Other statistics cited in the paper underscore this trend

"As a recent USDA publication points out, roughly half of the United States outside of Alaska is agricultural land (or 930,000,000 acres).

"The 1997 Census of Agriculture tells a [revealing] story about the separation of ownership and control. Today, half our agricultural land is owned by persons not farming it ... One out of two agland owners, in other words ... are landlords and not farm operators. Roughly two thirds are 60 years old. Many live away from the farmland they own. In their hands, the prospects of land conversion is more of a business calculation and estate planning endgame than an occupational decision

"What about farm operators as opposed to farm owners? They, too, are in transition. For the first time in the history of the Agricultural Census, the production of our food and fiber rests in the hands of less than a million full-time farmers. Though there were approximately two million farmers enumerated in 1997, only half of these listed farming as their sole occupation. In other words, one out of two farm operators are ‘footloose' when it comes to their farming commitment. They have diverse, nonfarm occupational and ownership interests which, depending on tomorrow's land or commodity markets, will precipitate further vacancies in [our increasingly empty farmland].

"The ownership story doesn't end there. Whether or not owners are operators and operators are committed to full-time farming, a small fraction of the already depleted number of owners decide the future of the agricultural landscape.

"Recall that 930 million acres of agricultural land are at stake.

"Widely dispersed farm ownership still existed in the 1970s...

"‘A Time to Act' reports an attrition of 300,000 farmers [in the 16 year period] since 1981, a decline surely reflecting the farm crisis of the 1980s.

"By 1991 USDA researchers were reporting that the largest 4 percent (124,000 owners) held 47 percent of all farmland and 25 percent of all value in farms. We have, then, a situation in which a population roughly the size of Boise, Idaho, owns nearly half the agricultural land in the United States and controls its fate. " [Emphasis added.]

The situation has not improved. A July 17, 1998 article in The New York Times reported that farm debt in 1998 reached $172 billion, the highest since the height of the farm crisis in 1985. Since then, articles in the New York Times and other papers have continued to chronicle the economic struggles and losses of land that are devastating farmers across the nation (see Excerpt 9 - "An American Tragedy,")

Federal estate tax laws also exacerbate this problem, since they remove land from individuals and families and abet consolidation by corporate and nonfarm entities. See Excerpt 17 - "The Case for Eliminating Estate Taxes."

As a result: "Ownership units have grown in acres, assets, and market share at the expense of their neighbors. A starkly bimodal ownership structure is the result. The newly consolidated unit ... typical in many parts of the U.S. today, may rest legally in the hands of an individual, a family corporation, or an institutional owner (insurance company, bank, corporation, religious order, university, or estate)

"At the national level, food manufacturing concentration [also] is nothing less than breathtaking. By the early 1980s, 56 out of 98 food manufacturing industries had four-firm concentration levels of 40 percent or more ... Oligopoly in the national food system has forged ahead, apparently immune to anti-trust legislation ... commodities such as beef, pork, broilers, turkeys, animal feed, flour, corn, soybean and ethanol are exceedingly concentrated."

Consequently: "... many million farmers have been evacuated from their lands, and ... American agriculture has been diluted almost beyond recognition by depressed ratios of people-to-land and by changing ownership realities for those who remain on the land.

"As the farm population has tumbled, farm operator numbers have diminished as have the number of committed, full-time farmers. Their working lands have been consolidated by owners who don't farm, live elsewhere, and who have significant nonfarm interests."

"Such a structure," Geisler says: "is a poor shield against farmland conversion and eventual sprawl."

It also puts this nation's entire farm production system at risk.