Larger Farms and Younger Farmers Are More Vulnerable to Financial Stress

Farm-level measures of solvency, liquidity, and repayment capacity indicate that farms with at least $100,000 in annual sales were more likely to be under financial stress than smaller-scale operations in 2017. Levels of financial stress that year were near 20-year averages and not as severe as peak levels in 2002. If gross cash farm income in 2017 were to fall by 20 percent, the share of farms in extreme financial stress would increase relatively more for larger-scale farms, farms with a principal operator under age 40, and dairy farms.