Measuring Farm Household Well-Being: Comparing Consumption and Income-based Measures

This paper reports estimates of consumption-based measures of well-being for farm households based on new, specially-designed survey questions in USDA’s annual, nationally representative survey of farms, the Agricultural Resource Management Survey. With this new data, we show how patterns of consumption-smoothing relative to income levels differ between farm households versus all U.S. households, and between households of operators of large farms vs. “residential-lifestyle” farms, with limited exposure to farm income variability. We then show that the consumption measure provides a different perspective than income and wealth on the well-being of farm households relative to all U.S. households.