Farm income by state data: the series that matter, delivered as rows

One record owns this question and Datadory delivers it as plain typed rows: USDA ERS Farm Income and Wealth Statistics, the Economic Research Service's account of US farm-sector finances. One row per year, state and line item - roughly 460,000 rows per full release, about 109 MB uncompressed - covering the United States and all 50 states plus current-year national forecasts.

It is an income statement and a balance sheet at once. The income side carries value added by agriculture, net farm income, net cash income, returns to operators, cash receipts by commodity, federal direct government payments by program and production expenses by type. The wealth side adds assets, liabilities, working capital and selected liquidity, efficiency, solvency and profitability ratios. Farm-level tables slice average net cash income by farm typology, sales class and commodity specialization.

Everything else in the 16-record agricultural slice plays a supporting role: NASS supplies the commodity volumes behind receipts, ARMS supplies farm-business structure, PSD and FAOSTAT cover the foreign markets that decide what US producers earn.

The February 5, 2026 release shows the working shape: state estimates through 2024 with 2025-2026 national forecasts sitting in one flat table. Columns are predictable once you have seen them - Year, State (US for national totals), an artificialKey encoding the variable-commodity hierarchy, both variable-description segments, Amount, unit description, the publication date of the vintage and a chain-type GDP deflator for real-dollar conversions.

Two structural facts decide whether this record fits your question. State balance-sheet estimation has been suspended - those series end in 2003, so any per-state debt or asset claim stops there. And values are annual only; there is no quarterly or monthly income series anywhere in the product, so intra-year movement needs different records.

Three companions turn a single-state income statement into an argument.

USDA ERS ARMS - Farm Financial and Crop Production Practices links the sector accounts to the businesses behind them. Its Farm Structure and Finance stream runs through 2024 and slices estimates by farm type, economic sales class, operator age and production specialty. Use it to explain why a state's net farm income moved - fewer, larger operations, or heavier debt service. Its Crop Production Practices stream stops at the 2013 survey.

USDA FAS PSD Online frames the demand side: roughly 2.09 million supply-and-demand balances for 63 commodities across 214 countries, market years 1960-2026. This is the context for why Iowa's soybean receipts track Chinese import policy.

IndexMundi - Agricultural Commodity Prices gives you the price environment between income releases: about 90 monthly commodity price series running from July 1991 forward, drawn from World Bank, IMF, USDA and Bloomberg data. Pair it with the income statement and price moves stop being anecdotes.

Know the boundaries before you publish a chart. The series measures the farm sector: income accruing from agricultural production, allocated to states by where production happens. It is not household income - operator household economics live in ARMS - and it says nothing about rural poverty, off-farm wages or local multiplier effects.

Geography has two blind spots. State balance sheets end in 2003, so cross-state solvency comparisons cannot be built from current releases. And sub-state income does not exist in this record at all - county questions route to USDA NASS Quick Stats, whose survey and Census estimates resolve from national totals down to counties, ag districts, watersheds, congressional districts and ZIP codes, with records reaching back to 1850. For the complete structural picture, the USDA Census of Agriculture runs every five years from 1840 through 2022, counting farms and their sales, expenses, land and operators at county, state and national level.

Mind the revision cycle too. Prior-year forecasts convert to estimates only at the late-summer release, so a forecast-year figure pulled mid-cycle will differ from the same figure six months later. Record the publication date with every extract - the field exists precisely so your analysis stays reproducible.

Ag lenders and crop insurers anchor state risk models on net farm income and balance-sheet ratios, then drop to Quick Stats for county yield context when a book of business concentrates in one basin.

Commodity traders and input suppliers read cash receipts by commodity as a demand map - which states earn from corn versus cattle decides where fertilizer, machinery and storage capacity sells.

Rural-focused investors use the sector accounts as the denominator for everything else: a state whose net farm income doubles while its harvested acres hold flat is a different market from one growing by acreage.

All four jobs run off the same typed rows - which is why they arrive as tables keyed by year, geography and line item rather than as charts you have to reverse-engineer.

Datadory handles that so the rows just arrive: normalized encodings, units kept beside amounts so dollars, percent, ratio and 1,000-acre series never mix, real-dollar conversions using the included deflator, and estimates separated from forecasts by publication vintage. Delivered daily, weekly, or hourly - your call - into your warehouse, your notebook or your dashboard.

Start with a sample: tell us the states and line items you need and we will route the extract before you finish scoping the schema.

This page is one thread of a broader guide. Start with the agricultural products services data guide for the full 23-record landscape, then go deeper on the neighboring workflows: ARMS farm financial survey data for farm-business structure, county level farm data for sub-state sizing, and the Datadory agricultural products services data hub for the complete dataset index.