed, or are eventually lost during storage and transport. Using our dataset, we found that crops produced on smaller farms were more likely to end up as food, while larger farms had more of their crops being used for processed goods and animal feed.
The types of crops that smaller farms produced were far more diverse than larger farms. Our database has 154 crops in it. Compared to farms in the same region, smaller farms were growing a greater number of crop species than larger farms; in the figure below, farms < 2 ha accounted for ~40% of crop species richness. While many researchers and advocates have long touted how smaller farms grow a diverse array of crops, our results provide concrete evidence in a global context.
At the same time, larger farms grow different crops than smaller farms. Smaller farms grow more fruits, pulses, roots and tubers, while medium sized farms produce more vegetables and nuts, and larger farms produce more oil crops. This suggests that in order to have a diversity of crops at the landscape and regional level, the food system needs a diversity of farm sizes.
There are some caveats to our work. We could only find usable data for 55 countries, and a giant hole in our dataset is information from China. While this means there are large gaps in our coverage, we tried to use some simple statistics to estimate how our results might change depending on the countries we included (check out the article for more info). Despite this limitation, our results on how much food different farm sizes produce are roughly in line with the two other studies (here and here) that used completely different methods and data to answer this question — we used nationally representative surveys that directly asked farmers how big their farm was and what they grew, the other two studies overlaid several geospatial data sets to estimate farm size and crop production. Having three studies, from different research teams, using different methods and data come up with very similar results is promising! All three studies also refute the earlier and widely reported estimate that small farms produce 70–80% of the world’s food (see examples here, here, and here); however, all studies still find small farms to be making substantial contributions to food and nutrition.
A final limitation of our study is that we used the size of farm as the indicator (farmers operating on smaller farms are called ‘smallholders’). While the actual area of the farm is one definition of farm size, other smallholder advocates and researchers find it helpful to define the size of the farm as its economic output, incorporate the social status of the farmer, determine if a farmer is subsistence oriented or selling crops to the market, and if a farm is mechanized or relies on rain for irrigation. Each definition identifies different groups of farmers, who are vulnerable to food insecurity, market risks, and climate change in different ways.
While we have so far discussed the contributions of smallholders to food production using the widely used threshold of 2 ha, we allow you, the reader, to define small farms at different thresholds (e.g., a small farm is < 2 ha, <10 ha, < 50 ha, etc.) — check out our interactive app to explore the data. While our current dataset cannot test the other various definitions of farm size, we want to! If you have ideas for what other definitions of smallholders are important to include in our effort please add your thoughts in the comments below.
