All Other Miscellaneous Crop Farming (NAICS 2022: 111998): An Investor's Primer

1. Overview

"All Other Miscellaneous Crop Farming" is the catch-all bucket of U.S. crop agriculture — the code the government uses (under the North American Industry Classification System, or NAICS) for farms growing specialty crops that don't fit any of the big, named categories. In practice it means growers of hops, grass and forage seed, peppermint and spearmint, ginseng, herbs and spices, maple sap and syrup, agave, tea, and mixed farms where no single crop dominates. It also captures open-field (outdoor) cannabis and hemp, an important detail for investors.[1] Many of these are small, geographically clustered, often multi-generational businesses: the hop yards of Washington's Yakima Valley, the grass-seed fields of Oregon's Willamette Valley, Wisconsin's ginseng country, and Vermont's maple woods.

Why it matters: individually these are niche crops, but several are large, cash-generating, export-driven markets — Oregon grass seed alone was worth roughly $639 million in 2022,[7] U.S. hops around $446 million in 2024,[6] and Wisconsin ginseng exports topped $19 million.[10] They share a common economic signature: high-value specialty crops, concentrated buyers, thin and volatile farm-gate pricing, and pronounced boom-bust cycles.

The ways to gain exposure differ sharply by investor type, and this primer covers both. For public-market investors there is essentially no pure-play "miscellaneous crop farm" stock; the closest listed operators are publicly traded cannabis cultivators, and the rest of the exposure is indirect — through seed companies, the branded food and lawn-care companies that buy these crops, and farmland real-estate vehicles. For private investors, this is where most of the actual capital sits — direct farmland ownership, operating farms, grower cooperatives, specialty processors, and institutional farmland funds.

2. What it is and how it's structured

Scope. The U.S. Census Bureau defines NAICS 111998 as establishments primarily engaged in: (1) growing crops not classified elsewhere; (2) growing a combination of crops where no single crop or crop family accounts for half of production value; or (3) gathering tea or maple sap.[1] Government examples include agave, mint, hop, spice, grass-seed, and hay-seed farming, plus general combination-crop farming; herbs, ginseng and other medicinal-plant cultivation also fall here.[1] The classification generally ends at the farm gate — the first sale or the point where price is set. Two quirks matter: reducing maple sap into syrup is unusually included in this farming code (most food processing is classified separately), and open-field marijuana is indexed here while greenhouse/indoor cannabis is not.[1]

What it explicitly excludes — this matters, because the name is misleadingly broad. The code deliberately carves out every crop with its own NAICS home:

• Oilseeds and grains — corn, wheat, soybeans, etc. (NAICS 1111)
• Vegetables and melons (1112); fruits and tree nuts (1113)
• Greenhouse, nursery, floriculture, mushrooms, and other crops grown under cover (1114, including 111411/111419); nursery and Christmas-tree production (111421)
• Hay farming (111940) — note the distinction: growing hay is its own code, but growing grass and hay seed is 111998
• Tobacco (111910), cotton (111920), sugarcane (111930), sugar beets (111991), peanuts (111992)
• Aquatic plants (112519)[1]

So 111998 is genuinely the "everything else" of crop farming.

Ownership mix. Like U.S. agriculture generally, this is overwhelmingly small, family-owned, and unincorporated. Roughly 95–97% of U.S. farms are family operations (the exact figure varies by USDA source and year); within that, small family farms are about 85% of farms but produce only ~14% of the value of products sold.[3][4] The specialty crops here fit that pattern — hundreds of independent growers per region, a handful of larger operators, and grower-owned cooperatives that pool marketing and processing. A modest institutional segment (farmland funds, private ag platforms) sits on top.

3. How big it is

Honesty requires a caveat about the federal data. Standard federal business statistics do not count this industry at all. The Census Bureau's County Business Patterns (CBP) and the Economic Census — the usual sources for establishment counts, employment and payroll — explicitly exclude all of Crop and Animal Production (NAICS 111 and 112).[5] Census Nonemployer Statistics cover a different population (nonemployer businesses) and are not a substitute for agricultural output data.[5] The authoritative source for farming is instead the U.S. Department of Agriculture's (USDA) Census of Agriculture, which tracks output by commodity rather than by tidy NAICS code.

The only ground-truth federal figure our records hold for this code specifically is the U.S. Small Business Administration (SBA) size standard: $2.5 million in average annual receipts — the ceiling below which a farm in this industry counts as "small" for federal-program and contracting purposes.[2] The low threshold itself signals that these are small operations. It is not a measure of the industry's revenue or enterprise value. Other federal business metrics for this code — establishment counts, employment, payroll, total revenue — are not available and are not estimated here.

For scale, the meaningful numbers are USDA commodity figures. The largest components of 111998 by farm-gate value:

For broader context, all of U.S. agriculture sold $543 billion of products in 2022 across 1.9 million farms on 880 million acres.[4] The miscellaneous specialty crops here are a small but high-value slice of that total, and each is regionally concentrated to a degree few other industries match.

4. The investable universe

There is no U.S.-listed pure-play whose reported revenue maps neatly to all of NAICS 111998 — the single most important fact for a public-market investor. The crops are grown by thousands of private family farms and cooperatives; public exposure is a set of proxies. The closest thing to a listed cultivator is a publicly traded cannabis company (outdoor cannabis is in-scope), though most such firms grow indoors or in greenhouses, which is not.

Public companies (proxies):

Adjacent but generally out-of-scope: controlled-environment agriculture (CEA) names such as Village Farms International (VFF) and Local Bounti (LOCL) grow greenhouse/hydroponic produce classified as vegetables or greenhouse products (NAICS 1114), not 111998.

Major private and cooperative owners — where the industry actually lives (private firms rarely disclose NAICS-level revenue, so these are representative, not a ranking):

• Hops: Yakima Chief Hops (grower-owned network linking family farms to brewers) [19]; Hopsteiner (integrated private grower/breeder/processor/trader using owned and contracted acreage, typically on multi-year contracts) [20]; John I. Haas / BarthHaas (privately controlled family hop group with U.S. farming, breeding and processing) [21].
• Maple: Sweet Tree Holdings (Vermont producer/private-label supplier, ~500,000 taps) [22]; Bascom Maple Farms (multi-generational New Hampshire producer, packer and equipment supplier) [24]; and private funds such as Fiera Comox, whose agriculture portfolio includes a Vermont maple platform reporting ~500,000 taps across ~18,000 acres [23].
• Ginseng: Hsu's Ginseng and other Marathon County, Wisconsin growers.
• Institutional farmland funds: Nuveen Natural Capital / Westchester, Manulife (Hancock) Agricultural, PGIM and others hold U.S. cropland for pensions and endowments.

5. How the money works

Owners make money the way all specialty-crop farmers do: realized price × saleable yield per acre, minus input, land, and (often heavy) labor costs — plus any margin from processing, packaging, branding or contract premiums. Several features specific to these crops shape the economics.

Perennial assets and long establishment cycles. Many of these are not plant-and-harvest-annually crops. Hops grow on trellises costing roughly $10,000–15,000+ per acre to install, then produce for years. Maple is a multi-decade forest asset. Grass-seed stands last several seasons. Ginseng runs a ~4-year cycle and cannot be replanted on the same ground for decades (replant disease), making it unusually land-hungry. This front-loaded capital raises barriers to entry and makes supply slow to respond to price — a classic boom-bust setup.

Concentrated buyers and contract selling. Farm-gate margins are thin; value concentrates downstream. Hops are largely sold on multi-year forward contracts to a small number of brewers and merchants. Ginseng is exported almost entirely to Hong Kong and mainland China. Mint oil goes to a handful of flavor and consumer-goods houses. Spices and herbs feed processors like McCormick. In each case a few large buyers face many small growers.

Cyclicality is the defining trait. These niche crops overshoot in both directions. Hop acreage ballooned during the 2010s craft-beer boom, then — as craft beer flattened — U.S. hop area fell 18% in a single year (2024) and crop value dropped 21%.[6] Ginseng saw ~90% of American growers go bankrupt in the late 1990s after overproduction and Canadian competition.[10] Model these as commodity cycles amplified by small, illiquid end-markets.

Export dependence and trade risk. Grass and forage seed, alfalfa, ginseng and hay are heavily export-driven, so currency swings and tariffs hit hard. S&W Seed's fiscal-2024 revenue fell ~18%, driven largely by collapsing alfalfa-seed sales into the Middle East/North Africa (MENA) and a Saudi import ban.[11]

Where the real return comes from. Over long horizons, much of the total return to owning these operations has been land appreciation, not operating profit — which is precisely why farmland REITs and institutional funds are structured around owning the ground and leasing it out. The best operating economics usually belong to those who control a scarce input — water, land, genetics, processing capacity, or customer access — rather than farms selling undifferentiated output into a spot market.

6. What drives demand

Demand is crop-specific, which is both a diversification benefit and a research burden:

• Hops — craft and mainstream beer volumes and hopping rates (how heavily beers are hopped); value hinges on variety, aroma and quality. Flat-to-declining U.S. beer consumption is the current headwind.[6]
• Grass and turf seed — housing starts, lawns, golf courses, athletic fields, and erosion/roadside seeding; forage and alfalfa seed track dairy, livestock and pasture renovation.
• Maple syrup — premiumization, the "natural sweetener" trend, and organic/private-label retail demand; U.S. output is a minority of a market dominated by Quebec, which produces ~72% of world supply.[8]
• Ginseng — Asian consumer demand, especially traditional Chinese medicine; almost entirely an export story.[10]
• Mint — flavors for gum, candy, oral-care and consumer products; competes with synthetic menthol and imported oil.[9]
• Herbs and spices — food consumption and cuisine diversity; the U.S. grows only ~40% of its own spice needs and imports the rest, so domestic growers compete against cheap imports.[12]
• Hemp and cannabis — driven by state legalization, medical use, consumer adoption, testing standards, and unresolved federal policy.

Across all of them, weather and climate (frost timing for maple, drought and heat for the rest), input-cost inflation (fertilizer, fuel, hand labor), and trade policy move the needle year to year. Organic certification, domestic sourcing and documented supply chains can support premium pricing.

7. Regulation

Farming here sits under the general U.S. agricultural framework plus several crop-specific rules:

• Food safety — the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) Produce Safety Rule under the Food Safety Modernization Act (FSMA) governs how covered produce and herbs are grown, harvested, packed and held, subject to exemptions.[25]
• Organic — USDA's National Organic Program (NOP) certifies organic claims — a meaningful premium channel for herbs, mint and maple.[26]
• Pesticides — the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) registers and restricts crop-protection products under the Federal Insecticide, Fungicide, and Rodenticide Act (FIFRA); specialty crops often have few approved products.[27] The EPA's Agricultural Worker Protection Standard (WPS) governs pesticide exposure, training and restricted-entry intervals.[28]
• Labor — many of these crops are hand-tended or hand-harvested, making the Department of Labor (DOL) H-2A seasonal guest-worker program — and its rising Adverse Effect Wage Rate — a major cost driver; the Migrant and Seasonal Agricultural Worker Protection Act (MSPA) adds wage, housing and disclosure obligations.[29]
• Ginseng exports — American ginseng is listed under CITES (Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species) Appendix II; exports require permits (U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service) plus phytosanitary certification.
• Crop insurance & Farm Bill — federal crop insurance and disaster aid apply, though specialty-crop coverage is thinner than for major commodities.[30]
• Hemp and cannabis — hemp is federally defined by a delta-9 tetrahydrocannabinol (THC) concentration of no more than 0.3% on a dry-weight basis.[31] The Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) still lists marijuana as a Schedule I controlled substance; a federal process to reschedule it to Schedule III is underway, and outcomes remain uncertain.[32]
• Water and land — state water rights, irrigation permits, groundwater rules and zoning can determine whether a farm is viable at all.

For investors, licenses, water rights, pesticide records, worker documentation, organic certificates, food-safety controls and (where relevant) cannabis permits are core diligence items, not administrative details.

8. Competitive dynamics and consolidation

The structure is a barbell: highly fragmented at the farm level, concentrated at the buyer/processor level. Thousands of independent growers sell into markets served by a few brewers, exporters, flavor houses or packers. Growers respond by banding into cooperatives (Yakima Chief Hops, ginseng and maple co-ops) to gain scale, share processing infrastructure and improve bargaining power.[19][20]

Three consolidation dynamics stand out. First, geographic clustering is extreme — the Yakima Valley holds ~75% of U.S. hop acreage,[6] the Willamette Valley grows the majority of U.S. cool-season grass seed,[7] Marathon County, Wisconsin grows ~95% of state ginseng,[10] and Vermont makes 53% of U.S. maple.[8] Second, farms are getting larger as smaller operators exit and successful growers aggregate acreage. Third, institutional land ownership — farmland REITs and pension-backed funds — is slowly buying and leasing back cropland, financializing what was historically owner-operated. Downstream, processors periodically integrate backward into growing or contracting to secure supply.

Competitive advantage tends to come from land and water access, local agronomic knowledge, proprietary varieties and breeding rights, specialized harvesting/processing equipment, long-term buyer contracts, and organic/traceability credentials. Scale helps spread fixed processing, compliance and logistics costs — but it is not a moat by itself: a large operator without water security, labor reliability or contracted demand can still lose money.

9. Risks

• Commodity price cycles / oversupply — the central risk; niche demand plus slow-adjusting perennial supply produces violent swings (hops 2024, ginseng 1990s).[6][10]
• Buyer concentration — a few brewers, exporters or processors set terms for many growers.
• Trade and tariff exposure — export-dependent crops (seed, ginseng, alfalfa) are hostage to foreign policy and currency; S&W's MENA collapse is a live example.[11]
• Weather, climate and disease — frost, drought, heat, wildfire, and crop-specific pathogens (hop powdery/downy mildew, ginseng replant disease).
• Water risk — water-rights restrictions or rising irrigation costs can impair both farm income and land value.
• Labor — availability and rising cost of H-2A hand labor, plus housing and compliance obligations.
• Input inflation — fertilizer, fuel, and energy for evaporators and dryers.
• Quality and food safety — rejected lots, pesticide residues or failed testing can destroy a crop's value.
• Substitution — imported spices and herbs, synthetic menthol, and alternative sweeteners undercut domestic growers.
• Regulatory / legal status — organic, water, labor and (especially) cannabis rules can change costs or market access overnight.
• Illiquidity and proxy risk for public investors — no clean listed vehicle; proxies carry unrelated business risk (McCormick is a global CPG company; REIT tenants skew elsewhere; cannabis names carry Schedule I legal risk).
• Private-market opacity — statements, ownership, crop contracts and liabilities can be hard to verify.
• Succession — aging operators and thin generational transfer threaten continuity.

10. How to invest, and the outlook

Public routes (tickers and multiples reserved to here): there is no direct play, so public-market investors choose a proxy and accept its dilution.

• Cultivator proxies are the publicly traded cannabis names — Green Thumb (GTBIF), Trulieve (TCNNF), Glass House (GLASF) — but they carry Schedule I legal risk, and most grow indoors or in greenhouses (outside 111998). Examine yield, cost per unit, crop loss, testing results, contract coverage and cash flow.
• Input/operating side: S&W Seed (SANW) is the closest listed seed operator, but a distressed micro-cap.
• Downstream demand: McCormick (MKC) for spices/herbs, Scotts Miracle-Gro (SMG) for grass seed and lawns, B&G Foods (BGS) for maple (Maple Grove Farms) — all large diversified companies where these crops are a small share of results.
• Land: farmland REITs Gladstone Land (LAND) and Farmland Partners (FPI) give land exposure and pay dividends, but their tenants grow mostly permanent and row crops, so the link to these specialty crops is loose.[13][14] For REITs, review net asset value (NAV), funds from operations (FFO)/adjusted FFO (AFFO), rent coverage, tenant quality and water rights.

Private routes — where most real capital in this space goes: direct ownership or leasing of specialty cropland; buying into a grower cooperative; acquiring an operating hop yard, maple operation or ginseng farm; specialty-crop platforms with processing and distribution; or committing to an institutional farmland fund (Nuveen/Westchester, Manulife/Hancock, PGIM, Fiera Comox). Diligence should demand crop-level yield and price history, water-rights documentation, customer contracts, insurance/loss history, compliance records, capital-expenditure needs, debt maturities, succession plans, and a valuation that separates farm operations, land, water, processing and brands.

Outlook (forward-looking judgment): this is a mature, cyclical, fragmented set of niche markets, and near-term drivers point in different directions. Hops appear likely to keep rationalizing acreage as they work off post-craft-boom oversupply against soft beer demand. Maple premiumization and turf/grass-seed demand look comparatively steady. Ginseng remains hostage to Chinese demand and trade policy. Cannabis hinges on federal rescheduling. Structurally, rising labor and input costs and greater climate variability are headwinds across the board. The most durable lesson from this industry's history is that long-run returns have come more from owning the land than from farming it — so the cleanest, if imperfect, public exposure remains farmland ownership. The better question for any specific deal is not "how large is NAICS 111998?" but which scarce asset captures the margin — land, water, genetics, processing, contracts, or brand — and is the investor being paid for the risks attached to it?

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Sources

1. U.S. Census Bureau, "2022 NAICS Definition: 111998 — All Other Miscellaneous Crop Farming" (definition, examples, exclusions, cannabis/maple treatment), 2022. https://www.census.gov/naics/?details=111998&input=111998&year=2022
2. U.S. Small Business Administration, "Table of Size Standards" (NAICS 111998: $2.5 million average annual receipts), 2023. https://www.sba.gov/document/support-table-size-standards
3. USDA Economic Research Service, "Farm Structure and Organization" (family-farm share of U.S. farms), 2024–26. https://www.ers.usda.gov/topics/farm-economy/farm-structure-and-organization/farm-structure-and-contracting
4. USDA National Agricultural Statistics Service (NASS), "2022 Census of Agriculture" (1.9M farms; $543B products sold; 880M acres; farm typology — small family farms ~85% of farms, ~14% of value), 2024. https://www.nass.usda.gov/Newsroom/2024/02-13-2024.php
5. U.S. Census Bureau, "County Business Patterns — Methodology" (excludes Crop and Animal Production, NAICS 111–112) and "Nonemployer Statistics" (distinct population), 2024–26. https://www.census.gov/programs-surveys/cbp/technical-documentation/methodology.html
6. USDA NASS / Hop Growers of America, "2024 National Hop Report" (44,793 acres; 87.1M lb; $446M value; Yakima/Washington share; −18% acreage, −21% value in 2024), 2024. https://www.usahops.org/news/2024-usda-nass-national-hop-report
7. Oregon State University Extension, "Willamette Valley Grass Seed Production" (~$639M value 2022; ~400,000 acres), 2022–24. https://valleyfieldcrops.oregonstate.edu/willamette-valley-grass-seed-production
8. USDA NASS, "Maple Syrup Production" (5.86M gallons 2024; ~$159M value 2023; Vermont 53% of U.S.; Quebec ~72% of world supply), 2024–25. https://www.nass.usda.gov/Statistics_by_State/New_England_includes/Publications/Current_News_Release/2024/2024-Maple-Syrup-Survey.pdf
9. USDA NASS (via Capital Press), "Mint production drops again" (peppermint 2.81M lb / 31,300 acres; spearmint 1.54M lb / 12,200 acres; Northwest ~93%), 2023–24. https://capitalpress.com/2024/01/30/usda-mint-production-drops-again/
10. Wisconsin Economic Development Corporation / UW-Madison, "Wisconsin Ginseng" (~1,500 acres; ~$15M farm revenue; >$19M exports; >90% of U.S. crop; Marathon County concentration; 1990s bankruptcies), 2024. https://wedc.org/wisconsin-ginseng-has-international-appeal/
11. S&W Seed Company, "S&W Announces Fiscal 2024 Financial Results" (~$60.4M revenue; MENA/alfalfa decline), 2024. https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/sw-announces-fiscal-2024-financial-results-302293516.html
12. McCormick & Company, "2024 Financial Results" (~$6.5B sales), 2024, and USDA Economic Research Service, "The U.S. Spice Market" (U.S. grows ~40% of spice needs). https://ir.mccormick.com/news-releases/news-release-details/mccormick-reports-strong-2024-financial-results-and-provides
13. Gladstone Land Corporation (LAND), SEC filings (farmland REIT portfolio), 2024–25. https://www.sec.gov/cgi-bin/browse-edgar?action=getcompany&CIK=0001495240&type=10-K
14. Farmland Partners Inc. (FPI), "Annual Report on Form 10-K for the Year Ended December 31, 2024," 2025. https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1591670/000155837025001214/fpi-20241231x10k.htm
15. B&G Foods, Inc. (BGS), "Annual Report on Form 10-K" (Maple Grove Farms brand), 2026. https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1278027/000110465926022961/bgs-20260103x10k.htm
16. Green Thumb Industries (GTBIF), "Annual Report on Form 10-K for the Year Ended December 31, 2024," 2025. https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1795139/000095017025028273/gtbif-20241231.htm
17. Trulieve Cannabis Corp. (TCNNF), "Quarterly Report," 2026. https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1754195/000175419526000032/tcnnf-20260331.htm
18. Glass House Brands (GLASF), "Annual Report on Form 40-F," 2025. https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1848731/000184873125000007/glasf-20241231.htm
19. Yakima Chief Hops, "Our Company" (grower-owned hop supplier), 2026. https://www.yakimachief.com/commercial/our-company
20. Hopsteiner, "Hops Farming, Growing, and Purchasing" (integrated grower/breeder/processor; multi-year contracts), 2026. https://hopsteiner.us/growing-and-purchasing/
21. BarthHaas / John I. Haas, "Company" and "Our History" (privately controlled family hop group), 2026. https://www.barthhaas.com/company and https://www.johnihaas.com/our-history/
22. Sweet Tree Holdings, "Homepage / Product Lineup" (Vermont maple; ~500,000 taps), 2026. https://sweettreeholdings.com/
23. Fiera Comox, "Agriculture" (private ag manager; Vermont maple platform, ~500,000 taps / ~18,000 acres), 2026. https://www.fieracomox.com/en/agriculture/
24. Bascom Maple Farms, "About Bascom Maple Farms" (multi-generational NH maple producer, packer, equipment supplier), 2026. https://bascommaple.com/pages/about-bascom
25. U.S. Food and Drug Administration, "FSMA Final Rule on Produce Safety," 2026. https://www.fda.gov/food/food-safety-modernization-act-fsma/fsma-final-rule-produce-safety
26. USDA Agricultural Marketing Service, "National Organic Program: Farms and Operations," 2026. https://www.ams.usda.gov/services/organic-certification/farms-operations
27. U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, "About Pesticide Registration" (FIFRA), 2025. https://www.epa.gov/pesticide-registration/about-pesticide-registration
28. U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, "Agricultural Worker Protection Standard (WPS)," 2026. https://www.epa.gov/pesticide-worker-safety/agricultural-worker-protection-standard-wps
29. U.S. Department of Labor, "H-2A Temporary Agricultural Program" and "Migrant and Seasonal Agricultural Worker Protection Act (MSPA)," 2026. https://www.dol.gov/agencies/eta/foreign-labor/programs/h-2a and https://www.dol.gov/agencies/whd/agriculture/mspa
30. USDA Risk Management Agency, "Specialty Crops" (crop insurance), 2026. https://www.rma.usda.gov/about-crop-insurance/highlighted-initiatives-plans/specialty-crops
31. U.S. Code, "7 U.S.C. §1639o — Definitions" (hemp: ≤0.3% delta-9 THC dry weight), 2026. https://uscode.house.gov/view.xhtml?edition=prelim&req=granuleid:USC-prelim-title7-section1639o
32. U.S. Department of Justice / Drug Enforcement Administration, "Marijuana Scheduling and Rescheduling Regulatory Actions," 2026. https://www.dea.gov/drug-information/drug-scheduling