“Farmers in the United States are growing old, largely because men once fully committed to farming leave it reluctantly and slowly, but also because young men refuse to enter farming as long as income prospects are so poor,” he said. Those sentiments mirrored exactly several stories I had seen in recent newspapers.
Then I noticed the date of the article I was reading, which I had found online. It had been published in February … 1963.
I couldn’t ask the author, who name was Marion Coleman, if the policy changes he was hoping for happened, because he’d been dead about ten years. But he certainly knew that farm crises are nothing new.
Personally, I don’t know Allis from Chalmers, and once, when visiting a farm, was mildly surprised to learn that bacon did not come wrapped in cellophane. But what I do know is history.
And the history of western civilization is pretty much the history of young people leaving the farm. Karl Marx wrote grumpily about the “idiocy of rural life.” After World War I, Songwriter Walter Donaldson, who was probably more fun at parties, asked “How you going to keep them down on the farm after they’ve seen Paree?”
The number of Americans who farm full-time for a living has steadily declined, in large part because the remaining farmers are so productive. True, according to the federal farm census bureau, the average age of our farmers is increasing.
But so is the average age of the nation, and the average farmer is still younger than the average presidential candidate. Thanks to technology and better nutrition, people in their 50s today are usually physically younger than their grandparents at the same age.
It would be a tragedy if most of our farmers abandoned their farms because they could no longer make a living from agriculture. It would also be sad if they had to sell out to vast factory-like corporate operations.
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