President Joe Biden recently visited Minnesota farmland and touted how his economic policies are bolstering rural America.
Biden said fewer Americans are able to keep “the farm in the family,” and, to emphasize his point, offered figures about the loss of agricultural land in recent decades.
“Over the past four decades, we’ve lost over 400,000 farms in America (and) over 140 million acres of farmland,” Biden said Nov. 1. “And that’s an area roughly equal to the size of Minnesota, North and South Dakota combined.”
That’s a lot of lost land. A reader heard his statistics and asked us to fact-check them.
We found the numbers are accurate, at least by one standard measure. But some agriculture experts caution against deciding that the news is dire.
The White House pointed us to data from the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s National Agricultural Statistics Service….
