Small farms grow the majority of the world's food

There has been a zombie statistic floating around for the last 10 years: small farms grow 70-80% of the world's food. There was little transparency on the methods behind this statistic, yet major news outlets, NGOs, and multilateral agencies were quoting it to garner support for small farms. I led a project to look into this stat and found farms under 2 ha in size grow around 30%, which is still an impressive figure!

Explore our new dataset on how much food is produced by differently sized farms. For each of the 55 countries, we found nationally representative surveys and censuses that asked farmers how much of each crop they produced. Using this information, we calculated how much total crop production (in kilocalories) each farm size produced. Because different types of crops are allocated towards human food, animal feed, processed non-food goods, seed for planting, or are wasted during storage and transportation, we then worked out how each farm size allocated their production. All together, our dataset has > 150 crops from 55 countries. Click each tab to find out how much food, feed, processed goods, seed, or waste small farms are producing and how much land they're using compared to larger farms - and check out how crop diversity differs across farm sizes.

For more details check out our article and the downloadable dataset that contains sub-national information.

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