Impact growing, numbers keep decreasing

by Denny Banister

Most Missourians live in the major metropolitan areas of St. Louis and Kansas City. In such an urban setting of factories, office buildings, apartment towers, and millions of metric tons of concrete highways and streets jammed with thousands of cars, busses and trucks, it’s difficult to realize Missouri is an agricultural state.

With 109,000 farms, Missouri has more farms than every state in the nation except Texas. We also trail only Texas as the state with the largest number of beef cow operations, cattle operations, beef cows and calf crop. These, and many other figures, are included in the newly released 2001 Missouri Farm Facts, a publication compiled by the Missouri Agricultural Statistics Service.

Missouri leads most of the nation in other livestock production as well. We are the fifth largest state in turkeys raised, sixth in milk cow operations, seventh in hogs and pigs, tenth in broiler production, and we are the fifteenth largest state in the number of sheep operations.

With all this livestock in Missouri, it stands to reason we are also big in livestock products. For example, we are the ninth largest producer of America’s ice cream supply (that got your attention), tenth in total cheese production and fifteenth in egg production and red meat.

And our impact on America’s agricultural output is hardly limited to our huge livestock industry. Missouri is the third largest producer of hay, fourth in grain sorghum production, sixth in soybean and rice production, ninth in corn and watermelon output and tenth in cotton production.

Missouri is the eleventh largest state in grape production, we’re twelfth in winter wheat and the thirteenth largest tobacco producing state in the nation. We are also big producers of peaches, potatoes, apples and oats.

So, what does all this agriculture production mean to the vast majority of Missourians who are not farmers? To be blunt, it means big bucks to Missouri. Missouri farms produced and sold $4.57 billion worth of crops, livestock, poultry and aquaculture in the first year of this century, 7 percent more than the previous year. Farmers have a tremendous impact on our state’s economy.

There is something distressing in all this productivity, however. Remember the very first figure I quoted – the fact Missouri has the second largest number of farms in the nation with 109,000? This is hardly a distressing figure – until you consider it is 1,000 farms less than we had one year earlier.

Unfortunately for farmers and non-farmers alike, this trend is likely to continue.

(Denny Banister of Jefferson City, Mo., is assistant director of information and public relations for the Missouri Farm Bureau, the state’s largest farm organization.)