- “We’re going to see a sea change in American agriculture as the next generation gets on the land,” said Kathleen Merrigan, the head of the Food Institute at George Washington University and a deputy secretary at the Department of Agriculture under President Barack Obama. “The only question is whether they’ll get on the land, given the challenges.”
The number of farmers age 25 to 34 grew 2.2 percent between 2007 and 2012, according to the 2014 USDA census, a period when other groups of farmers — save the oldest — shrunk by double digits. In some states, such as California, Nebraska and South Dakota, the number of beginning farmers has grown by 20 percent or more.
A survey conducted by the National Young Farmers Coalition, an advocacy group, with Merrigan’s help shows that the majority of young farmers did not grow up in agricultural families.
Enjoy your microgreens and arugala you Trump-voting sacks of shit. 'cuz the hipsters? They ain't farming seven sections of corn.
Honestly, non-snarkily, I really like the idea of living off the land and farming in such a way so as to meet (most of ) a person/family's nutritional needs - kickin' it old school. The idea has always had a lot of appeal to me. My brother and I used to dream-talk about going in together on that sort of communal farm endeavor. Philosophically speaking, I've always found it a fair shame that our society basically prohibits a person from picking up, finding a patch of land, putting down roots (literally) and living off the land for long-term sustenance. Unless you inherit some property and have a few buckets of cash saved away, there's just no way you can maintain a farm-based life without some kind of scheme to generate profit. Property tax and what not. Generally speaking I'm a fan of taxes, don't get me wrong. I know the difference between ideals and reality though, so I know I find a lot of appeal in these ideas...but the life would be p tough. That's why I really do think the ideal way to farming/self-sustenance does require at least a small band of physically capable, committed adults for successful execution. As for seven sections of corn - yeah. We ain't talkin industrial farming here. Industrial farming of cash crops funded by gov't subsidies is no kind of farming I'm interested in at all. I guess thank god for Michael Pollan and everyone else who helped get us here, right? Full article got behind a paywall for me like wamp, but hey thar's my opinions.
This was me. After years of visiting my uncle's pastorally picturesque blueberry farm, I thought I'd see what it was all about. I worked 8am-7pm 6 days a week for four months on a certified organically grown farm in rural North Carolina. The work was hard and beautifully rewarding because of it. I learned more in those months about farming than I ever learned from tending a garden with my parents/grandparents growing up - and we had big gardens when I was young. The folks I lived with were self-sufficient, handy, knowledgeable, and intensely agrarian - i.e. dinner conversation revolved around the hidden superfood-nutritional benefits of sweet potato greens. It's a nice and simple life. I hope you get the opportunity to live it.Honestly, non-snarkily, I really like the idea of living off the land
That's capitalism, though - If I can feed three families off my five acres and you can feed one, that means I free up two families to do something other than farming. From a collectivist standpoint, you're holding back society - your idyll is subsistence farming while mine creates a merchant and/or artisan class. The whole "manifest destiny" thing was about claiming land so that the natives or foreign invaders couldn't; it wasn't until trade goods traveled back to the homelands that society advanced to the frontier. There's about an acre of arable land per person in the United States. That's going down to 0.6 in the next 30 years. We need about 1.2 acres per person using modern agriculture. One of my favorite books from backintheday? Fundamentally, farming hasn't been a 1:1 adventure in these United States since 1900.
I have friends on both sides of this equation. Person 1: An Iowa corn farmer, who owns several thousand acres of land, and rents it out to farmers who actually till the soil. He spends the majority of his time spying on the farmers in a variety of ways, to ensure they are "doing it right", and getting maximum yields, because he gets a cut of their sale price. He goes out and measures the distance between plants, the composition of the soil, the watering schedule, etc., and if they do anything wrong, they get dinged. It must suck ass to rent land from him. (But he does this micro-management because there are a LOT of ways for his tenants to screw him. And they have. So he has to constantly be on them to ensure they aren't hiding crops, underquoting their total sales, etc.) Person 2: She worked in big construction projects, like skyscrapers. In her spare time, she found a wreck of a house, spent a year fixing it up, sold it for a huge bucket of money. Then she bought a small house with lots of property, quit the construction job, and built herself a little urban farm. In fact, she called it that, too: Urban Sanctuary Farm She has had tremendous success going to local farmers markets, and making her own cosmetic products (essential oils, beard oil, skin care products, honeybee lip balms, etc.) in the winter, and going to all the winter/holiday bazaars and festivals. It is a lot of work, but she loves it. And, with her construction background, she builds all the facilities she needs to run the little farm. But in the end... there simply isn't enough land for everyone to be a farmer. There are too many people on the planet, now, and without industrial farming yields, a billion people would die. So idyllic farming like Person 2 will always be a niche for those who can afford it. Everyone else will eat Person 1's food.
I think it's an interesting prospect that everyone in the world could garden instead of farm. I'd be hard pressed to find a living space in which one couldn't grow a couple potted carrots and herbs. I agree that high-yield farming is impossible for everyone to do, for space constraints and because people don't have enough time or care to make it happen. I've been thinking of making some herbal infused oils and selling them at farmers markets alongside my modest crop of tomatoes and onions. Has anyone here ever tried anything similar?
There isn't physically enough arable land (27 million square miles on Earth) for 7.6 billion people to all grow their own food. Logistically it would be a problem, as well. There isn't enough room for 7.6b people to live near their plot of garden. (Much less issues like sewage, water, etc.) So the only way to feed the world now and into the future, is with industrial farming techniques. Gardening will always be a pastime effort for people fortunate to live in an area with arable land, and a small enough population that they can have a patch of garden. That's just the way it is. (Oh. And the farmer friend of mine has a business doing exactly what you are talking about: herbal infused oils, soaps, and selling them at farmer's markets. She calls that Soapy Business.
Oh, I have no doubt that it is impossible for every individual to grow all their sustenance. You are completely correct. I was referencing something more along the lines of having a small garden box / a few pots to grow herbs and spices in. I feel as if almost everyone has the means to accomplish this eco-friendly task. It couldn't take more than a few minutes per day to do. Ah! Your friend has a hobbyset I'd very much like to reflect. Do you know if farmers markets charge to set up a table?
I was going to recommend WWOOF to you but apparently I already did 11 months ago. Farming is hard work. For a lot of people it's rewarding. My grandfather loved his plot. Me? I put in raised beds and my wife and kid plant a bunch of stuff but then they ignore it the entire summer while I'm gone so I get to see the the "what might have been" harvest every year. Dunno. I got at least 3 cups of onions this year... and holy shit, pull your parsnips when they're young or they turn into Triffids.
Seconded on WWOOF'ing. A hard working frieend of mine from my synagogue fell in love with working with goats the last time she WWOOF'd between semesters. After either finishing up or taking a break form college, she's gone right back into the system on a new farm that she's been in contact locally. The system and choice it allows has got me considering it as an option out of graduation for a bit. Would be nice to use Taglit to get time on a kibbutz to compare the environments.
Agricultural loans are a whole 'nuther realm. If you work on a farm for a couple years, the Farm Bureau considers you to be a competent farmer. They will then help you secure agricultural loans. Cropland can also be rented more easily than purchased - sharecropping is alive and well. Finally, the capital investment necessary to start farming is radically lower than most small business. If you want to be a dentist, you go to school for eight years, buy a building or a practice for a million dollars and get started paying down your (truly massive) debt. If you want to be a farmer, go WWOOFing for a year, then sign on as a farmhand, then get an ag loan that pretty much pays everything you need. Or, you know, rent land for $100 an acre or less and put crops on it. My wife's cousin had a dairy farm up until last year. They had nothing past high school but they had a thousand head of cattle, leased 500 acres of grazing land and were an easy $2m in debt.
...this is the sort of thing where I've said the same thing three times and you're like "...ORLY?" YRLYThe farm bill itself does not fund FSA lending. Congress does that annually, says Jim Radintz, USDA’s assistant deputy administrator for farm loan programs in Washington, D.C. “Congress has reserved, by law, a substantial portion of funding for beginning farmers, particularly in the direct programs,” he says. “In the direct farm ownership (real estate purchase) program, 75% of the funds are reserved for beginning farmers for the first 11 months of the fiscal year.” Half of direct operating loan funds are reserved for beginning farmers for the first 11 months. FSA also guarantees loans from commercial lenders, with 40% held for beginning farmers for the first six months. All this gives start-up operations an edge on limited funds, he says.
Right, and I understand that must be aggravating. I do not intend to cause aggravation. My initial comment was in shock at the fact that while lots of folks are leaving desk jobs to farm, they aren't really doing anything other than effectively sharecropping. They don't own land, they only barely get to decide who they are selling their produce to. I suppose when I read that title, it suggests that people are buying and owning farms, rather than just doing the same old permadebt path that's so well worn by the Farm Bureau. Are these people going to have any savings in the 10, 20, 30 year term? Will they be able to own their property and pass it on to another, less indebted generation? I don't know the answer, but if we are doing the same things as ever, we will get the same results as ever. I have my Little House on the Prairie dreams like _refugee_, like lots of people our age. But that's all they are ever going to be, dreams.
Wakey wakey eggs and bakey. Look - the average American burns about 13,000 kWh a year. That's in electricity - we'll ignore transport for reasons that are about to become clear. That also doesn't cover things like heating. 13,000 kWh a year is 36 kWh a day. Let's assume you work 8 hours a day... and let's assume that the only thing you do is peddle an exercise bike to generate electricity. We're going to assume that because we have the best numbers there... depending on who you ask, a cyclist in good training can generate about a quarter horsepower indefinitely. That's about a fifth of a kilowatt, by the way. So. Sitting at your Peloton, which is one of the not-connected-to-the-internet, not-screened, not-powered spinning cycles, your workday involves generating 2 kW. You're burning 36. Before you get on the bus or get in the car. Before you heat a tea kettle on the stove. Before you take a warm shower. Before you heat the house. ___________________________________________________________ Now obviously - you can cut your consumption. You can put up a windmill. You can dam a waterfall. You can hang solar panels (we won't get into what it costs in energy to make a solar panel). But as far as your raw energy profile, your physical output as a human is a little over 5% of your physical input as a human, just in electricity (a gallon of gas is about 37kWh so if your commute is 25 miles each way you've doubled your footprint, for example, and that's if you're driving a brand new Prius). "Off the grid" is a lovely idea but in order for you to do it, you have to consume an awful lot of resources. You want water? You need water rights. You want access? You need a variance. Even if you wanna do subsistence farming you gotta be serious about it. The population of London is about 9 million right now. The population of London under Henry VIII was about 50,000. That delta is due to the modernization of agriculture. Little House on the Prairie was set in the 1870s, when the population of the United States was under 40 million people. It's over 400 now. You can have your dream. But you need to recognize that as envisioned by you, it's a selfish dream. Selfish dreams cost more money than selfless ones. If you want 5 acres and independence, you need to be producing enough crops to feed a CSA with 150 shares. That probably gives you $3000 a month from April through September. That's $18,000. So. you've got 5 acres, you're feeding yourself, and you've got $1500 a month in bills. Can you do it? I would argue you can. It's a pain in the ass, though. So it's not that you can't dream. It's that you can't dream easy.I have my Little House on the Prairie dreams like _refugee_, like lots of people our age. But that's all they are ever going to be, dreams.
Accurate. And energy mitigation looks a lot like shitting into sawdust compost, sleeping in a trailer-house hybrid, small gas engine pump irrigation, wood stove, all hand tools except a walk-behind tractor from '89 that has no easy-to-find replaceable parts. CSA shares supplemented by twice-weekly farmers markets might get you $3,600/month, but you've spent enough on gas and storage at this point that the real value you've incurred after a day at market is about $1.75/hr. The only decision point that makes any of that easier is growing for a market with a cashable crop like fruit/berries or wholesale grains (non-optional at the scale discussed here) instead of growing for self-sufficiency and a portfolio of produce. To speak of something I know about, you can pack a shit ton of blueberries into 5 acres.
Whatcom County grows 80% of the raspberries in the United States. Wholesale they make between $1.50 and $1.80 a pound. An acre of raspberries in Whatcom County costs $3500 to produce, and produces between 5,000 and 8,000 lbs of marketable raspberries. I was looking at a 20 acre raspberry farm for about a million dollars. That's somewhere between $100k and $300k gross every year. Clearly - it's a living. Clearly, it's something you can turn a profit on. But you better like raspberries. I was also looking at hazelnuts. Whatcom County used to produce 80% of the hazelnuts in the united states and I like trees. Unfortunately, the U of Oregon agriculture department determined that the break-even period on a hazelnut tree is 14 years, and they only produce for 20-25. And that is why there are no new hazelnut orchards.