Editor’s Note: This post is from our data newsletter, the Rural Index, headed by Sarah Melotte, the Daily Yonder’s data reporter. Subscribe to get a weekly map or graph straight to your inbox.
In 2018, I was the manager of an urban farm in Greenville, South Carolina, that employed local teens through a workforce development program. One day, while trying to teach them about the American food system, I asked where they thought the ingredients for bread came from. After an awkward silence, one student answered, “The grocery store,” which set off a roar of laughter. I lost their attention for the rest of the day.
But despite my failure to spark the interest of teenagers, I’d like to revive that quintessential question, “Where does my food come from?” The following five maps show where your Thanksgiving meal might have come from if it were sourced entirely within the United States. (Keep in mind that many of these crops are also imported into the country.)
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American producers farmed 28,000 acres of cranberries in 2022, the latest year of available data. Cranberry production in the United States is concentrated in New England, Wisconsin, and the Pacific Northwest. That’s because cranberries need cold winters to produce the most fruit.
In 2022, the most recent year of available data, New England had nearly 12,000 acres in cranberry production. Almost all of those acres are in metropolitan counties. The metropolitan area of Plymouth County, Massachusetts, which is famous for cranberry farming, produced about an estimated 80% of New England’s cranberry crop in 2022.
It might be counterintuitive that a lot of agricultural production can happen in counties that are not considered rural by the county-level definition we usually use at the Daily Yonder. But there are a variety of ways to define rural, some of which capture rurality at a finer scale than the county. Larger farms might be located in rural census tracts of counties that might be generally classified as metropolitan, while other farms are small, urban operations, like the market garden I briefly managed in South Carolina.
In Wisconsin, however, all of the cranberry production recorded in the 2022 census was in nonmetropolitan, or rural, counties. In 2022, Wisconsin had almost 13,000 acres dedicated to cranberry production.
In the Pacific Northwest, roughly 3,800 acres were dedicated to cranberry production in 2022.
The Census of Agriculture uses a variety of measurements to record yield and productivity, but not all of them are recorded for every crop. For cranberries, the measure used for this analysis is the number of acres bearing fruit. Other crops rely on different units of measurement.
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In 2022, American farmers sold approximately 223 million turkeys, 67% of which came from nonmetropolitan counties. The hotspots for turkey operations in the United States were Central Minnesota, Northwest Arkansas, Southern Indiana, the Carolinas, and Virginia.
Rural Sampson County, North Carolina, sold 9.9 million turkeys, the highest sales in the country. The small metropolitan community of Kershaw County, South Carolina, had the second highest turkey sales in 2022, selling about 7.4 million birds.
Overall, turkey operations in the Southeastern United States sold 87.9 million turkeys in 2022, 52 million of which came from rural counties.
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In 2022, American farmers sold more than $31 billion in hog meat, nearly 80% of which came from rural counties.
In addition to turkey farming, Sampson County, North Carolina, is also a hotspot for hog farming. In 2022, Sampson County farmers sold $966 million in hogs. In nearby Duplin County, North Carolina, farmers sold roughly $940 million of hog meat in 2022.
Outside of North Carolina, the greatest hotspot for hog production is in Northern Iowa and Southern Minnesota. In 2022, Midwestern farmers sold more than $25 billion in hog meat. In rural Sioux County, Iowa, alone, farmers sold approximately $753 million.
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American farmers harvested more than 100,000 acres of sweet potatoes in 2022. The major hotspots for sweet potato production were in Eastern North Carolina and in California’s Central Valley.
The metropolitan area of Merced County, California, had the most acreage dedicated to sweet potato production in 2022 with approximately 20,600 of sweet potatoes harvested that year.
In rural Greene County, North Carolina, farmers harvested 7,300 acres of sweet potatoes in 2022. (Many of the sweet potato figures in Eastern North Carolina have high margins of error, so keep that in mind while citing these figures.)
Sweet Potatoes grow best in warm climates with nutrient-rich, well-drained soils. For that reason they also thrive in communities along the Mississippi River in Arkansas, Louisiana, and Mississippi. Farmers in those three states harvested more than 23,000 acres of sweet potatoes in 2022.
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In 2022, American orchardists farmed 338,200 acres of pecans. The majority of pecan production is concentrated in Oklahoma, Texas, and Southern Georgia. Pecan trees need humid, warm climates with well-drained soils.
Georgia orchardists had 118,700 acres of pecan production in 2022, 76,200 of which were in rural counties. In rural Mitchell County, Georgia, there were 16,300 acres dedicated to pecan production in 2022.
Methodology note: This analysis uses data from the 2022 USDA Census of Agriculture, which is already three years old and may not reflect current conditions. The Census also has relatively low response rates, which can introduce distortions or gaps in the data.
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