What grows on the farms around us?

Twenty years of farming

Every five years the Census of Agriculture counts every farm in the country. These are its numbers for Whatcom County.

Reading this page

• Squares, not fields. Crops are shown only as the mix inside each 1 km square (247 acres), never field by field, and no farm, farmer or dairy is named or marked. Milk cows appear only as county totals.
• Five years, not one. The USDA's crop map labels every 30 m of farmland each year from satellite images, but a single year mixes up hay, grass and pasture and mislabels small fields. So a spot counts as farmland here when it was mapped as a crop in at least three of the five years 2021–2025, and it is shown as the crop it was mapped as most often. Grass mapped in a year between hay years counts as hay; other grass and pasture, which includes mountain meadows and young clearcuts, is left off.
• Field by field, then square by square. Satellite pixels are noisy: the crop map scatters "berry" and "hay" spots over yards, hedgerows and woodlots. So each spot inside a farm field takes the crop most common in that field, using field outlines from Fields of The World, a global map of farm fields drawn by computer from satellite images. Outside those outlines, only patches of 10 acres or more count. The outlines are used only in this calculation and are not shown.
• Change over time comes only from the Census, the official count. The satellite map changes too much from year to year, by mistake rather than by farming, to show trends.
• "(withheld)" means the Census kept a number private because it could identify a farm.
• Shellfish beds on the tidelands, many of them tribal fisheries, are not part of this page.
• Sales are in the dollars of each census year, not adjusted for inflation.