Photo Credit: Farmartin/Wikimedia Commons

The average age of American farmers is rising with not enough young farmers to replace them once they retire, indicating trouble for the future of American farming. Farms could further consolidate, threatening the existence of small family farms and making it even harder for young farmers to enter the field.

Peter Varas decided to become a farmer six years ago while still in college in San Diego. But like most young and first-generation farmers in the country, the 25-year-old has been struggling to get his own farm started long after graduating. The biggest barrier to his venture – finding affordable farmland.

“Land is expensive,” said Varas, who is currently a researcher at UC Berkeley and a farm manager with Multinational Exchange for Sustainable Agriculture, “I’m young and I don’t really have access to capital like that.”

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Percentage of farmers under the age of 35 in 2017

Thirty percent of the aspiring farmers surveyed by the National Young Farmers Coalition (NYFC) in 2017 and 20 percent of the young farmers who either temporarily or permanently quit farming said that their main challenge was finding affordable land. The average value of farmland in the United States in 2018 was $4,130 per acre, up by 8 percent from just five years ago.

And for farmers like Varas who already have student loans to pay off, going further into debt is not an appealing option. The same NYFC survey found that student debt was the second biggest challenge for the young farmers it surveyed. A previous survey by the coalition reported that its respondents had an average student debt of $35,000.

“I’m also trying to help my family out with money,” said Varas, “It’s a difficult thing to balance.”

The average age of American farmers is rising with not enough young farmers to replace them once they retire, indicating trouble for the future of American farming. Farms could further consolidate, threatening the existence of small family farms and making it even harder for young farmers to enter the field.

In the next 20 years, 400 million acres of farmland are expected to change hands and retiring farmers – who generally depend upon the sale or leasing of their land and other farm assets to pay for their retirement – are more likely to choose established large farmers, developers, or commercial agricultural businesses.

“It differs region to region on some levels,” said Ian McSweeney, organizational director, Agrarian Trust, a non-profit that helps new farmers access affordable farmland, “In some areas it’s just that land goes fallow and the community loses residents. We’re already seeing a depopulated rural America play out before our eyes.”

 

In 2017, farms with revenues greater than $1 million dollars accounted for two-thirds of the food produced.

The average size of farmland is already on the rise in the country. There was a 6 percent jump in the number of farms bigger than 2000 acres, according to the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA). And in an era of depreciating farm prices, large farms have the ability to produce enough food to turn over a profit in a way small farms cannot, allowing them to capture a lion’s share of the market. In 2017, farms with revenues greater than a million dollars, which are just 4 percent of all farms in the country, accounted for two-thirds of the food produced.

Environmentally, it hampers the adoption of sustainable agricultural practices. Young and beginning farmers are more likely to establish eco-friendly farms. In the 2017 survey by NYFC, 75 percent of all respondents described their farming practices as sustainable and 63 percent said they were organic farmers. For Varas finding land that’s not next to industrial farms spraying pesticides is just as important as finding affordable land.

But the lack of more young farmers is unlikely to affect the amount of food produced. Fears of the inability to meet future food demands are misplaced, said James Mintert, director, Center for Commercial Agriculture at Purdue University. Mechanization of US agriculture has made large-scale food production easy and efficient, requiring less labor and fewer producers. It has also allowed farmers to retire much later in life.

Despite a decline in the number of farms and farm acreage, food production has increased, and is expected to continue increasing, for major crops, with the exception of wheat, in the country, according to USDA.

Making Farming Easier for the Next Generation

Having access to land and no student loans doesn’t necessarily mean an easy life for young farmers. High costs of cultivation can limit their ability to sustain their farms and make a profit. 

Olivia Watkins, a mushroom farmer in upstate New York, inherited forest land from her parents who also helped her pay for her college degree in sustainable agriculture. But she does not have the budget to clear a large enough patch of land and set up irrigation facilities to grow vegetables. So she decided to grow mushrooms instead.

“I have to be creative in terms of what product I’m growing,” said Watkins, 23.

Another widely touted solution by activists is to declare agriculture as a public service. It would allow young farmers to benefit from public service loan forgiveness and have one less barrier – student loans – to enter farming.

But the first step in bringing in a new generation of farmers is through education. It’s important to engage students at the school level about what it means to be an agriculturalist and provide more learning opportunities to those who are interested in feeding the world, said Blaze Currie with the National Future Farmers of America Organization. 

“I think it’s going to be important for the conversation to shift towards what we’re doing in our local school districts,” said Currie.