Which state has the BIGGEST farms? 📏

Wyoming — 2,729 acres per farm. The figure for the whole country is 463 acres per farm, so the average Wyoming farm is almost six times the average American one. Second is Montana at 2,374; third is Nevada at 1,889. Now go to the far end of the same table. The smallest average farm in the country is in Rhode Island: 56 acres. Wyoming’s average farm is about 49 times bigger. Same country, same table, same year. A gap like that has many causes, and this site is not going to pretend it knows how much of it is which. But here is something that is simply on the record, whatever it did or did not cause. For decades, the most land a single homestead claim could cover without paying for the land itself was a number the federal government set — free of the price of the land, but never of the filing fees, or of the years you had to live on it — and that number did not stay the same. The Bureau of Land Management’s homesteading fact sheet lists the changes in order: the 1862 Homestead Act let settlers “obtain up to 160 acres”; the 1909 Enlarged Homestead Act “Allowed homestead claims up to 320 acres in Colorado, Montana, Nevada, Oregon, Utah, Washington, Wyoming, and Territories of Arizona and New Mexico”; the 1916 Stock Raising Homestead Act “Allowed homestead entry of up to 640 acres in areas that had to be first designated by the Secretary of the Interior as ‘stock-raising lands.’” Read that 1909 list again beside this ranking. Five of the seven states at the top of this table — Wyoming, Montana, Nevada, New Mexico and Arizona — are on it. North Dakota and South Dakota, fifth and seventh here, are not. One warning before you go: this is an average, and an average is not a typical farm. When a few of the things being averaged are enormous, the average can sit above almost all of them. Biscuit’s Field Note is about the years when Congress kept changing that number.