Crop Production in the United States (NAICS 111)

A Histometrics rollup primer for public-market and private investors. NAICS — the North American Industry Classification System, the standard the U.S., Canada, and Mexico use to group businesses by activity — code 111 is a three-digit "subsector": it is all of U.S. crop farming, everything grown from the soil rather than raised as an animal. It contains five four-digit industry groups — 1111 Oilseed & Grain, 1112 Vegetable & Melon, 1113 Fruit & Tree Nut, 1114 Greenhouse/Nursery/Floriculture, and 1119 Other Crop. This page synthesizes the five child primers plus our ground-truth federal statistics for this level; it does not re-research the crops from scratch. Its distinctive value is the contrast across the five — which are big, which are growing, who owns them, and how (or whether) you can invest. For any single crop family, read its child primer.

1. Overview

NAICS 111 is the whole of American crop agriculture in one code: roughly a quarter-trillion dollars a year of farm-gate output (Section 3), grown by hundreds of thousands of mostly private, family-owned farms, on most of the nation's cropland. If you own a broad "U.S. agriculture" position, this subsector is most of what you are exposed to on the crop side (animals sit in the neighboring subsector 112).

Three facts define the subsector for an investor, and they are true of all five children:

1. These are commodity, price-taker, real-asset businesses. With few exceptions the farmer grows an undifferentiated crop and sells it at a price set by markets, weather, and policy — not by the farm. Profit is a thin, cyclical spread on a large, illiquid asset (land, trees, machinery, or growing structures), and a second return comes from the appreciation of that asset, especially the land underneath.
2. You cannot buy the farms. Production is overwhelmingly private, family-held, and fragmented. There is no U.S.-listed pure-play grower in four of the five children — and only one narrow exception across the whole subsector (outdoor cannabis, buried inside 1119). Public capital reaches crop farming indirectly: input suppliers, grain merchants and food processors, farmland real-estate investment trusts (REITs — listed companies that own and lease land), and commodity funds. Private capital reaches it directly: owning or leasing farmland, or backing growers and processors.
3. The government's own business statistics don't count it. Federal business registers exclude crop production entirely, so the authoritative source is USDA (the U.S. Department of Agriculture), which counts farms and bushels rather than companies with payroll (Section 3).

What makes this a real rollup rather than a pass-through is how sharply the five children differ underneath that shared spine — in size, direction, economic model, and how a dollar of capital can reach them. That contrast is Section 2.

2. What's inside — the five children and how they differ

The subsector splits into five four-digit industry groups. They share an operating DNA (grow a crop, sell it at the farm gate, capture a thin margin plus land) but diverge on almost everything an investor weighs. The table is ordered by economic size, largest first. Tickers are reserved to Sections 4 and 10.

*Approximate shares of the subsector's farm-gate value, computed from USDA figures in mixed years and on mixed bases (2022 Census farm sales for grain, vegetable, and fruit; the 2024 horticultural census for greenhouse/nursery; a farm-gate crop-value rollup for other crop). They are a proxy for relative weight, not an audited subsector total, and they do not reconcile exactly — see Section 3.

The through-line. All five are the same kind of business — a large real asset earning a thin spread on a crop the grower does not price — and all five are fragmented at the farm and concentrated in the middle (Section 8). But the subsector is lopsided: grain and oilseed is roughly six of every ten dollars; the other four children are each a 6–12% slice. An investor who "buys U.S. crop farming" is, in economic weight, mostly buying the Midwest corn–soybean complex.

Yet the four smaller children carry the sharper, more idiosyncratic stories — and they diverge in ways the giant does not:

• Capital intensity splits the subsector three ways. Grain and other-crop are land-and-machinery businesses (extensive, low labor per dollar). Fruit/nut and greenhouse/nursery are capital-heavy (perennial plantings that take years to bear; greenhouses at ~$1–3M/acre). Vegetable, fruit, and horticulture are labor-intensive (hand-picked; labor runs ~37–40% of expenses versus ~12% for farming overall) [12]. The economics of a corn field and a strawberry field are almost opposites.
• Direction splits the group. Grain is in a policy-propped down-cycle; fruit/nut and greenhouse/nursery are barbells (some categories growing, some in glut); vegetable is squeezed by imports; other-crop is mature-to-declining. None is a clean secular-growth story — the growth pockets are specific crops (berries, nuts, avocados, canola, nursery stock, pea protein), not whole children.
• Biofuel is the single biggest cross-cutting tailwind — but it pulls almost entirely on grain and oilseed (corn to ethanol; soybean and canola oil to renewable diesel) [11][17]. The specialty children barely feel it.
• The safety net divides commodity from specialty. Grains, cotton, sugar, and peanuts get Farm Bill price/revenue programs; fruit, vegetables, and horticulture are treated as specialty crops largely outside those programs, leaning on crop insurance and grants instead (Section 7). Same subsector, two different relationships with Washington.
• Investment access differs enormously. Grains (and cotton) have deep, liquid futures and single-crop funds; rice, sugar, and orange juice have thin or world-price contracts; most of fruit, all of vegetables, and all of horticulture have no liquid price instrument — you reach them only through diluted equities or private ownership.

3. How big it is (this level's rollup + undercount caveat)

Our ground-truth caveat first. Our ingested federal statistics file for NAICS 111 is empty — it carries no establishment count, revenue, employment, or payroll metric for this three-digit code. We say so plainly rather than invent one. Every figure on this page is carried up from the five child primers' cited USDA and company sources, labeled as such.

The closest thing to a subsector total. Summing each child's best available scale figure lands on the order of ~$285 billion of farm-gate output a year — roughly a quarter-trillion dollars:

Read the ~$285 billion only as an order of magnitude. The figures come from different USDA surveys in different years (the 2022 Census of Agriculture, the 2024 horticultural census, and annual crop-value series), and they mix two different rulers: farm sales (all revenue of farms specialized in a crop family) versus crop value (what a specific crop fetched at first sale). USDA tabulates farming by crop, while NAICS classifies each farm to a single industry by its primary commodity — so the two lenses never reconcile cleanly, and the other-crop line (a farm-gate crop-value rollup, ~60% of it hay grown as a secondary activity on livestock operations) is the least comparable. Treat the shares in Section 2 as rough relative weights, not precise proportions.

A structural picture from the 2022 Census of Agriculture. Across the crop-farming subsector the census counts farms in the hundreds of thousands, working most of the nation's cropland: grain and oilseed alone spans ~$168.7B in sales on ~69% of U.S. harvested cropland [2]; the fruit/nut/berry neighborhood counts 110,821 farms on 6.56M acres with $34.2B in sales, 93% of them family farms [4]; vegetables add 69,452 farms [3]; horticulture adds 23,060 operations with ~249,000 hired workers [5]. Read the counts and the dollars together: this is a small-business subsector by headcount and a big-money subsector by concentration — most operators are small and family-run, yet a minority of large operations produce most of the output.

Undercount caveat (important, and it applies to the whole subsector). Standard federal business statistics badly understate crop farming. The Census Bureau's County Business Patterns (CBP), Economic Census, Statistics of U.S. Businesses (SUSB), and Nonemployer Statistics — plus the Bureau of Labor Statistics' (BLS) Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages (QCEW) — all exclude crop production (NAICS 111) and farm proprietors by design [16]. Because these farms are overwhelmingly non-employer sole proprietorships, family partnerships, LLCs, and trusts, any payroll- or establishment-based registry reads near-zero here — a coverage artifact, not a measure of size, and it must never be mistaken for an absent industry. Even USDA's counts under-capture the informal tail (hobby growers, roadside sellers, micro-nurseries), while a simple farm count underweights the handful of large operations where the dollars concentrate. Size this subsector from USDA's Census of Agriculture and crop reports — not from business registers. The only firm-level federal business figures that exist are the U.S. Small Business Administration (SBA) size standards — receipts ceilings (roughly $2–5 million depending on crop) below which a farm counts as "small" for federal programs [17]; essentially every farm in the subsector clears them, a direct statement of how the industry is structured: many operators, almost no giants.

4. Investable universe (where value concentrates across the children)

Value in this subsector concentrates in two places at once: overwhelmingly on the grain–oilseed side by economic weight, and — for a public investor — almost entirely in the layers around the farm, because the farms themselves are private. The public universe is a menu of proxies, and a striking feature is how the same handful of companies serves several children at once — none is a bet on any single crop. Tickers are for identification, not recommendation.

The one public thread that touches all five children: farmland REITs. Gladstone Land (Nasdaq: LAND) and Farmland Partners (NYSE: FPI) own row-crop, orchard, vineyard, and specialty acreage leased to operators — collecting cash rent plus land (and, for LAND, water) appreciation. They are the cleanest listed way to own the asset under the whole subsector without taking direct crop-price risk, though each crop is a small slice of a diversified portfolio. Treat them as land-and-water plays, not crop bets.

Input & equipment suppliers — sell into planted acres across every child. Seed and crop protection via Corteva (NYSE: CTVA) and Bayer; fertilizer via Nutrien (NYSE: NTR), Mosaic (NYSE: MOS), and CF Industries (NYSE: CF); machinery via Deere (NYSE: DE), CNH (NYSE: CNH), and AGCO (NYSE: AGCO). They are broad agricultural-cycle plays regardless of which crop pencils out [18].

Merchants, processors, and brands — where the crop-specific listed exposure sits, one link downstream of the farm:

• Grain & oilseed: Archer-Daniels-Midland (NYSE: ADM), Bunge Global (NYSE: BG), and The Andersons (Nasdaq: ANDE) originate, store, crush, and mill grain, earning handling and crush margins that can widen when farm-gate prices are weak.
• Fruit & vegetable: diversified produce distributors Dole (NYSE: DOLE), Del Monte (NYSE: DMC), and Mission Produce (Nasdaq: AVO); processors John B. Sanfilippo & Son (Nasdaq: JBSS) for nuts, Seneca Foods (Nasdaq: SENEA) and Keurig Dr Pepper (Nasdaq: KDP) for apples; frozen-potato processor Lamb Weston (NYSE: LW) — the single nearest listed read on the vegetable child; lemon-and-land name Limoneira (Nasdaq: LMNR).
• Other crop: leaf merchants Universal (NYSE: UVV) and Pyxus (tobacco); ADM/Olam (peanut shelling); foreign cane producers Adecoagro (NYSE: AGRO) and Cosan (NYSE: CSAN); the only listed cultivators anywhere in the subsector — outdoor-cannabis growers Green Thumb (GTBIF), Trulieve (TCNNF), Glass House (GLASF) — carrying federal Schedule I legal risk.
• Horticulture: Markel Group (NYSE: MKL), which owns ~81% of Costa Farms (the one meaningful public window onto a large grower); Central Garden & Pet (Nasdaq: CENT), owner of Bell Nursery; plus channel and input names SiteOne (NYSE: SITE), BrightView (NYSE: BV), Scotts Miracle-Gro (NYSE: SMG), and 1-800-Flowers (Nasdaq: FLWS).

Commodity & fund routes — deep for grain, thin-to-absent elsewhere. Single-crop grain funds Teucrium Corn (CORN), Soybean (SOYB), and Wheat (WEAT); the broad basket Invesco DB Agriculture (DBA); the agribusiness equity exchange-traded fund (ETF) VanEck Agribusiness (MOO); and price contracts for the few hedgeable crops — Intercontinental Exchange (ICE) cotton and frozen concentrated orange juice (FCOJ), CME Group rough-rice, and Teucrium Sugar (CANE) for the world (not U.S.) sugar price. A sharp access contrast runs through the subsector: grains and cotton have deep listed futures; rice, sugar, and orange juice have thin or decoupled contracts; and all of vegetables, most of fruit, and all of horticulture have no liquid instrument at all.

Where the real ownership sits (private / cooperative). The operating farms (overwhelmingly family-held); private trading and processing giants (Cargill, Louis Dreyfus, McCain, Simplot, The Wonderful Company, Mastronardi, Costa Farms); grower cooperatives (CHS, Sunkist, Blue Diamond, Ocean Spray, Florida's Natural, the sugar-beet and peanut co-ops); genetics and brand licensors (Driscoll's for berries, Ball/Dümmen Orange for ornamentals); institutional farmland managers (Nuveen Natural Capital, Manulife) that lease large portfolios to tenants; and fractional-farmland platforms (AcreTrader, FarmTogether). Direct farmland ownership is the oldest and truest route to the economics below [19].

5. How the money works

Every child runs a version of the same equation — saleable output × realized price, minus input, land, labor, and financing costs, plus any government support and downstream margin the owner can capture — with the grower a price-taker. What differs is what the big cost is and who keeps the margin:

• Grain & oilseed — a thin spread on land. Revenue ≈ harvested acres × yield × price + insurance + government payments. Costs are dominated by fertilizer (tied to natural gas), land rent, seed, and chemicals; labor is a small share. The margin is currently thin to negative — corn, soybeans, and wheat sat below full cost of production for a fourth straight year through 2025/26 — so income leans on federal backstops [7][10].
• Fruit & tree nut — sunk capital, long payback, labor-heavy. Perennial trees and vines cost thousands per acre to establish and take 3–7 years (pistachios ~10–12) to bear, then produce for decades; capital is illiquid and cannot rotate out when prices fall. Labor runs ~40% of production expenses — the highest of any farm type — and secure water is a fixed cost you cannot skip [12]. Fresh fruit earns two to three times what processing fruit does, so the margin lives in premium/branded/genetics differentiation.
• Vegetable & melon — perishable, labor-dominated. Yield × marketable packout × realized price, with hired labor often 30–50% of operating cost on hand-harvested crops and the cold chain decisive. Potatoes run on pre-plant contracts and storage (stable, capped); other vegetables run on glut-prone spot markets where the money migrates downstream to washed/bagged/pre-cut product.
• Greenhouse/nursery/floriculture — a factory, not a field. Output is saleable volume × price, driven by yield per square foot (not acreage), and the gap between biological and saleable output (shrink) is the margin battleground. Labor (~37% of expenses) and energy are the shared swing costs; a greenhouse runs ~$1–3M per acre with long paybacks — the cost structure that repeatedly sank warehouse "vertical farm" models [5].
• Other crop — the price is set by contracts, co-ops, or policy floors. Tobacco on contract pounds, cotton on a hedgeable world price, sugarcane and beets where the grower owns the mill or co-op and captures the downstream margin, hay on a purely local price with no hedge at all. Here more than anywhere, contract terms and processor access matter more than a revenue multiple.

Two profit streams — crop margin and land — run through every child. Operators earn the (thin, volatile) farming margin; landowners earn cash rent plus land appreciation — and U.S. cropland hit a record $5,830 per acre in 2025, up 4.7%, even as crop prices fell [8]. That split is why public investors (mostly landowners via REITs) and farm operators experience this subsector very differently, and why the cleanest listed proxy for most children is a farmland REIT rather than an operating company: the crop is the coupon, the land is the bond.

The metrics that travel across the subsector are farm-appropriate — yield and quality per acre or per square foot, realized price versus break-even, packout/shrink, cash rent and net return per acre, owned-versus-leased mix, water security, contracted-versus-uncommitted volume, working-capital adequacy, and the debt-to-asset ratio — not the regulated-utility rate base, REIT funds-from-operations, or mining all-in-sustaining-cost language used in other sectors.

6. Demand drivers

Demand runs through a handful of channels — feed, food, biofuel, exports, and discretionary/ornamental — but the mix differs sharply by child, which is why the five do not move together:

• Biofuel — the biggest cross-cutting tailwind, concentrated in grain. Federal mandates pull corn into ethanol and soybean and canola oil into biodiesel / renewable diesel [11][17]. This is the single largest demand lever in the subsector, and it barely touches the specialty children.
• Feed and the livestock herd (grain, hay). Corn feeds livestock; hay demand tracks the U.S. cattle herd, now at a multi-decade low — a headwind until the herd rebuilds.
• Food staples and health/snacking (vegetable, fruit, nut). Vegetables are defensive at the plate; berries, nuts, and avocados ride the "better-for-you" and plant-protein waves — though total per-capita fruit availability has fallen even as specific categories boom, so growth is category-specific, not automatic.
• Discretionary income and housing (horticulture). Nursery stock is tied to home-building and landscaping (rate-sensitive twice over); floriculture is pure discretionary gifting, spiking at Valentine's Day and Mother's Day in a compressed spring window.
• Exports and China — the sharpest swing factor, concentrated in a few crops. The U.S. exports the bulk of its cotton, most of its almonds and pistachios, and roughly half its soybeans; China is the pivotal buyer of soybeans and sorghum specifically. Trade policy is a demand lever, not only a risk.
• Imports — a double-edged force on the perishables. Year-round import supply (Mexican produce and flowers, Peruvian blueberries, Brazilian juice) expands categories while pressuring domestic prices; imports now supply the majority of U.S. fresh-fruit availability and a large and rising share of fresh vegetables and cut flowers.

The two forces to watch across the whole subsector: federal biofuel policy (which can move a large slice of grain/oilseed demand in a single rule) and trade/China (which can reprice soybeans, sorghum, cotton, and nuts overnight).

7. Regulation

Crop farming is lightly regulated as a business but heavily shaped by federal farm, trade, food-safety, and resource policy — and the single most useful contrast is that the framework splits the subsector into "commodity" and "specialty" crops:

• The Farm Bill safety net — for commodity crops. Agriculture Risk Coverage (ARC) and Price Loss Coverage (PLC), run by USDA's Farm Service Agency (FSA), set price/revenue floors for grains, cotton, sugar, and peanuts; the 2025 One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBBA) raised statutory reference prices, materially supportive for crops sitting below breakeven [10]. Fruit, vegetables, and horticulture are largely outside these Title I programs — treated as specialty crops that rely on crop insurance and specialty-crop grants instead.
• Federal crop insurance — near-universal. USDA's Risk Management Agency (RMA) subsidizes revenue and yield policies covering most planted acres across every child — the single largest farm-support mechanism.
• Biofuel policy — a grain-and-oilseed demand lever. The Environmental Protection Agency's (EPA) Renewable Fuel Standard (RFS) sets biofuel volumes, and the 45Z clean-fuel credit rewards low-carbon feedstocks [11].
• Labor and immigration — the biggest cost lever for the labor-intensive children. The Department of Labor's (DOL) H-2A seasonal guest-worker visa and its rising Adverse Effect Wage Rate (AEWR) govern the hand-harvested workforce in fruit, vegetables, and horticulture; grains barely feel it.
• Water — the binding constraint in the West. California's Sustainable Groundwater Management Act (SGMA) is curtailing Central Valley pumping (a group-defining risk for the California-heavy fruit, vegetable, and horticulture value), while Colorado River and Ogallala politics bind rice, Western hay, and cotton.
• Plant health and food safety. USDA's Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service (APHIS) runs quarantines — most acutely against Huanglongbing (HLB, "citrus greening"), which has no commercial cure and has gutted Florida oranges, and against nursery pests. The Food and Drug Administration's (FDA) Food Safety Modernization Act (FSMA) Produce Safety Rule governs edible crops.
• Crop-specific overlays. The U.S. Sugar Program (loans, allotments, import quotas) for sugarcane and beets; the FDA Center for Tobacco Products setting the ceiling on leaf demand; the Capper-Volstead Act's antitrust exemption enabling the grower cooperatives that run much of other-crop and specialty farming.

Net: policy is mostly a source of stability and modest upside for the commodity children and a source of cost and constraint (labor, water, food safety) for the specialty children — and a dependency across the board. A weaker safety net or lapse in ad-hoc aid would expose the underlying weakness in crop margins.

8. Consolidation

The structural signature is identical across all five children: fragmented at the farm, concentrated in the middle — a barbell. No farm has pricing power over its crop, so the competitive game is cost, scale, and control of a scarce asset (land, water, genetics, processing capacity, or contracted buyer access). Land is steadily moving into fewer, bigger hands — the midpoint corn farm grew from 200 acres in 1987 to 685 acres in 2017, and large farms' share of cropland rose from 15% to 41% [21] — a pattern echoed in every child, and reinforced by record land values that raise the barrier to entry [8].

Meanwhile the suppliers and buyers are highly concentrated: a few seed and fertilizer firms upstream; the "ABCD" grain traders plus CHS in grain; four processors controlling ~97% of the frozen-potato market (now facing price-fixing litigation); two leaf merchants in tobacco; a handful of sugar millers; genetics licensors and big-box retail buyers in horticulture. So growers across the subsector buy from concentrated sellers and sell to concentrated buyers, squeezed from both ends. Layered on top is a slow financialization — farmland REITs and pension-backed funds buying and leasing back cropland, separating land ownership from farming. A crucial distinction for investors: consolidation of market channels (merchants controlling the pipes) is not the same as consolidation of farm ownership (a landlord accumulating acres) or farm operation — often three different parties, and the margin belongs to whoever controls the scarce asset.

9. Risks

The risk stack is largely shared across the subsector, with different emphasis by child:

• Price / margin cyclicality — the dominant risk. Thin-to-negative operating margins are the base case across grains and much of other-crop right now, and gluts recur in fruit and vegetables; a big harvest can depress prices even when a farm yields well [7].
• Weather, water, and yield. Drought, flood, freeze, heat, and disease can wipe out a season; water is existential for California specialty crops (SGMA), rice, and Western hay.
• Labor and immigration — concentrated in the labor-intensive children. H-2A wage and availability risk hits the biggest cost line in fruit, vegetables, and horticulture directly [12].
• Trade / export shocks and import penetration. China is the pivotal buyer of soybeans and sorghum; tariffs threaten billions in nut and fruit exports; imports pressure domestic vegetable, fruit, and flower prices.
• Input-cost squeeze. Fertilizer (tied to natural gas), fuel, seed, rent, energy, and interest can rise faster than crop prices.
• Policy dependence. A large share of farm income is transfer payments (ARC/PLC + insurance + ad-hoc aid), not market income; any Farm Bill, sugar-program, biofuel, or trade change reprices the affected child.
• Disease and biosecurity. HLB in citrus (no cure); pathogens in enclosed horticulture; quarantines that can sever entire state markets.
• Capital intensity and illiquidity. High establishment costs and long paybacks make perennial and greenhouse assets unforgiving when weak prices, poor crops, and high rates hit together (the greenhouse-food and leveraged-nursery failures of 2023–25).
• Public-market mismatch. Every listed proxy is diversified far beyond any one crop (or is a price fund carrying futures roll cost), so the shares are poor short-term reads on farm economics — and private-company opacity makes market size, share, and valuations genuinely hard to verify.

10. How to invest & outlook

Decide which economic link you want first — land, farming, or the supply chain — because they pay off differently and often in opposite directions.

Public routes (indirect, liquid):

1. Farmland REITs (LAND, FPI) — the one listed handle spanning all five children: own the land, collect cash rent, ride appreciation. Review net asset value (NAV), funds from operations (FFO — the REIT cash-flow measure), rent coverage, tenant quality, and — critically — water rights. Closest to a landowner's return; the link to any single crop is loose.
2. Input & equipment suppliers (CTVA, NTR, MOS, CF, DE, CNH, AGCO) — broad agricultural-cycle exposure driven by planted acres, farmer income, and the replacement cycle.
3. Merchants, processors & brands (ADM, BG, ANDE, LW, DOLE, DMC, AVO, JBSS, UVV, MKL) — earn handling, crush, processing, and branding margins, often counter-cyclical to farm margins; each a diversified parent in which the crop is a slice, valued on segment mix, not acreage.
4. Commodity funds & futures (CORN, SOYB, WEAT, DBA, MOO; ICE cotton/FCOJ, CANE) — deep for the grain complex, thin-to-absent for the specialty children.

Private routes (direct, illiquid) — where nearly all the real ownership sits: owning cropland and leasing to an operator; farmland funds and fractional platforms; operating a farm; grain-storage, crush, packing, cold-chain, or greenhouse infrastructure; grower-cooperative membership; or secured farm lending. These capture the two returns that matter most — cash rent plus land appreciation. Diligence the asset itself: title and lease terms, water rights first, soil, yield/packout history, local basis or contract terms, buyer/tenant quality, insurance, succession, working capital, debt structure, and an exit value grounded in both operating cash flow and land value.

Near-term outlook (a judgment, not a forecast). The subsector's setup is weak crop economics propped up by policy and offset by strong land values. Commodity-crop margins are the poorest in years, with ARC/PLC, insurance, and OBBBA reference-price increases doing much of the work of keeping row-crop farms in the black; the specialty children are squeezed by labor, water, and import competition. Across every child the medium-term backdrop favors the landowner over the crop grower — rents and land values kept rising even as prices fell. The clearest structural tailwind is biofuel (renewable diesel and ethanol pulling on the grain–oilseed giant); the brighter demand pockets are specific crops (berries, nuts, avocados, canola, nursery stock, pea protein), not whole children; and the sharpest swing factors are trade/China and biofuel mandates.

Bottom line. NAICS 111 is the whole of American crop farming — roughly a quarter-trillion dollars a year — but it is heavily lopsided: grain and oilseed is six of every ten dollars, and the fruit, vegetable, horticulture, and other-crop children are smaller, divergent niches with opposite economics (land-extensive versus labor- and capital-intensive; commodity versus specialty; hedgeable versus not). Across all five, the durable exposure for most investors is the land and the supply chain, not a bet on any single crop or a business you cannot buy. The right question for any deal is which scarce asset captures the margin, and whether you are being paid for the risk attached to it. For the complete analysis of any child, read its primer.

For full detail see the five child primers: 1111 Oilseed & Grain, 1112 Vegetable & Melon, 1113 Fruit & Tree Nut, 1114 Greenhouse/Nursery/Floriculture, and 1119 Other Crop.

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Sources

This rollup synthesizes the five child primers (NAICS 1111, 1112, 1113, 1114, 1119) plus our ground-truth federal statistics file for NAICS 111, which contains no ingested stat metrics. Figures are USDA crop and census data and company filings carried up from the children, labeled by source; they are not an audited three-digit subsector total. Numbering is this page's own.

1. U.S. Census Bureau, 2022 NAICS Manual — Subsector 111 (Crop Production) and industry groups 1111–1119 (scope, definitions, exclusions). https://www.census.gov/naics/
2. USDA National Agricultural Statistics Service (NASS), 2022 Census of Agriculture Highlights: Grain and Oilseed Production (ACH22-13), 2024 (specialized grain/oilseed farm sales ~$168.7B; ~69% of U.S. harvested cropland; +58% since 2017). https://www.nass.usda.gov/Publications/Highlights/2024/census22-grain-oilseed.pdf
3. USDA NASS, 2022 Census of Agriculture Highlights: Vegetable Production (vegetable & melon sales ~$28.2B; +44%; 69,452 farms; ~4.3M acres; ~5.2% of ag sales), 2024. https://www.nass.usda.gov/Publications/Highlights/2024/Census22_HL_Vegetable.pdf
4. USDA NASS, 2022 Census of Agriculture Highlights: Fruit, Tree Nut, and Berry Production (ACH22-15) (110,821 farms; 6.56M acres; $34.2B sales; 93% family; California ~68%), 2024. https://www.nass.usda.gov/Publications/Highlights/2024/Census22_HL_FruitNutBerry.pdf
5. USDA NASS, Horticulture Highlights: 2024 Census of Horticultural Specialties (ACH22-27) ($18.3B; 23,060 operations; ~249,000 hired workers; labor ~37% of expenses; scale/ownership breakdowns), 2026. https://www.nass.usda.gov/Publications/Highlights/2026/HorticulturalSpecialties2024.pdf
6. USDA NASS, Crop Values Summaries and USDA Economic Research Service (ERS) commodity backgrounders (all-hay ~$21.3B, 2023; cotton + cottonseed ~$6.5B, 2022; sugarcane/beet, peanut, tobacco values — the other-crop rollup ~$35B, mixed years). https://www.nass.usda.gov/Publications/Todays_Reports/reports/cpvl0225.pdf
7. Capital Press, Wheat, corn, soybean prices are below breakeven, signaling fourth year of losses, 2026; American Soybean Association, The Rising Cost Squeeze, 2025. https://www.capitalpress.com/2026/05/08/wheat-corn-soybean-prices-are-below-breakeven-signaling-fourth-year-of-losses/
8. USDA NASS, Land Values 2025 Summary, Aug. 2025; American Farm Bureau Federation (U.S. cropland ~$5,830/acre, +4.7%). https://www.nass.usda.gov/Publications/Highlights/2025/2025LandValuesCashRents_FINAL.pdf
9. USDA ERS, Sector at a Glance pages (soybeans/oil crops, wheat, rice, cotton, sugar and sweeteners; export shares, consolidation, demand). https://www.ers.usda.gov/topics/crops
10. USDA Farm Service Agency (FSA), Agriculture Risk Coverage (ARC) & Price Loss Coverage (PLC); USDA Risk Management Agency (RMA), Federal Crop Insurance; 2025 One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBBA) reference-price increases. https://www.fsa.usda.gov/resources/income-support/arc-plc
11. U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), Renewable Fuel Standard (RFS) — 2026/2027 volumes; American Farm Bureau Federation, 45Z Clean Fuel Production Credit, 2025–2026. https://www.epa.gov/renewable-fuel-standard
12. USDA ERS, Farm Labor (wages + contract labor ~40% of fruit/tree-nut expenses vs. ~12% all farms); U.S. Department of Labor (DOL), H-2A Temporary Agricultural Program (Adverse Effect Wage Rate). https://www.ers.usda.gov/topics/farm-economy/farm-labor
13. Public Policy Institute of California / California DWR, Sustainable Groundwater Management Act (SGMA) (500,000+ acres fallowed by 2040). https://water.ca.gov/Programs/Groundwater-Management/SGMA-Groundwater-Management
14. USDA Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service (APHIS), Citrus Greening (HLB) and Asian Citrus Psyllid; Plant Protection and Quarantine programs. https://www.aphis.usda.gov/plant-pests-diseases/citrus-diseases/citrus-greening-and-asian-citrus-psyllid
15. U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), FSMA Final Rule on Produce Safety. https://www.fda.gov/food/food-safety-modernization-act-fsma/fsma-final-rule-produce-safety
16. U.S. Census Bureau, County Business Patterns (CBP), Statistics of U.S. Businesses (SUSB), Nonemployer Statistics; U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages (QCEW) — all exclude crop production (NAICS 111) and farm proprietors. https://www.census.gov/programs-surveys/cbp/technical-documentation/methodology.html
17. U.S. Small Business Administration (SBA), Table of Small Business Size Standards Matched to NAICS Codes (receipts thresholds ~$2–5M by crop), 2023. https://www.sba.gov/document/support-table-size-standards
18. Company filings/results: Archer-Daniels-Midland; Bunge Global; The Andersons; Corteva; Nutrien; Mosaic; CF Industries; Deere; CNH; AGCO; Lamb Weston; Dole; Del Monte; Mission Produce; John B. Sanfilippo & Son; Seneca Foods; Keurig Dr Pepper; Limoneira; Universal; Adecoagro; Cosan; Markel Group; Central Garden & Pet; SiteOne; BrightView; Scotts Miracle-Gro; 1-800-Flowers. https://www.sec.gov/cgi-bin/browse-edgar
19. Farmland REITs and private/cooperative owners: Gladstone Land (Nasdaq: LAND) and Farmland Partners (NYSE: FPI) Form 10-Ks; Cargill; Louis Dreyfus; CHS Inc.; The Wonderful Company; Costa Farms; grower cooperatives (Sunkist, Blue Diamond, Ocean Spray, sugar-beet and peanut co-ops); Nuveen Natural Capital; Manulife Investment Management; AcreTrader; FarmTogether. https://www.gladstonefarms.com/investors/; https://farmlandpartners.com/
20. Fund and futures descriptions: Teucrium Corn (CORN), Soybean (SOYB), Wheat (WEAT), Sugar (CANE); Invesco DB Agriculture (DBA); VanEck Agribusiness ETF (MOO); Intercontinental Exchange (ICE) cotton (CT) and frozen concentrated orange juice (FCOJ); CME Group rough-rice (ZR). https://etfdb.com/etf/MOO/
21. USDA ERS, Farm Size and the Organization of U.S. Crop Farming (ERR-152) and Three Decades of Consolidation in U.S. Agriculture (midpoint corn farm 200→685 acres; large-farm cropland share 15%→41%). https://www.ers.usda.gov/media/8660/err-152.pdf