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Farm Size and Productivity

How does farm size vary across the world? How much of farmland is held by smallholders?

By: Hannah Ritchie and Max Roser

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?

Hannah Ritchie

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.

Hannah Ritchie

More articles related to Farm Size

To protect the world’s wildlife we must improve crop yields – especially across Africa

Hannah Ritchie

After millennia of agricultural expansion, the world has passed ‘peak agricultural land’

Hannah Ritchie

Increasing agricultural productivity across Sub-Saharan Africa is one of the most important problems this century

Hannah Ritchie

All charts

Average farm size
Chart 1 of 12

Endnotes

  1. 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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Our articles and data visualizations rely on work from many different people and organizations. When citing this topic page, please also cite the underlying data sources. This topic page can be cited as:

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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