ISSUE 010
One point two eight billion
Agriculture is the industry everyone in Missouri gestures at and almost nobody quantifies the same way twice. I found four numbers for the size of the sector and they differ by a factor of three, not because anyone is lying but because they are counting different things. Here is what each one actually measures, where to get the un-inflated version for your own county, and the one figure that moved most this year.
An idea worth thinking about
Missouri agriculture contributes $93.7 billion, or $34.9 billion, and the difference is not a correction
The Missouri Department of Agriculture hosts a study of the economic contribution of Missouri agriculture and forestry using 2021 figures. Its headline numbers: $93.7 billion in total economic contribution, $34.9 billion in value added, 456,618 jobs and $31.8 billion in household income, broken out across livestock, crops, other agriculture and forestry, with separate reports for every county.
The $93.7 billion and the $34.9 billion are both real, and they answer different questions. Value added is the sector's own contribution to state output — what agriculture produced, net of what it bought from other industries. Total contribution runs the same dollars through the economy again, counting the feed store, the equipment dealer, the diesel supplier and the groceries bought by everyone's wages. Economic impact studies almost always lead with the larger figure, because it is larger. Neither number is wrong; quoting one as the sector's size while meaning the other is.
Two things the department's page does not say. It does not name the firm that produced the study — Decision Innovation Solutions, an agricultural economics consultancy, lists the work as its own — and it does not describe the method on the page, so a reader cannot see the multipliers from the summary. The data is 2021. Missouri agriculture in 2021 was a different business than Missouri agriculture now, as the last slot of this entry shows. Use the county reports for shape and proportion; do not quote the dollar figures as current.
A tool I disappeared into
The federal government publishes GDP for every county in Missouri, by industry, with no multipliers in it
The Bureau of Economic Analysis publishes GDP by County alongside Personal Income by County. The most recent release, issued 5 February 2026, covers 2024; the next lands 2 December 2026. You can read it three ways: interactive tables, interactive maps, or a downloadable zip of the whole regional dataset. Industry detail is published against NAICS codes, with a crosswalk file provided, so farming comes out as its own line rather than being folded into a rural category.
The reason to prefer this over an impact study is that it is a measurement rather than a model. BEA is not estimating what agriculture causes elsewhere in the economy; it is reporting what was produced in the county. For anyone trying to understand whether their town's economy is actually agricultural or merely surrounded by farmland, that distinction decides the answer, and it frequently reverses the intuition. A county can be ninety percent farmland and have most of its output in healthcare.
Two cautions. County GDP is volatile at small scale — BEA's own 2024 release spans counties that moved from plus 76.6 percent to minus 46.3 percent in a single year — so read trends rather than single-year changes, and read the methodology primer BEA links before drawing conclusions about any one small county. Farm output in particular swings with prices and weather in ways that have nothing to do with the local economy changing shape.
Learn something
Foreign-held farmland is 0.67 percent or 3.6 percent depending on what you count as held
Bruce Sherrick and Juo-Han Tsay at the University of Illinois published an analysis of the federal foreign agricultural land register in farmdoc daily on 23 September 2026, working from holdings reported through 31 December 2024. The register identifies 46.3 million acres in which a foreign interest holds a reportable position. That is the number that produces the alarming percentages. It is also not an ownership figure.
Pull it apart. Reportable interests include leases of ten years or longer, and long-term leases account for 16.3 million acres — about a third of the total — mostly tied to wind and solar development on land that remains in American ownership. Of the acres that are foreign-owned rather than leased, 88.5 percent is forestland, much of it commercial timberland the agricultural census does not count as land in farms at all. Direct foreign owners hold roughly 690,000 acres of cropland, pasture and other agricultural land, which the authors put at less than one-tenth of one percent of US land in farms. Their headline figure for foreign-owned agricultural land overall is about 0.67 percent, against 880.1 million acres in farms, and they describe it as an upper bound. They say published figures as high as 3.6 percent are hard to reconstruct and appear to fold in long-term leases and other records.
On who, by acreage: Canada holds 2.28 million acres, 38 percent of the foreign-owned total and mostly forest. Singapore, Luxembourg and Denmark hold roughly half a million acres each. Eight countries together hold 88 percent. China appears at 1,938 acres in direct individual ownership with full citizenship information, ranking 31st of 49 countries, or 247,659 acres if every affiliated entity is included, about 0.5 percent of reported foreign interests. Texas leads the states at 1.14 million acres; Missouri is not among those the authors break out. The authors also flag that about 2.9 million acres, six percent of the register, carry no predominant country or investor code and are excluded from their analysis, and that some records appear to be misfiled American ownership.
Missouri's own statute is worth knowing regardless of what the national numbers say. The National Agricultural Law Center's compilation of state agricultural land ownership statutes, last updated 5 October 2025, lists Missouri under Mo. Rev. Stat. sections 350.010 to 350.040 and 442.560 to 442.592 as having a prohibition, a reporting requirement and corporate farming restrictions. Section 442.571, in its current form effective 28 August 2015, bars aliens and foreign businesses from acquiring Missouri agricultural land once their combined holdings exceed one percent of the state's total aggregate agricultural acreage. Roughly 29 states forbid or limit foreign ownership in some form. This entry reports the law and the counts and takes no position on either.
What we’re seeing
Direct government payments to Missouri farms nearly quadrupled in one year
The Rural and Farm Finance Policy Analysis Center at the University of Missouri published state-level farm income projections on 5 November 2025, authored by Oranuch Wongpiyabovorn and Alejandro Plastina, funded by the USDA Office of the Chief Economist with the authors noting the findings are their own rather than USDA policy. The Missouri line reads as follows, in billions of dollars.
Crop receipts: $6.78 in 2024, $6.74 in 2025, a projected $6.69 in 2026 — essentially flat, down one percent and one percent. Livestock receipts: $6.86, then $8.03, then a projected $7.81, up 17 percent and then down three. Total expenses barely move, $12.30 to $12.23 to a projected $12.08. Net farm income: $3.40 in 2024, $5.39 in 2025, a projected $4.52 in 2026 — up 58 percent, then down 16.
Then direct government payments. $0.33 billion in 2024. $1.28 billion in 2025. A projected $0.82 billion in 2026. That is a 283 percent increase in one year followed by a projected 36 percent fall. Against the reported net farm income figures, payments represent roughly ten percent of Missouri net farm income in 2024, about 24 percent in 2025 and about 18 percent projected for 2026 — that arithmetic is mine, not the brief's. The brief notes that most of the increase came from one-time programmes that do not recur unless Congress authorises new assistance, that an extended federal shutdown could push some payments into 2026, and that a rumoured additional programme tied to 2025 retaliatory tariffs was unconfirmed when it went to press.
Two cautions that belong in any use of these figures. Every 2025 and 2026 number above is a projection, not an actual. And the components do not reconcile: crop plus livestock receipts plus payments minus expenses gives about $3.82 billion for 2025, against the $5.39 billion reported as net farm income. Other income and expense items are evidently in the model and the brief does not enumerate them for Missouri. I am reporting the table as published and flagging the gap rather than quietly picking whichever number closes it.
What the shape means for somebody who is not a farmer. Missouri's 2025 farm income recovery came from two places — cattle prices and a one-year surge in federal payments — and neither is a structural change. Crop receipts never recovered. Expenses never fell. If the payments return to something near the 2024 level and cattle prices soften, the sector's 2026 looks a great deal more like 2024 than like 2025, which is roughly what the projection says.
For a small business in a farm county, that is the planning input. The thing that moved was transfer payments, not production, and it moved once. A main-street business that read 2025 as the beginning of a run-up is reading a one-time programme as a trend. The same caution applies in reverse: the 2026 projection is a model output from before the year began, and models of government payments have been wrong in both directions lately.
One question
In your county, is agriculture the economy or the landscape?
The county GDP tables answer that in about four minutes and the answer surprises people in both directions. Reply and tell me what yours said.
More in this pillar as it's written.
— Shana
Sources link to the original publisher, never to a summary.