Heterogeneity in US Farms: A New Clustering by Production Potentials

Asif Rasool () and David Abler
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Asif Rasool: Department of Agricultural Economics, Sociology, and Education, Pennsylvania State University, 202 Armsby Building, University Park, PA 16802, USA
David Abler: Department of Agricultural Economics, Sociology, and Education, Pennsylvania State University, 202 Armsby Building, University Park, PA 16802, USA

Agriculture, 2023, vol. 13, issue 2, 1-14

Abstract: This paper uses agglomerative hierarchical cluster analysis to group 2778 farming-defined counties into six clusters, revealing farm patterns across the contiguous 48 states of the United States. To understand the differences in economic performance and improve farm households’ well-being, economists have endeavored to identify patterns in US farming. The US is a leading global producer and exporter of many agricultural and food products. Our primary objective is to construct a policy-relevant farm clustering to characterize agricultural homogeneity in US farms’ production potential. We identify six clusters that are relatively homogeneous in five dimensions: farm size, farm assets, farm labor, farm output, degree of mechanization, and government programs. Minimizing diversity within a cluster allows for analysis of public policy changes on specific clusters and comparison of differential effects of the change across clusters.

Keywords: agglomerative cluster analysis; US agriculture; farm diversity; production potential degree of mechanization; farm size; unsupervised machine learning (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: Q1 Q10 Q11 Q12 Q13 Q14 Q15 Q16 Q17 Q18 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2023
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