Shifting Ground: The Changing Landscape of Farm Numbers, Area, and Average Size Worldwide, 1971-2020

The tide is turning on the trajectory of farm structures throughout the world. Drawing on a new, balanced-panel dataset for 168 countries covering 1971–2020, we estimate that farm numbers rose from 426 million to 668 million, while measured farmland has contracted since about 1980, and average farm size has shrunk. Yet recent movements signal a historic pivot. As agri-food economies mature—with higher incomes, ageing and slowing populations, and rapid urbanization—the long-standing pattern of ever-more farms and ever-smaller holdings is no longer universal. The global weighted mean area per farm fell from 7.6 ha to 4.5 ha over the past half-century, but the rate of decline moderated to 0.74% per year in the past decade, down from 0.85% pr year previously. Seven countries—China, India, Indonesia, Russia, Nigeria, Bangladesh, and Ethiopia—contain 70% (469 million) of all farms; their dominance distorts geographically divergent trajectories worldwide. For at least several decades, the median farm worldwide has crept up in size to 5.3 ha in 2020, while the unweighted mean has climbed to 58.0 ha. The roster of countries with stable or rising average farm sizes increased from 88 (62.0%) in the 1970s to 108 (66.2%) in the 2010s, with consolidation now evident in China, Thailand, and Vietnam as well as in high-income economies. Consolidation usually entails fewer farms and, in many cases, shrinking farmland area as well as increasing average farm sizes. A statistical decomposition confirms that, globally, shifts in farm numbers—rather than changes in total farmland—principally (though not everywhere, all the time) drive movements in mean farm size, underscoring the demographic and structural forces reshaping agriculture worldwide.