A national comparison shows that the median rate of return for nonfarm businesses exceeds farm businesses by approximately three percentage points, but that large farms are four percentage points higher than nonfarm businesses at the median. Distributional analysis reveals that nonfarm businesses lagged farm business below the median but exceeded them above the median of the distribution. Decomposition methods show that asset turnover rather than differences in operating profit margins explains most of the divergence in rates of profit to entrepreneurs in the farm and nonfarm sectors.