2022 Census of Agriculture: Sales of organic agricultural products concentrated in California

The 2022 Census of Agriculture showed that California led the Nation in organically produced agricultural commodities sold from farms. Census data include certified organic operations as well as those exempt from certification because of their small size (farms and businesses with less than $5,000 in gross annual organic sales). Certified and exempt organic operations both use agricultural production practices that integrate cultural, biological, and mechanical practices to foster cycling of resources, promote ecological balance, and conserve biodiversity. In 2022, U.S. organic sales reached $9.6 billion, almost $1 billion more than in 2017, when adjusted for inflation to 2022 dollars. Organic sales are highly concentrated along the West Coast, particularly in California, which had more than $3.7 billion in organic sales in 2022, almost 40 percent of the Nation’s organic sales. Organic sales in California increased by 12 percent when adjusted for inflation from 2017 to 2022. Organic product sales are also concentrated in the upper Midwest and Great Lakes regions, as well as southeast Pennsylvania and central North Carolina. Since many counties have few sellers of organically produced agricultural commodities, USDA, National Agricultural Statistics Service (NASS) withholds information at the county level to keep data private for individual farms. Counties with published sales at the county level make up $8.3 billion in organic sales (86 percent of the total), while 14 percent of total production occurs in the gray areas of the map. For example, Alaska and Delaware have no organic sales reported at the county level but report 2022 sales of $841,000 and $8.3 million at the State level, respectively. Some States, such as California, New York, and Washington, have more than 98 percent of State-level sales reported via county-level data. This chart was drawn from the NASS 2022 Census of Agriculture. For more on organic sales, see the USDA, Economic Research Service’s Organic Agriculture topic page.

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