Page 87 - Farm Bill Series_The 7 Things You Should Know

“For example, several districts in the Mississippi Delta, Northern Texas, and Eastern North
Carolina are identified as major production areas for corn, cotton, and wheat. It is unlikely
that all three commodities will have the same political impact in these areas,” they wrote.

Others have tried to analyze the political influence of farmers by looking at “farming dependent”
counties,” as mapped by USDA. In a 1985 Economic Research Report on “Agricultural Policy,
Rural Counties and Political Geography,” authors Bernal Green and Tom Carlin identified 702
counties with 20
percent or more of
labor and proprietor
income from
production related to
farming and ranching
from 1975-1979.

In its most recent 2015
report, ERS found 444
farming dependent
counties out of the
3,144 in the U.S. These
were defined as the
counties where 25
percent or more of the
county’s average
annual labor and
proprietors earning
were derived from
farming, or 16
percent or more of
jobs were in
farming. (See map
below).

Going into the last
farm bill debate,
some farm
organization leaders
didn’t need maps to
do the basic “math”
about their
declining numbers.

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