Farms kept 11.8 cents of the US food dollar in 2024, down from 12.1

The farmer's share of the American food dollar slipped again in 2024. In a Chart of Note published on April 28, 2026, the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Economic Research Service (ERS) reported that U.S. farm establishments received 11.8 cents of every dollar spent on domestically produced food sold at places such as grocery stores and restaurants in 2024. On the same revised basis, the 2023 farm share was 12.1 cents. In ERS's words, farmers received roughly one-eighth of what consumers spent.

The remaining 88.2 cents of the 2024 food dollar was the marketing share, which pays for the steps after the farm: transporting, processing and selling food to consumers. The chart was prepared by ERS economists Quinton Baker and James Chandler Zachary.

ERS introduced the Food Dollar Series in 2011 to analyse where the money consumers spend on food goes. It expresses all U.S. spending on domestically produced food in a single dollar, which makes it easier to compare different foods and different years. The measure rests on input-output analysis and uses the ERS Agri-Food Economic Data System, built mainly from the national input-output tables of the Commerce Department's Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA).

One part of it, the marketing bill, splits each food dollar in two: the farm share, the value of farm commodities, and the marketing share, which is 100 cents minus the farm share. ERS also publishes an industry group bill, which divides costs among groups such as food processing, wholesale, retail and food services, and a primary factor bill, which shows how much of the value goes to salaries and benefits, property income, taxes and imports.

One factor behind the long-term downward trend in the farm share, ERS says, is the rising proportion of spending on food away from home, such as restaurant meals. That food carries the added costs of preparing and serving it, so its marketing share is higher. The Food Dollar accounts separately for food at home, such as bakery products, and food away from home, such as restaurant meals.

All the figures in the chart, including the 2023 share, come from the Food Dollar model that ERS revised in 2026. Because of changes in both methodology and source data, ERS recalculated the series from 2007 onward. The revisions are described in the ERS report A More Detailed Food Dollar: Enhanced Accounting of U.S. Food Costs (ERR-357), published on March 3, 2026, and the data are in the Food Dollar data product updated on March 10, which covers 2007 to 2024.

According to the report, the previous model produced 16 tables and updated only six of them each year; the new one contains 47 annual tables on the cost distribution of food and alcohol. The new method directly removes the value of farm-to-farm transactions, which otherwise overstate the returns to farms. It raises the farm share for food away from home and lowers it for food at home, and the wholesale share fell by about 5 cents per food dollar. Under the previous model the 2023 farm share was 15.9 cents, so the new figures cannot be compared directly with earlier releases.

For growers the farm share is a key number: it shows how much of what consumers pay for food reaches the farm gate. This release set a new baseline for tracking it under the revised model.

Photo: Alabama Extension / Wikimedia Commons (CC0)

Sources: USDA Economic Research Service (Chart of Note), ERS report ERR-357, ERS Food Dollar data product and documentation, ERS Amber Waves