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There was an organic couple near me who put on seminars on how to make a living on a small farm
They said they were proof it could be done. He was drawing a military officer's retirement plus SS from a post military job
She was drawing a state retirement from being a college instructor
Young people are interested in farming: Although perhaps not so much at the industrial scale. Micro farms are in. Urban farms are in. Truth is, you can grow a lot on a little bit of land, if you optimize things.
I agree with the last quote. We grew a year's worth of potatoes and a third of a year's vegetables in our Alaskan backyard in our short growing season. Granted the long daylight hours and adequate water was a big help. The thing to do is stay abreast of the trends and produce a premium product (organic, non-GMO, things hard to produce in quantity or harvest mechanically, or consumer ready products) though no one is going to make a killing doing these things, a living of sorts might be accomplished. Another thing that would be profitable is four season produce with green and hoop houses. We plan to do this and use our plentiful wood as a heat source.
I quoted the first quote because this is what is being done primarily now. Micro-farms being worked by retirees or people with day jobs. My husband and I being in this category.
The hard thing for young people is affording the land but a 10-15 acre parcel is completely doable as part of a home/land package outside of small cities. With intensive scale production of several different types of product (Fruits/berries/truck vegetables/herbs/chickens/eggs/goats/craft cheeses/cut flowers) as long as the competition is light and the product of high quality, there should be a market for it. The key is having income to pay for home/land until things get going and to allow so room for float in a bad year.
In full disclosure, I am retired military, and if I were flipping burgers I would have a greater income. My income is well below the minimum for paying income taxes, yet still above the poverty level.
Having a pension us way better than not having a pension.
But don't fall into the mindset that folks with a pension earn more than a truck stop waitress earns.
I've gotten into growing vegetables recently and I figure that I could be a farmer. Truthfully, I don't like most human beings. I generally find them to be self-seeking, inconsiderate, stupid, and generally a nuisance and hindrance to me. There are some groups of people who escape that evaluation en masse, such as children and the elderly (hence why I do well as a music teacher, and as an entertainer for the elderly), but for the most part, I don't like people. It could be because I'm autistic and I don't relate to most people, but regardless of the reason, I think I would enjoy farming because it's an occupation / lifestyle which I could do largely by myself or with merely a select few people, such as my wife.
This article I read said that there is a crisis in America because few young people want to go into farming. I'm 34, which means I'm fairly young. I don't have the first clue how to get into farming. It's not like farms around my home area advertise for help. They're all small enough that they could feasibly be operated by one person with a tractor, or perhaps one family. There are no commercial farming operations anywhere nearby... not to mention, even if there were, why would any of them want to hire me, a guy who doesn't have much experience, when there are plenty of dudes my age who have grown up with it to the point where they have 30 years of experience by the time they reach age 34?!
I've felt that an easy way to get young people into farming is simply to give them a small farm to work, along with all of the equipment required to operate it... even if that equipment and the land was merely on loan for a while. There would be some requirement that they at least log a certain number of hours working that farm, or perhaps a production requirement. After a certain number of years working that farm or meeting those requirements (whatever they may be), the farm and the equipment belong to the farmer.
Young people aren't going to get into farming if they can't afford to buy a farm and farming equipment, and with fewer and fewer older Americans being in farming, there won't be that many young Americans inheriting such farmland and equipment from their families.
Any thoughts?
Your problem is that even in farming like any business you have to deal with people if your to be a success. Normally farming in any serious sense is business like any other. The small family farm has been dead for sometime really. Even small farms are more specialized and larger businesses.
In full disclosure, I am retired military, and if I were flipping burgers I would have a greater income.
Same here but I took my short military service time and moved it to Federal civil service where I retired. Essentially I went to "town" to get a pension but I always had the intention to return to rural America. I have a small Federal pension as well as a very tiny SS annuity.
As to the subject of this thread, as long as people like to eat, there will be farmers. I would never have the nerve to claim that I am now, or will ever be, a farmer. I suppose if producer prices somehow went sky high, I may start using my tractors for more than just mowing. They had better hurry though.
Your problem is that even in farming like any business you have to deal with people if your to be a success. Normally farming in any serious sense is business like any other. The small family farm has been dead for sometime really. Even small farms are more specialized and larger businesses.
The plain fact is that if farming were more profitable, ie, had a better ROI, there wouldn't be a problem with younger people in farming. There are a lot of young people who are raised on farms and would like to be farmers and have access to farmland, machinery, livestock, etc through their families who go into other careers because they see their fathers/uncles/grandfathers/cousins who are farmers work endless hours and still come up short on the balance sheets at the end of the year. Many take agriculture-related jobs. Others take jobs in or relatively close to their hometowns, so it's not like they turn their backs on the rural life-style, it's just that they realize there's not much future for them in farming.
As far as I can tell, most farmers in this part of country who have actually been able to make a success of farming, don't have a lot of problems finding sons, sons-in-law, nephews, cousins, etc to take on their farming operations.
This thread makes it look like the best way to get into farming is to take a government job or be military (another government job) and then retire on a guaranteed paycheck. Then you can decry the damn gumbint all day long and talk about the free market
I digres. The problem of young people in farming is really the following: farming had never been a profitable venture simply because food cannot be an expensive item. Since people eat to survive and so much food is consumed daily by everyone, food must, by definition, be cheap. The fact that food factories run by corporations are involved and the fact that there is a lot of foreign produce imported further tells us that food needs to be cheap or else two things would happen: 1) riots and 2) everyone would turn into a farmer if food was very expensive since the jobs they would otherwise hold would not be sufficient to cover the costs of food.
So, young people have no problems getting into farming around here. However, that's because there are a lot of professionals in the area, making a lot of money and willing to pay $4/lb of tomatoes and $4/lb of squash etc. The whole "small farm and diversification of product" thing started because most of the people getting into farming today cannot afford to buy a large piece of land to turn into a farm. Do not forget they also need to live somewhere - additional cost. Finally, to be close to your market and to be present at all the farmers markets etc. - you need to live close to town where you customer base is - further cost on your land. In that situation, people are forced to be resourceful and "pretend" that having a small, niche farm is what farming should really be. As if they would refuse a 20 times larger holding of land if they could afford it .
The above is why people like Joel Salatin have been able to become heroes and rich in the process, for pointing out the obvious. It is just a convenient side-effect to take a swipe at the "mono-culture" farmers with their big combines and loans from the banks. As if the eight 5 acre farms around this town will be able to grow all the wheat necessary to make bread for a million people....
So, the world needs the big farmers with their big holdings. These folks don't have a problem finding someone to inherit them, usually. As for the rest of the small, niche farmers? There are many young people who do not want to work in a cubicle. Cubicles require education these days though, so it is a 4-yr investment and also possible loans to be repaid. For the ones without education, it is either the army (as it has always been), oil rig, maybe a service job selling something like cosmetics or whatever you can sell or working for a cable company, maybe construction, a slew of other manual labor jobs and possibly, at the end if nothing else works out - the farm (apprentice and then hope for the best). Why? 'Cause even when construction is back breaking labor (and even more back breaking than the farm) - you need no land and the pay is immediate, someone else is on the hook for chasing the customer and the job, all you have to do is show up. The farm, on the other hand... - bad weather destroyed the crop, locusts or bugs ate the crop, taxes, mortgages, crazy people who ate your zucchini from the farm stand and got diarrhea and are now taking you to court.... so many problems - and what's the payoff? Watch your friend in the cubicle pull $100K/year, have a nice home, go for vacations to Florida while you are toiling day-in-and-day-out and haggling with some moron over why he is paying $4/lb for your zucchini? I think the answer is obvious
This thread makes it look like the best way to get into farming is to take a government job or be military (another government job) and then retire on a guaranteed paycheck. Then you can decry the damn gumbint all day long and talk about the free market
I digres. The problem of young people in farming is really the following: farming had never been a profitable venture simply because food cannot be an expensive item. Since people eat to survive and so much food is consumed daily by everyone, food must, by definition, be cheap. The fact that food factories run by corporations are involved and the fact that there is a lot of foreign produce imported further tells us that food needs to be cheap or else two things would happen: 1) riots and 2) everyone would turn into a farmer if food was very expensive since the jobs they would otherwise hold would not be sufficient to cover the costs of food.
So, young people have no problems getting into farming around here. However, that's because there are a lot of professionals in the area, making a lot of money and willing to pay $4/lb of tomatoes and $4/lb of squash etc. The whole "small farm and diversification of product" thing started because most of the people getting into farming today cannot afford to buy a large piece of land to turn into a farm. Do not forget they also need to live somewhere - additional cost. Finally, to be close to your market and to be present at all the farmers markets etc. - you need to live close to town where you customer base is - further cost on your land. In that situation, people are forced to be resourceful and "pretend" that having a small, niche farm is what farming should really be. As if they would refuse a 20 times larger holding of land if they could afford it .
The above is why people like Joel Salatin have been able to become heroes and rich in the process, for pointing out the obvious. It is just a convenient side-effect to take a swipe at the "mono-culture" farmers with their big combines and loans from the banks. As if the eight 5 acre farms around this town will be able to grow all the wheat necessary to make bread for a million people....
So, the world needs the big farmers with their big holdings. These folks don't have a problem finding someone to inherit them, usually. As for the rest of the small, niche farmers? There are many young people who do not want to work in a cubicle. Cubicles require education these days though, so it is a 4-yr investment and also possible loans to be repaid. For the ones without education, it is either the army (as it has always been), oil rig, maybe a service job selling something like cosmetics or whatever you can sell or working for a cable company, maybe construction, a slew of other manual labor jobs and possibly, at the end if nothing else works out - the farm (apprentice and then hope for the best). Why? 'Cause even when construction is back breaking labor (and even more back breaking than the farm) - you need no land and the pay is immediate, someone else is on the hook for chasing the customer and the job, all you have to do is show up. The farm, on the other hand... - bad weather destroyed the crop, locusts or bugs ate the crop, taxes, mortgages, crazy people who ate your zucchini from the farm stand and got diarrhea and are now taking you to court.... so many problems - and what's the payoff? Watch your friend in the cubicle pull $100K/year, have a nice home, go for vacations to Florida while you are toiling day-in-and-day-out and haggling with some moron over why he is paying $4/lb for your zucchini? I think the answer is obvious
I agree. People have been "leaving the farm" for work in the cities for thousands of years, ever since somebody figured out that while making bricks out of mud was back-breaking it work, it was actually less and paid better than laboring on your father's/grandfather's land for something to eat and a place to sleep.
I've gotten into growing vegetables recently and I figure that I could be a farmer. Truthfully, I don't like most human beings. I generally find them to be self-seeking, inconsiderate, stupid, and generally a nuisance and hindrance to me. There are some groups of people who escape that evaluation en masse, such as children and the elderly (hence why I do well as a music teacher, and as an entertainer for the elderly), but for the most part, I don't like people. It could be because I'm autistic and I don't relate to most people, but regardless of the reason, I think I would enjoy farming because it's an occupation / lifestyle which I could do largely by myself or with merely a select few people, such as my wife.
This article I read said that there is a crisis in America because few young people want to go into farming. I'm 34, which means I'm fairly young. I don't have the first clue how to get into farming. It's not like farms around my home area advertise for help. They're all small enough that they could feasibly be operated by one person with a tractor, or perhaps one family. There are no commercial farming operations anywhere nearby... not to mention, even if there were, why would any of them want to hire me, a guy who doesn't have much experience, when there are plenty of dudes my age who have grown up with it to the point where they have 30 years of experience by the time they reach age 34?!
I've felt that an easy way to get young people into farming is simply to give them a small farm to work, along with all of the equipment required to operate it... even if that equipment and the land was merely on loan for a while. There would be some requirement that they at least log a certain number of hours working that farm, or perhaps a production requirement. After a certain number of years working that farm or meeting those requirements (whatever they may be), the farm and the equipment belong to the farmer.
Young people aren't going to get into farming if they can't afford to buy a farm and farming equipment, and with fewer and fewer older Americans being in farming, there won't be that many young Americans inheriting such farmland and equipment from their families.
Any thoughts?
Offer a job working as a helper on the farm. This would allow one to try it out and see if they like it or not, and also to gain experience.
There's a general strategy that is being implemented by governments, to hoard people into the cities, and give agricultural land to large corporations for farming. This is implemented via various socio-/economic/political measures and persistent targeted brainwash that farming life is bad/hard/unglamorous and certain portrayals of people who live in rural areas by mass media. One tool used is taxation, various restrictive codes, etc, meant to exlile "poor person" (say, poorer small farmer who's not after large material wealth) and bring second/third/recreational homes of the wealthier population, in certain areas, for example.
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