The meat and dairy industries — along with the farms that grow corn and soy for animal feed — are some of the biggest polluters in the US. Yet they’re largely exempt from environmental regulations. An argument that industry lobbyists and allied politicians often make is that there are simply too many farms to regulate.

In 2022, when asked why farmers aren’t required to reduce their pollution, then-Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack told reporters that farms aren’t as straightforward to regulate pollution as, say, factories. The US has “millions of farms,” Vilsack claimed. “So as you think about regulation, the reality is, it’s not as easy as you might think to enforce.”

Around that same time, as the Supreme Court prepared to argue a highly consequential case concerning the Clean Water Act, industry groups contended in a brief to the Court that stricter water pollution regulations would place too heavy a burden on America’s legion of farmers. The brief’s first sentence reads: “There are more than 2 million farms and ranches in the U.S. …”

Two million farms is an impressive-sounding number, and it’s regularly invoked to not only thwart proposed pollution limits but also to pass beneficial tax laws and subsidy programs for farmers.

Farmers hold a vaunted status in the founding mythology of the US that persists today, so arguing against or in favor of a given piece of legislation from a position of helping 2 million farms has been an effective talking point for the industry. But there’s just one problem with it: It’s not true.

Around half of America’s farms make little to no money and produce little to no food, but they’re often lumped in with the country’s largest and most polluting farms — a verbal sleight of hand that is rarely questioned and provides political cover for the biggest polluters to continue business as usual.

How many farms are there in the US, really?

The US Department of Agriculture defines a farm as “any place from which $1,000 or more of agricultural products were produced and sold, or normally would have been sold, during the year.” When the USDA conducted its last farm census in 2022, it counted 1.9 million farms.

But........

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