Global Farm Size, v1, 2000

The aim of this research is to create a global map of farm sizes. We do this by merging two currently available sources of information on the distribution of farm sizes across the world: national level data on farm size distributions and subnational data on field size distributions. The resulting map is a ”best guess” of where different sizes of farms are distributed globally. We caution that this map should not be used for detailed country level analysis, but is intended for global assessment studies, where results are typically aggregated at the regional or global level. This document explains the underlying data, pre-processing, and algorithm we developed to create this map. We were driven to create this map as a work that can be built upon and improved as higher resolution and more accurate data become available.

Download the Global Farm Size, v1, 2000 layers (xxMB GeoTIFF files).

Insert table or list of files to be downloaded.

The methods for generating the farm layers are described in detail in this PDF file (956 KB).

Data set:

Mehrabi, Z. and V. Ricciardi. 2024. Global Farm Size, Version 1, 2000. Preliminary Release). (Palisades, NY: NASA Socioeconomic Data and Applications Center (SEDAC). https://doi.org/10.7927/xxxx-xxxx. Accessed DAY MONTH YEAR.

Peer-reviewed publication:

Mehrabi, Z., McDowell, M.J., Ricciardi, V. et al. 2020. The global divide in data-driven farming. Nature Sustainability, 4:154–160. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41893-020-00631-0

This is a preliminary open data release, pending peer review of the data and associated journal articles. Following the peer review process, data curation will be completed by the NASA Socioeconomic Data and Applications Center (SEDAC) and the data will be disseminated through the SEDAC catalog.