Files
Abstract
Recent consolidation in agriculture has shifted production toward fewer but larger farms,
reshaping business relationships between farmers, processors, input suppliers, and local
communities. We analyze growth and diversification of U.S. corn, wheat, apple, and beef
farms by examining longitudinal changes in 10 size cohorts through three successive censuses.
We fail to reject Gibrat’s law in apple and wheat industries and the mean reversion
hypothesis in beef and corn industries. Apple and wheat farms diversify over time. The
findings suggest that scale economies diminish for large farms across all four industries and
scope economies dominate scale economies for large apple and wheat farms.