Farm households have substantially higher median income than the US as a whole, but their income overwhelmingly comes from non-farm sources.
ers.usda.gov/topics/farm-ec
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I don’t really understand this data either but I was looking it up and that’s what the Agriculture Department says.
Best guess: The typical “farmer” is a person with a high-paying job who lives in a rural area and does a small amount of farming on his land for tax purposes.
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Makarand Desai
@makmd
Replying to @mattyglesias
Does it mean these people treat farms as a side gig? This is really confusing piece of data!
Obviously what normal people mean when they want to look up information about farmers is something like “people who make a living from farming” which is evidently not what is being measured here.
But I met a guy who works for Goldman Sachs in Dallas and has a vacation house in the Hill Country that features enough cattle to get preferential property tax treatment as a ranch.
He tries not to lose too much money on the ranching, but he’s not making a living that way.
Does it mean these people treat farms as a side gig? This is really confusing piece of data!
Buying 100 acres and using most of it for hunting/fishing/shooting but dicking around with a few acres of row crop is pretty common among a certain class of rich retirees in the south.
If you could look at farm revenue rather than net income it would probably still be lopsided but make at least a little more sense. The $90k ford f150 is getting subtracted from farm income for example even tho you won’t find a speck of mud on it
I think this data might be explained by millions of ‘farms’ (wink wink) performing extremely low levels of agricultural activity, just enough to qualify for agricultural property tax exemptions / rebates. And the owners have regular jobs.
I think these numbers are including the time-honored tradition of gentleman farms.
There's more than a few gentleman "farms" on land New Jersey state law has preserved from development. They're mostly bankers' estates, with just enough agricultural activity to get a tax credit.
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Abhorrent on every level.
1. We are extorting businesses like cheap mob thugs.
2. We are being bought off to allow China, our greatest geopolitical adversary, to continue pursuing tech dominance - including in AI, the most important arms race of the age.
Shameful and pathetic.
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The Spectator Index
@spectatorindex
BREAKING: NVIDIA and AMD reportedly agree to give US government 15% of their revenues from chip sales in China, according to Financial Times report.
What the fuck is this
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Demetri
@Dimi
SCOOP - @Nvidia has done deal with Trump administration to pay US government 15% of revenues from #China H20 sales, in unprecedented quid pro quo for export licenses.
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Correct.
There are 147,947,000 housing units in the United States.
500,000 properties is 0.3% of the housing stock.
Important to remember that the US is very big.
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Chris Postell
@WBBChris
Oh no, not at all. The real problem is not the companies that own over 500,000 properties, acquired mostly over the course of the last 5 years.
It is *reads notes* your neighbor for not selling that plot of land to let BlackRock buy and develop it for more profit.
Got it. x.com/realrobdurden/…
I know we all hate economists, but they predicted this fairly accurately. US companies will take the hit, lay off people, cancel CAPEX investment plans and suffer margin erosion.
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Scott Lincicome
@scottlincicome
Goldman's latest (still very early) analysis of tariff effects thru June 2025:
-Foreign exporters absorbed 14% of US tariffs
-US companies ate 64%
-US consumers ate 22%
-Protected US companies also raised prices
-Consumers will see bigger price increases (70%) thru the Fall
