World farms and farmland by land size class

The vast majority of the world’s 600 million farms are small. Recent estimates show that 70 % of all farms operate only 7 % of all agricultural land, while 70 % of all agricultural land is found in the largest 1 % of farms (see Figure 1). This difference between the smallest and the largest farms becomes even more striking in the light of two facts. First, a common approach defines small farms as those below 2 ha of farmland, bringing the share of the smallest farms to more than 80 % of all farms, with a total farmed area slightly above 10 % of all farmland. Second, the majority of land operated by farms with more than 50 ha (i.e. almost 40 % of all farmland) is found in farms with over 1 000 ha of land. In other words, 80 % of the world’s farms each operate an agricultural area smaller than three football fields (with one football field measuring 0.7 ha), whereas nearly 40 % of world farmland is found in a very small share of farms, each of them with a farmed area larger than the area of the park of the Palace of Versailles (which measures more than 800 ha).