USDA gave microgreens their own line in the census for the first time: 516 operations, 2.92 million square feet under protection, $86.4 million in sales for 2024. The production column on that same line does not survive a price check.
Where the numbers come from
One source: the 2024 Census of Horticultural Specialties, Volume 3, Part 3, publication AC-22-SS-3, released by USDA NASS on February 26, 2026. It covers any operation that sold $10,000 or more in horticultural products. The full tables sit in a 10.9 MB plain text file, no registration needed.
This is the twelfth census of horticultural specialties, the first having been taken in 1889. Microgreens appear in it for the first time. The appendix section on data changes since 2019 says so word for word:
Food Crops Grown Under Protection: Added the following plants: Spinach, Eggplant, and Microgreens.
What Table 15 says
516 operations, 2,924 thousand square feet under protection, $86,378 thousand in sales. Wholesale took $77,070 thousand and retail $9,309 thousand, so 89.2 percent of the money is wholesale. Average revenue per operation works out to $167,399 a year on an average 5,667 square feet.
The ratios pull apart. Microgreens account for 13.8 percent of all operations growing food crops under protection, but only 3.3 percent of the area and 8.5 percent of the money. Many small growers on small footprints, which is what anyone in the trade would expect.
The production column fails a price check
The census reports production in hundredweight: 508,132 cwt, or 50.8 million pounds. Divide sales by production and you get $1.70 per pound. Nobody sells microgreens at that price anywhere.
The state breakdown in Table 14 shows where that comes from. The same calculation, state by state, spreads across two orders of magnitude:
| State | Operations | Production, cwt | Sales, $1,000 | $ per pound |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Texas | 32 | 80,641 | 2,799 | 0.35 |
| Hawaii | 12 | 21,750 | 2,763 | 1.27 |
| California | 32 | 335,993 | 43,123 | 1.28 |
| Wisconsin | 50 | 1,717 | 2,426 | 14.13 |
| Oregon | 6 | 1,079 | 1,815 | 16.82 |
| Maryland | 3 | 18 | 68 | 37.78 |
Eight states priced below $3 per pound hold 90.5 percent of the reported national production but only 61.2 percent of the money. Fifteen states priced at $5 and above hold 3.6 percent of production and 19.4 percent of the money. Only the second group carries prices a grower would recognize.
A second check points at the same group
Take yield per square foot per year. North Carolina reports 79 pounds, Montana 50.4, Idaho 50.3, Hawaii 28.6, California 21.3. Wisconsin reports 4.9, Illinois 4.5, Florida 3.8. The states with impossible prices also report yields several times higher. Two independent checks land on the same set of respondents.
Two explanations fit. Area under protection is floor area, and racks are stacked, so 20 or even 50 pounds per square foot of floor is physically reachable. Or the large California and Texas operations put baby leaf and spring mix on the new microgreens line because the report form gives them nowhere else to put it, and California is the center of the baby leaf business. Only the second explanation accounts for $1.28 per pound, which is an ordinary wholesale price for baby leaf.
Which numbers on this line are usable
- Operation counts, area and dollar sales are measured independently of weight, so they hold.
- The hundredweight column does not hold, because it mixes different crops.
- The hydroponic share is computed from that same broken column, so the 8.3 percent figure proves nothing.
Across the fifteen states with plausible figures, the median price is $11.43 per pound. Those 214 operations sold $16.7 million, averaging $78,173 each.
Thirty two California farms are half the money
California has 32 of the 516 operations, or 6.2 percent. They hold 53.9 percent of the area and 49.9 percent of the sales. A California operation averages $1,347,594 in revenue; the other 484 operations in the country average $89,370. Area splits the same way: 49,281 square feet against 2,783.
The pattern repeats across all food crops grown under protection, and there the data is clean, because Table 2 counts operations and dollars with no weights involved. Of 3,731 operations, 73 of them, 2.0 percent, take $745.9 million of $1,011.2 million, or 73.8 percent of the market, averaging $10.2 million each. Meanwhile 2,858 operations, 76.6 percent of the total, each earn under $100,000 and together hold 7.4 percent of the money, averaging $26,082. The class totals reconcile with the table total to within one rounding unit.
What to do with this
Next time someone quotes US microgreens statistics with tonnage and a market growth rate attached, divide the dollars by the pounds. If the answer comes out under $5 per pound, something other than microgreens is inside the number, and baby leaf is the likely candidate.
The blunt takeaway from the first federal count: even where the government tracks the crop, microgreens is a business run on a few thousand square feet with revenue comparable to two salaries. Our own breakdown of what a single tray actually returns and of why these farms fail covers what happens to that revenue after costs.
