A recent email asked:

I am quite certain that the USDA has a definition for a small family farm, and that some other agency has one for family owned businesses... Could you find out what they are, what the basis for the definitions are and when the numbers were last updated?

If there are definitions in existence, they it is easier, I believe to come up with a description of what we might exempt from estate taxation, and what we would not....the way it is now, there dialogue will have it that a 100 milliion farm is being adversely affected. It would be great if we could say, ah, but that is not a small family farm, that is an agribusiness, or whatever....

Can you help?

Family Farms:

"Small family farms" are usually defined to have less that $250,000 in sales.

See USDA Factbook in particular this chart.

The Average Farm net worth: $563,562 (In 1999). The median net worth will be considerably less.

More information can be found at the economic research service section at the USDA.

Small businesses:

Usually defined to be fewer than 500 employees. The Federal Reserve gathers information on these firms through their Survey of Small Business Finances. You can find quite a bit of this data summarized in this article.

Other good sources are the Small Business Administration or the Census Bureau