Farm Size and Productivity
How does farm size vary across the world? How much of farmland is held by smallholders?
It's estimated that there are around 570 million farms in the world.1
The size and productivity of farms across the world varies a lot. This matters a lot for economic development, poverty alleviation, global food production and its environmental impacts.
Most of the world's farmers are smallholders – with farms less than two hectares in size. Yet these farmers are some of the poorest. The size and low labor productivity on these farms can make it difficult for smallholders to increase their incomes, and escape poverty.
The distribution of farms across the world matters for human development and wellbeing, as well as the impact that agriculture has on the environment.
On this page you can find all our data, visualizations, and writing relating to farm size.
Research & Writing
Smallholders produce one-third of the world’s food, less than half of what many headlines claim
Most of the world’s farmers are smallholders. They are also often the poorest. How much of the world’s food do they produce?
Do we only have 60 harvests left?
Claims that the world has only 100, 60, or even 30 years of harvests left often hit the headlines. These claims are overblown, but soil erosion is a problem and we can do something about it.
More articles related to Farm Size
All charts
Average farm size
Number of farms
Share of farms operated by smallholders
Agricultural land area by farm size
Average farm size vs. GDP per capita
Farm machinery per unit of agricultural land
Global allocation of crops to end uses by farm size
Global crop production by farm size
Has the average farm size increased or decreased since 1960?
Number of farms by size
Share of agricultural land operated as smallholder farms
Share of farms operated by smallholders vs. GDP per capita
Endnotes
Lowder, S. K., Skoet, J., & Raney, T. (2016). The number, size, and distribution of farms, smallholder farms, and family farms worldwide. World Development, 87, 16-29.
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Hannah Ritchie and Max Roser (2022) - “Farm Size and Productivity” Published online at OurWorldInData.org. Retrieved from: 'https://ourworldindata.org/farm-size' [Online Resource]BibTeX citation
@article{owid-farm-size,
author = {Hannah Ritchie and Max Roser},
title = {Farm Size and Productivity},
journal = {Our World in Data},
year = {2022},
note = {https://ourworldindata.org/farm-size}
}
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