All Other Grain Farming (U.S.) — NAICS 111199

An investor's primer for both public-market and private investors. Core size figures are U.S. federal statistics; where a metric is not available in the official record, we say so rather than estimate. Forward-looking statements are framed as judgments, not facts.

1. Overview

Under the North American Industry Classification System (NAICS), code 111199 — "All Other Grain Farming" — is the catch-all bucket for U.S. farms that grow grains other than the big four: corn, soybeans, wheat, and rice. In practice it means grain sorghum (milo), barley, oats, rye, and millet, plus a long tail of minor cereals (buckwheat, triticale, spelt, wild rice) and "grain combination" farms where no single grain is half the crop. [1] Sorghum and barley do most of the work: together they were more than four-fifths of the category's value — roughly $2.35 billion of ~$2.73 billion in 2024 farm-gate crop value. [2]

This is a farm-level commodity business, not a cleanly defined listed sector. Each grain has a clear, separable demand story — sorghum rides feed, ethanol, and (heavily) exports to China; barley rises and falls with beer; oats are a food and forage crop the U.S. increasingly imports. The crops are small, cyclical, and policy-sensitive, which makes the category a useful lens on the broader U.S. row-crop economy.

The catch for investors: there is no pure-play way to own this industry directly. These crops are grown almost entirely by privately held family farms. It helps to separate three different economic links:

• Farm-operating exposure — crop yields, prices, input costs, rents, debt, and weather.
• Farmland exposure — collecting rent and capturing land appreciation.
• Downstream exposure — storage, logistics, processing, merchandising, and branded food or fuel demand.

Public-market access is indirect — through farmland real estate investment trusts (REITs), grain merchandisers, seed/fertilizer/equipment suppliers, and grain-commodity funds. Private routes — owning or leasing cropland, farmland funds, farm lending — are how the actual land and operating cash flows change hands. Both are covered in Sections 4 and 10.

2. What it is, and what it excludes

An establishment lands in 111199 if its primary product is a grain other than the crops that have their own code. Production generally ends at the "farm gate," before extensive cleaning, milling, storage, trading, or processing. [1] The U.S. Census Bureau explicitly carves out the neighbors: [1]

• Soybeans — 111110
• Other oilseeds (canola, sunflower, flax) — 111120
• Dry peas and beans — 111130
• Wheat — 111140
• Corn (grain) — 111150
• Rice (except wild rice) — 111160
• Oilseed-and-grain combination farms — 111191
• Hay, silage, and forage — 111940

So 111199 is defined by subtraction: the cereals that are individually too small to earn their own line. Sorghum grown for grain sits here; sorghum grown for silage or forage does not.

Ownership mix. This is a family-farm industry. Operations are overwhelmingly individually or family-owned, and most fall under the U.S. Small Business Administration (SBA) size standard for the industry of $2.25 million in average annual receipts — i.e., the SBA treats essentially the entire industry as a small business. [3] Many operations are non-employer (family-labor) farms.

As national context (a proxy, not a 111199-specific breakdown): family farms were 95% of all U.S. farms in 2022; small family farms were 85% of farms, while large-scale family farms were just 4% of farms but produced 51% of the value of agricultural products sold. [7] Grain regions lean heavily on leased land — about 39% of farmland in the contiguous U.S. was rented, and non-operating landlords owned roughly 80% of that rented ground [8] — which is why the "who owns the land" question is often separate from "who farms it."

3. How big it is

A data quirk worth stating plainly: standard federal business statistics undercount — really, ignore — this industry. The Census Bureau's Statistics of U.S. Businesses (SUSB), Nonemployer Statistics, County Business Patterns (CBP), and the Economic Census all exclude crop and animal production (NAICS 111–112) altogether. [4] So the usual "establishment count / employment / payroll / sales" figures simply do not exist for 111199 — the only 111199-specific federal business figure in the record is the SBA's $2.25 million size standard. [3] Government payments flow into farm cash flow, but that does not make the industry government-owned.

The authoritative headcount comes from a different program — the U.S. Department of Agriculture's (USDA) Census of Agriculture, run by its National Agricultural Statistics Service (NASS) — and it tabulates by crop, not by NAICS 111199. Because one farm can grow several of these grains, the crop counts below overlap and should not be summed into a single "number of firms." [4]

2022 Census of Agriculture — farms and grain harvested: [4]

For scale, corn for grain was grown on 289,382 farms — this whole category is a rounding error next to the corn/soy heartland. [4]

2024 value of production (farm-gate): [2]

For scale, USDA reports total U.S. crop cash receipts across all crops at $244.9 billion in 2024 — 111199 is well under 2% of that, and the $244.9 billion cannot be allocated cleanly to this subindustry. [6]

2024 production and acreage: sorghum, 344 million bu on 6.30 million planted acres; barley, 144 million bu on 2.37 million seeded acres; oats, 67.8 million bu on 886,000 harvested acres at a record 76.5 bu/acre yield. [5] For international comparison, USDA's Foreign Agricultural Service (FAS) pegs 2025/26 U.S. output at roughly 11.1 million metric tons (MMT) of sorghum, 3.1 MMT of barley, 1.0 MMT of oats, and 0.3 MMT of rye. [11] Note the multi-year slide in barley: U.S. plantings have fallen to their lowest since 1876. [9]

Geography is concentrated. Sorghum is a Great Plains / "Sorghum Belt" crop — Kansas is #1 and Texas #2, with Oklahoma, Colorado, and Nebraska behind. [10] Barley is a northern-tier crop (Idaho, Montana, North Dakota); oats cluster in the upper Midwest.

4. The investable universe

There are no publicly traded pure-play grain farms. Public exposure is a menu of proxies; the closest thing to owning the land-and-crop cash flow is private. Exchange abbreviations below are the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) and the Nasdaq Stock Market (Nasdaq).

Public — closest proxies:

Note on futures: oats trade on the Chicago Mercantile Exchange / Chicago Board of Trade (CME/CBOT) and are the one grain here with a listed contract; sorghum has no dedicated futures (it is priced off corn), and barley and rye have no active U.S. contract. [20]

Private owners and supply-chain comparables. Private farm ownership is hard to rank by NAICS code because the landholding entity, the operating company, and the leasing entity can all be separate. Relevant names — not all coded to 111199, and not all primarily farm operators — include:

• AgReserves / Farmland Reserve — operates U.S. and international row-crop farms (wheat, grain corn, and other crops). [29]
• J.R. Simplot Company — family-owned and privately held; farming, ranching, fertilizer, food processing, and ag distribution. [30]
• Cargill — privately held merchant that sources, stores, trades, and processes barley, sorghum, wheat, corn, and other crops. [31]
• Louis Dreyfus Company — private merchant/exporter with U.S. grain origination, processing, storage, and export operations. [32]
• CHS Inc. — farmer-owned cooperative with grain origination, marketing, logistics, crop inputs, and international sales. [33]

The industry itself — the land and the operating profit — is otherwise held by family farms, farm partnerships, and, increasingly, farmland investment vehicles (funds and fractional-ownership platforms). Direct cropland ownership leased to an operator is the canonical private route.

5. How the money works

A grain farm's profit is a thin spread on a big asset. Farm revenue is roughly harvested acres × yield per acre × realized price + crop-insurance proceeds + government payments + other farm income. Three levers drive the outcome:

1. Operating margin per acre = (yield in bu/acre × price/bu) − cost of production. Revenue is almost entirely price × volume; there is no branding or pricing power in a bushel of #2 sorghum. The dominant cost is land (cash rent or the ownership equivalent), then fertilizer and fuel (variable, and fertilizer tracks natural-gas prices), plus seed, chemicals, machinery, labor, and interest. Margins are chronically slim and can go negative fast — in the 2025 sorghum bust, Sorghum-Belt bids fell as low as $2.35/bushel, below the cost of production, with some elevators not even posting a bid. [10] A key concept here is basis — the gap between a local cash price and the relevant futures price; merchants and storage operators can earn on basis moves, storage fees, and handling, while the farmer mostly earns or loses on the crop-revenue-minus-cost spread. [19]

2. Government program income. Because crop margins are so volatile, federal programs are a structural part of the revenue line — not a footnote. The two Farm Bill "Title I" programs — Price Loss Coverage (PLC) and Agriculture Risk Coverage (ARC) — pay out when prices or revenue fall below set benchmarks; the 2025 effective reference prices were sorghum $4.51, barley $4.95, and oats $2.76 per bushel. [21] Layered on top is subsidized federal crop insurance and periodic ad-hoc disaster/trade aid. In 2025 these payments ballooned: USDA forecast direct government payments to farmers at $42.4 billion, up from $9.6 billion in 2024, accounting for most of the year's projected rise in net farm income. [22]

3. Land appreciation. For the owner, the durable wealth is the dirt. Average U.S. cropland hit a record $5,830/acre in 2025 (+4.7%). [23] For an investor buying farmland, total return = cash rent (a low-single-digit yield) + land appreciation; the crop is the coupon, the land is the bond.

Metrics that matter here: yield per harvested acre, cost of production per bushel, farm-gate price and local basis, cash rent per acre, net return per acre, owned-versus-leased mix, storage capacity and sales timing, and — for the balance sheet — working capital and the debt-to-asset ratio. Cash flow is seasonal (spend before planting, carry inventory through harvest, collect on delivery), and hedging with futures/options trims price risk but adds margin calls and basis risk. This is a capital-intensive, cyclical, low-margin, price-taker business.

6. What drives demand

Each grain has its own demand engine, which is why they don't move together:

• Sorghum — livestock feed, ethanol (historically about a third of the crop went to renewable fuel), and exports, dominated by China. In 2024 the U.S. exported roughly 5.24 MMT of sorghum worth ~$1.38 billion, of which China took about 4.63 MMT (~$1.23 billion). [10] Growth niches include pet food (used by ~15 companies across 130+ products), birdseed, and gluten-free human food. [12]
• Barley — split between malting (beer and spirits) and feed. Under ~20% of global barley is malted; the rest is feed. [9] U.S. demand is dominated by beer, and beer is shrinking: malt-barley demand was forecast at an all-time-low 110.7 million bushels for 2024/25, down 27% from 2016/17, as drinkers shift to seltzers, spirits, and cannabis. [9]
• Oats — food (oatmeal, granola, and the fast-growing oat-milk category) plus forage and cover-crop use. Demand is rising but U.S. supply isn't: the U.S. now imports the majority of its oats from Canada, and domestic acreage has declined for decades. [13]
• Rye — cover cropping, distilling (rye whiskey), and bread; small but with a cover-crop tailwind.

Underlying supply is driven by weather, soil and water, relative crop prices, input costs, available acreage, rotation, technology, and government programs. Grain demand is durable, but any single year's farm profitability usually hinges more on weather and supply shocks than on steady unit growth.

7. Regulation

Grain farming is lightly licensed but heavily supported and steered by federal policy. The key levers:

• Farm Bill / commodity programs. ARC and PLC (administered by USDA's Farm Service Agency, FSA) set the safety net for covered commodities including sorghum, barley, and oats. [21] A 2025 reconciliation law (enacted July 2025) raised reference prices and strengthened ARC, lifting the ARC-County guarantee from 86% to 90% of benchmark revenue and the maximum payment rate from 10% to 12.5%. [21] These parameters directly change farm cash flow and planting decisions.
• Crop insurance. USDA's Risk Management Agency (RMA) offers premium-subsidized yield and revenue policies for small grains including barley, oats, rye, and wheat, subject to policy and geographic eligibility; most commercial grain farms carry them. [24]
• Trade policy. For sorghum especially, tariffs and Chinese purchasing decisions act as a de facto demand regulator (see Risks). The Renewable Fuel Standard (RFS) and related biofuel policy support sorghum's fuel demand.
• Pesticide and worker safety. The Environmental Protection Agency's (EPA) Worker Protection Standard (WPS) governs training, safety information, protective equipment, restricted-entry intervals, and pesticide handling for farmworkers. [25]
• Organic production. USDA's National Organic Program (NOP), run by its Agricultural Marketing Service (AMS), requires certification to sell products as organic; land generally must be free of prohibited substances for three years before an organic harvest. [26]
• Foreign ownership. The Agricultural Foreign Investment Disclosure Act (AFIDA) requires foreign persons to report interests in U.S. agricultural land — a disclosure regime, not a nationwide ownership cap. [27]
• Grain quality. The Federal Grain Inspection Service (FGIS), under the U.S. Grain Standards Act, sets standards and oversees official inspection and weighing of grain. [28]
• State and local rules. Water rights and groundwater-pumping limits (acute in the drier sorghum and barley regions), pesticide restrictions, environmental permits, labor rules, zoning, and conservation-program eligibility can materially affect individual farms.

8. Competitive dynamics and consolidation

The industry has two structures at once: many family-owned farms and local operators on one side, and concentrated storage, processing, and export infrastructure on the other.

Farmers are price-takers in a global commodity market — no product differentiation, no pricing power — so competition plays out through cost and yield: the low-cost, high-yield operator survives thin-margin years. Durable advantages come from low cost per acre, reliable yields, secure land and water, storage access, local buyer relationships, disciplined leverage, and the occasional ability to market identity-preserved or specialty grain.

The long-running trend is consolidation: fewer, larger farms working more acres, as fixed machinery and land costs reward scale. Land is the barrier to entry, and with cropland at record prices, [23] getting bigger increasingly means renting rather than buying. Investors should distinguish consolidation of farmland ownership (a landlord accumulating acres) from consolidation of farm operations (an operator controlling more planting/harvest/marketing) — they are often different parties.

On the demand side, competition is international and substitutional: U.S. sorghum competes with Australian and (newly, from late 2024) Brazilian sorghum for Chinese buyers; [10] barley competes with corn as feed and loses ground as beer declines; [9] oats compete with Canadian imports. [13] Downstream, the buyers — grain merchandisers, maltsters, ethanol plants, exporters — are consolidated and hold the negotiating leverage.

9. Risks

• Export concentration (sorghum). Sorghum's fortunes are tied to one customer. In 2025, U.S. sorghum exports to China fell roughly 97% year-on-year as tariffs bit and Australia and Brazil took share — Australia now supplies more than half of China's imports — and prices collapsed below break-even. [10] This is the sharpest single risk in the category.
• Price cyclicality and margin squeeze. Grain prices are volatile while input costs (fertilizer, fuel, interest, land) are sticky and high; USDA and Federal Reserve district banks flagged low grain prices plus elevated input costs as a source of 2025 financial stress. [22]
• Dependence on government payments. A large share of 2025 sector income is transfer payments, not market income; [22] a policy shift or a lapse in ad-hoc aid would expose the underlying weakness in crop margins.
• Secular demand erosion. Barley's malting demand is in structural decline with beer; [9] U.S. oat production has ceded share to Canada. [13]
• Weather, water, and yield. These are largely dryland and irrigation-constrained crops in drought-prone regions; drought, heat, frost, pests, or disease hit yield and quality directly.
• Basis and storage risk. Local prices can diverge from futures, and poor storage or off-grade quality causes discounts.
• Leverage and input/rate exposure. Land values and farm debt make downturns financially severe; fertilizer tracks natural gas, and higher interest rates raise both operating-loan and land-financing costs.
• Counterparty and concentration risk. Elevators, merchants, and processors can face liquidity stress in a weak price cycle, and a farm dependent on one crop, buyer, water source, or local elevator is less resilient.

10. How to invest, and the outlook

Public and private investors should first decide which economic link they actually want — land, farming, or the supply chain — because they pay off differently.

Public routes (indirect, liquid):

• Farmland REITs for land exposure — Farmland Partners (FPI) is the more row-crop-diversified; Gladstone Land (LAND) skews to specialty crops. [14] These pay dividends and give a real-estate, not a crop-price, return profile.
• Grain merchandisers (The Andersons/ANDE, ADM, Bunge/BG) profit from volume, handling, and basis regardless of price direction. [17][18][19]
• Input, seed, and equipment names (Deere/DE, Corteva/CTVA, Nutrien/NTR) or the VanEck Agribusiness ETF (MOO) for a diversified basket. [20]
• Commodity funds (Invesco DB Agriculture/DBA) or listed oats futures for direct price exposure — but sorghum, barley, and rye have no active U.S. contract. [20]

Private routes (direct, illiquid): owning cropland and leasing to an operator; farmland investment funds and fractional-ownership platforms; operating partnerships; grain infrastructure; or secured farm lending. These capture the two returns that matter most here — cash rent plus land appreciation — and are how nearly all of the real industry is held. Diligence should cover title, water rights, soil quality, lease terms, tenant concentration, crop history and insurance, local basis, storage and transport, labor practices, debt structure, and exit liquidity.

Near-term drivers to watch (analytical judgments, not forecasts): whether China resumes sorghum buying or the trade stays diverted to Australia/Brazil; the path of fertilizer and interest costs against soft grain prices; the durability of elevated government payments after the 2025 Farm Bill changes; beer volumes (barley) and oat-milk demand plus Canadian oat supply (oats). The medium-term backdrop looks favorable for land values (record and rising) [23] but challenging for crop margins (low prices, high costs) [22] — a split that rewards the land owner over the crop grower.

One caution across the whole complex: do not assume rising grain prices help every related name. Merchants can benefit from volatility, processors from margins, input firms from farmer spending, and landlords from rents and land values — sometimes in opposite directions. The best-positioned businesses tend to be those with secure land and water, low cost per acre, conservative leverage, strong storage/logistics, crop insurance, and multiple sales channels.

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Sources

1. U.S. Census Bureau, "2022 NAICS Definition: 111199 – All Other Grain Farming." https://www.census.gov/naics/ (see also NAICS Association code description, https://www.naics.com/naics-code-description/?code=111199)
2. USDA National Agricultural Statistics Service (NASS), "Crop Values 2024 Summary," February 2025. https://www.nass.usda.gov/Publications/Todays_Reports/reports/cpvl0225.pdf
3. U.S. Small Business Administration, "Table of Small Business Size Standards" (NAICS 111199 = $2.25 million), 2023 (Histometrics ingested federal statistics). https://www.sba.gov/document/support-table-size-standards
4. USDA NASS, "2022 Census of Agriculture, Volume 1, Chapter 1: U.S. National Level Data," 2024 (farm/acre/bushel counts). Business-statistics exclusion of NAICS 111–112: U.S. Census Bureau, "Statistics of U.S. Businesses" and "Nonemployer Statistics." https://www.nass.usda.gov/Publications/AgCensus/2022/Full_Report/Volume_1,_Chapter_1_US/
5. USDA NASS, "Crop Production 2024 Summary," January 2025. https://downloads.usda.library.cornell.edu/usda-esmis/files/k3569432s/ (Crop Production Annual)
6. USDA Economic Research Service (ERS), "Farming and Farm Income" (U.S. crop cash receipts $244.9 billion, 2024). https://ers.usda.gov/data-products/ag-and-food-statistics-charting-the-essentials/farming-and-farm-income
7. USDA NASS, "Family Farms: 2022 Census of Agriculture Highlights," 2025. https://www.nass.usda.gov/Publications/Highlights/2025/Census22_HL_FamilyFarms_FINAL.pdf
8. USDA ERS, "Farmland Ownership and Tenure" (39% of contiguous-U.S. farmland rented; ~80% owned by non-operating landlords). https://ers.usda.gov/topics/farm-economy/land-use-land-value-tenure/farmland-ownership-and-tenure
9. Agweek, "U.S. barley acreage hit lowest level since 1876 as beer demand sinks," 2024; Brewers Association, "Domestic Barley Production Continues Decades of Decline"; USDA ERS, "Barley use declining as U.S. beer production trends lower." https://www.agweek.com/crops/cereal-grains/u-s-barley-acreage-hit-lowest-level-since-1876-as-beer-demand-sinks
10. Southern Ag Today / Oklahoma Farm Report, "Grain Sorghum Exports to China at Their Lowest in Over a Decade," November 2025; Kansas Farm Bureau, "Grain Sorghum and Corn Basis Trends in 2025" (also 2024 sorghum export volumes/values). https://www.oklahomafarmreport.com/okfr/2025/11/13/grain-sorghum-exports-to-china-at-their-lowest-in-over-a-decade/
11. USDA Foreign Agricultural Service (FAS), "Production, Supply and Distribution" database, United States (2025/26 barley, oats, rye, sorghum). https://ipad.fas.usda.gov/cropexplorer/util/new_get_psd_data.aspx?regionid=us
12. Sorghum Checkoff, "Sorghum 101" and "Pet Food," 2025. https://www.sorghumcheckoff.com/sorghum-101/
13. Ambrook / Offrange, "Farmers Aren't Keeping Up With Oat Milk Demand"; USDA FAS, "Grain and Feed Annual — Canada," 2025. https://ambrook.com/offrange/supply-chain/oat-shortage-milk-demands
14. Farmonaut, "Farmland Partners vs Gladstone Land: 2025 Guide"; The Motley Fool, "2 Best Farmland REITs and How to Invest." https://farmonaut.com/usa/farmland-partners-vs-gladstone-land-2025-ca-wa-guide
15. Farmland Partners Inc., "Investing in American Agriculture" (portfolio acreage), 2025. https://farmlandpartners.com/
16. Gladstone Land Corporation, "Fourth Quarter and Year Ended 2025 Results," 2026. https://www.gladstonefarms.com/investors/news-events/press-releases
17. Archer-Daniels-Midland Company, "What Does ADM Do?" (states it does not own farms). https://www.adm.com/en-us/about/
18. Bunge Global, "Reporting Segment Changes and Recast Outlook," 2025. https://bunge.com/
19. The Andersons, Inc., "2025 Form 10-K" (elevators, merchandising, basis). https://www.sec.gov/cgi-bin/browse-edgar?action=getcompany&CIK=0000821026
20. Company and fund descriptions: Deere & Co.; Corteva Agriscience; Nutrien Retail; VanEck Agribusiness ETF (MOO); Invesco DB Agriculture Fund (DBA); Commodity.com, "Oats Trading Guide" (CME/CBOT oats; no active sorghum/barley/rye U.S. contract). https://etfdb.com/etf/MOO/
21. USDA Farm Service Agency (FSA), "Agriculture Risk Coverage (ARC) & Price Loss Coverage (PLC)"; farmdoc daily, "Projected ARC and PLC Payments for 2025," 2025; Terrain, "ARC and PLC to Offer Higher Payments," 2025 (2025 reference prices; ARC-CO guarantee 86%→90%, max rate 10%→12.5%). https://www.fsa.usda.gov/resources/income-support/arc-plc
22. USDA ERS, "Farm Sector Income Forecast" (2025 net farm income; direct government payments $42.4B vs $9.6B in 2024), 2025. https://www.ers.usda.gov/topics/farm-economy/farm-sector-income-finances/farm-sector-income-forecast
23. American Farm Bureau Federation, "Real Estate Rising: Farmland Values Hit Record High" (U.S. cropland $5,830/acre, +4.7%, 2025). https://www.fb.org/market-intel/real-estate-rising-farmland-values-hit-record-high
24. USDA Risk Management Agency (RMA), "Crop Policies." https://www.rma.usda.gov/policy-procedure/crop-policies
25. U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, "Agricultural Worker Protection Standard (WPS)." https://www.epa.gov/pesticide-worker-safety/agricultural-worker-protection-standard-wps
26. USDA Agricultural Marketing Service (AMS), "National Organic Program — Becoming a Certified Organic Operation." https://www.ams.usda.gov/services/organic-certification/becoming-certified
27. USDA FSA, "Agricultural Foreign Investment Disclosure Act (AFIDA)." https://www.fsa.usda.gov/programs-and-services/economic-and-policy-analysis/afida
28. USDA AMS, "Federal Grain Inspection Service (FGIS)." https://www.ams.usda.gov/about-ams/programs-offices/federal-grain-inspection-service
29. AgReserves, "About AgReserves." https://www.agreserves.com/about/
30. J.R. Simplot Company, company news and profile. https://www.simplot.com/company/
31. Cargill, "Agriculture — trading and processing." https://www.cargill.com/agriculture
32. Louis Dreyfus Company, "Grains and Oilseeds." https://www.ldc.com/us/en/who-we-are/business-lines/grains-oilseeds/
33. CHS Inc., "Grains." https://www.chsinc.com/products-and-services/agriculture/grains