American farmers today face a real contradiction. They are the most educated generation in the history of the profession, and yet the complexity they face arguably requires more education that at any point in history.
High school completion among farm operators passed the national average years ago, and the share of operators holding college degrees keeps climbing, especially among the largest operations. Our Large Commercial Producer (LCP) research at Purdue’s Center for Food and Agricultural Business shows that more than half of the producers we surveyed hold a four-year degree or higher, and the wide majority have at least some college education. The business of farming, though, is perhaps the most complicated it has ever been. Somewhere along the way, the job outgrew the diploma.
Fewer farms, bigger businesses
USDA’s National Agricultural Statistics Service counted 1.88 million farms in the United States in 2024, down nearly 15,000 from the year before. Farms with a million dollars or more in sales were the only sales class to grow, adding almost 1.5 million acres of operated land in a single year while every other size category shrank. Average farm size has crept up for decades and now sits well above where it stood in the early 1970s. Every acre that moves into a larger operation moves into a business that looks less like a family enterprise and more like a diversified small corporation: hired staff, multiple product lines, contracted inputs, forward marketing positions, equipment financing, a balance sheet that would not look out of place in a mid-size manufacturing firm. Running that well takes a lot more than knowing how to grow a good crop.
Running a farm business
Talk to large commercial producers and the same frustration comes up again and again. Many operators grew up learning how to grow a crop or finish livestock. Almost none of them were taught how to run the business that faces the challenges producers deal with today. Nobody hands you an org chart with your combine.
Consider what a modern operation actually demands.
Human resources. A farm with a dozen employees is not a two-person partnership anymore. Someone has to recruit, interview, onboard, train, motivate, discipline and retain a workforce, often including seasonal labor, family members in the business, and increasingly, contracted or off-farm staff supporting the operation remotely. Our LCP data show this is already well underway: more than a third of the producers we surveyed contract with an independent or consulting agronomist, roughly one in five employ a dedicated full-time accountant or CFO, and another one in five works with an independent marketing consultant. These are businesses hiring expertise because their operations have outgrown what one owner-operator can carry alone. And yet, when we asked producers to divide up their management effort across nine categories, personnel management came in dead last, drawing fewer points than everything else on the list, including equipment upkeep and even land acquisition. Farmers are building teams and spending the least time learning how to lead them. Recent research on hiring in the pork industry echoes this challenge (Nettle et al., 2025). Wages represent 12% of an average farm’s expenses, and more than 40% on specialty farms, yet few agricultural degree programs teach producers how to manage this part of the business.
Science and applied research. Input companies, seed dealers and equipment manufacturers all want a farm’s business, and each one shows up with a new product and a claim about yield or efficiency. Separating a real advantage from a good sales pitch takes the ability to design and interpret a legitimate on-farm trial, not just take a rep’s plot data on faith.
Risk management, strategy, economics and decision science. My colleague Dr. Mike Boehlje and his coauthors have argued for over a decade that the uncertainty facing agribusiness today looks nothing like the price and yield risk farm management courses traditionally covered. Strategic uncertainty, the kind created by structural change, new competitors and shifting value chains, does not hedge away with a futures contract. It calls for the same tools a corporate strategist would use: scenario planning, real options thinking and ongoing monitoring of changing competition. Our LCP research asked producers about several threats and their ability to manage them. Market and price risk was the biggest threat and the one producers felt least equipped to handle.
Operations management. Bigger operations create logistics problems that used to be trivial. Equipment routing, labor scheduling, storage and handling capacity, and throughput during planting and harvest are all factors that can be managed for efficiency, and management science brings tools for improving each one.
Marketing. Producing a bushel or a hundredweight well is only half the job. Capturing the margin on it takes an understanding of basis, contracting strategy and market forces that move commodities. But commodity marketing isn’t the only type of marketing that matters for margins. Creating high-margin value for target markets, branding, communicating with landlords, pricing without intermediaries and helping non-farm customers understand why they should pay extra for local production are all part of business marketing. These are skills that live in a marketing curriculum, not a production one.
Procurement. As input costs climb and supply chains stay unpredictable, managing supplier relationships, negotiating terms and sourcing strategically has become its own discipline rather than a phone call to the same dealer every spring.
Strategic business management. Every decision to add acres, build a new barn, add a partner, try a new revenue stream or take on debt is a strategic call with consequences that outlast the season. Farm succession, entity structure and capital allocation deserve the same rigor a business school would apply to any capital-intensive enterprise, because that is exactly what a large commercial farm has become.
Why this moment is different
Recent scholarship on agribusiness curricula backs up what practitioners see in the field (Odiase, et al., 2026). Across nearly four decades of surveys, employers have consistently ranked interpersonal and communication skills highest among the capabilities they want from agricultural graduates, with business and economic skills a distant second. That ranking hasn’t budged, but the stakes attached to it have grown enormously as operations have scaled and diversified. A communication failure or a bad hiring decision can hurt a farm at almost any size, and scale just adds more moving parts that can go wrong at once.
Boehlje et al. (2025) describe agribusiness as sitting inside value chains that keep consolidating, with strategy increasingly built on differentiation and cost leadership the way any competitive firm would build it. Farmers are, whether they intend it or not, now competing as businesses inside those chains, not merely as producers selling into them. This isn’t a story confined to row crops. Livestock, dairy and specialty operations feel the same value chain pressures, if not more, and need the same business sophistication.
It isn’t just the largest operations
Consolidation is only half the picture, and size alone doesn’t sort who needs this. Our 2025 survey of large commercial producers shows that some smaller farms are just as likely as the largest operations to employ a full-time, on-farm agronomists, and just as likely, if not more so, to employ a dedicated full-time accountant or CFO. Smaller producers in our data aren’t waiting until they hit some revenue threshold to start acting like a bigger business. Plenty of them are already doing it.
Smaller, highly educated, progressive farms are choosing intensive, high-value or direct-market models over scale. These operators often hold advanced degrees, run diversified enterprises and bring the same appetite for data and strategy that shows up in much larger operations. A ten-acre diversified vegetable and livestock operation selling direct to restaurants and consumers needs marketing, procurement and financial management just as much as a ten-thousand-acre grain operation does. The tools look different, but the discipline doesn’t.
The opportunity
Many farmers are recognizing these challenges and seeking out practical providers of knowledge they can use. Farmers have always been some of the most resourceful and innovative business owners, so it’s no surprise that some are already looking for education built specifically for people who already know how to farm and now need to know how to run the enterprise that farming has become.
That’s the gap worth closing, and right now it’s closing a lot slower than the business itself is changing.
Closing that gap is exactly what the Purdue Farm Business Short Course is designed to do. Over five days in West Lafayette (February 1–5, 2027), small teams will work through a realistic, evolving farm business scenario, covering financial benchmarking and capital decisions, risk and marketing strategy, leadership and succession, and technology’s real economic fit. Participants leave with a personalized Farm Business Blueprint and a 90-day action plan, and the program keeps going after the week ends with seasonal virtual sessions and a summer field visit. We’re building the first cohort now. If this is the education your operation never got, register here or share your interest to stay connected as it develops.
Boehlje, M.D., Akridge, J.T., Malone, T., & Neves, M.F. (2025). Agribusiness organization and management. In Encyclopedia of Agriculture and Food Systems (2nd ed.). Elsevier.
Boehlje, M., Roucan-Kane, M., & Bröring, S. (2011). Future agribusiness challenges: Strategic uncertainty, innovation and structural change. International Food and Agribusiness Management Review, 14(5), 53–82.
Nettle, R., Vikas, A., Lin, P., & Santhanam-Martin, M. (2025). Review: Attracting and retaining a farm workforce for the pork industry. animal, 101670. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1751731125002538
Odiase, I. R., Johnson, A. J., Downey, W. S., & Holcomb, R. B. (2026). Skills and capabilities needed for agribusiness graduates. Applied Economics Education and Extension. Advance online publication.
