This report is the first of several publications from a major research project initiated in the fall of 1976 by the Iowa Agriculture and Home Economics Experiment Station at Iowa State University with the cooperation of University Extension. The project is the Iowa Family Farm Research Project. One phase of this project is a sample survey, conducted in the spring of 1977, of farms and farm households in all of Iowa’s 99 counties. Only farms with $2,500 or more gross farm sales in 1976 were included in the survey. Information was gathered from a sample of 933 farm households.

The questionnaire was divided into two parts: one relating to the farm household, and the other relating to the farm business. The person determined to be the operator by a separate screening process responded to the farm business section of the questionnaire, and the spouse of this person, when one was present, responded to the household section. The operator was identified as the primary decision maker for the farm business, except where more than one decision maker was identified, in which case the number of days worked on the farm became the criterion for selecting between them. Seven persons within these households were identified as second operators having their own separate farming operation, and information relating to these operations was gathered also. Eleven female operators were identified out of the total of 940 farm business operations studied.