It’s a cloudy day in early October and I’m circling my rented Jeep Wrangler around a maze of industrial buildings in Hamilton, Ohio. Hamilton is a small city 30 miles north of Cincinnati with a population of just over 62,000 people. Like much of Ohio, farming is important here.
I’m on my way to a farm called 80 Acres, but it isn’t the sprawling midwestern wheat field you’re picturing in your mind. This tech-centric farm is indoors, housed entirely in a nondescript 10,000-square-foot warehouse.
Food and agriculture are the top contributors to Ohio’s economy. There are about 78,000 farms in Ohio, putting it near the top of every list ranking US states by number of farms. Its biggest crops are soybeans, corn and wheat.
But US farming is in trouble. There are roughly 2 million farms in the country spread across 900 million acres and they earned a total of $389 billion in sales in 2017, according to the 2017 Census of Agriculture, released in April 2019. All three of those numbers are lower than they were five years ago. There are fewer farms, there’s less land dedicated to agriculture and the remaining farms are making less money.
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