The average age of farmers in the United States is 58 years old. Industry leaders are worried about what will happen when they retire.
How robots and AI are changing agriculture
Robotics and AI are redesigning how food grows. Innovative robotics farming equipment companies share how AI is impacting the future of agriculture.
Bloomberg – Quick Take
When the 77-year-old family head of a New Jersey farm passed away in early August, he commented under a Facebook post that announced the passage of eight generations of farmers.
Many said that Hunter’s farms and markets, a family business that acquired John Hunter decades ago, and an integral part of their lives. It’s where their families bought corn, tomatoes and green beans every summer, and some learned how to “hard work” during their part-time high school work.
Hunter’s son, also named John Hunter, said his father’s death caused by a “mechanical accident” put his family in a “unfortunate club.” Currently, almost 40% of farmland across the country is owned by farmers over the age of 65, so the club is quickly gaining membership and raising alarm bells.
With the average age of American farmers exceeding 57, industry leaders have expressed concerns about the future of American agriculture and the country’s food supply.
Over 95% of US farms are family business owners. However, amidst large consolidation, the number of farms has steadily declined in recent years. According to data from the Ministry of Agriculture’s census report, there were about 2 million farms and ranches in 2022, a 6.9% decrease from 2017.
As farmers continue to age, the number of farms could drop even further, and fewer young people will replace them.
“Not every family has that next generation, there are things to take over, such as having sons, daughters and grandchildren,” said Bill Fulvik, agriculture professor at Rutgers University, which runs the school’s farmer training program. “It’s a huge challenge and we have to deal with it.”
40 Years of Making
The current dilemma facing the agricultural industry is linked to the farm crisis of the 1980s, when thousands of families lost their farms to plunge land values and overproduction. The recession has changed the way young people think about agriculture.
At the time, parents “dissuaded their children from returning to the land or pursuing careers in agriculture,” Aaron Locker, managing director of agricultural recruiting firm Kinkanon and Reed, told Congress at a June 4 hearing.
Enrollment in agricultural-based university programs fell nearly 37% between 1980 and 1990, and in some regions the proportion of students studying agriculture remains small.
Young people who grew up in agricultural families have chosen not to continue with businesses for a variety of reasons, ranging from concerns about available health resources in rural areas to uncertainty in farm labor.
People who want to open their own farms but don’t have industry-family connections face huge challenges, such as the cost of land and machinery.
“In the past, knowledge of the system would have been shared between generations and generations,” Hlubik said. “Now we don’t have as many people as we are actively farming. We’re less than 1% of the population.”
Existential threat?
People in the agricultural industry appear to be divided into the amount of consumers who can sense the effects of the aging farm population over the next few years.
Locker called the vacuum of family farm leadership “the threat to the resilience of the country’s most important system – our food supply.” Farmers who have retired and have no one to hand over their business are more likely to consolidate their farms or sell their land.
But others, including Chris Wolf, a professor of agricultural economics at Cornell University, say the broader impact is still not fully known.
“It’s not clear that it’s really a food security issue,” Wolf said. “It’s about how you live as long as you keep the farm up, and it becomes a major economic driver for the rural community.
Addressing the information gap and increasing financial support for new farmers could go a long way to solve the problem, he suggested. And there are signs of optimism.
According to data from the Ministry of Agriculture, the number of new farmers increased by 11% between 2017 and 2022, and the number of agricultural graduates in the labor force increased by 3% in 2023.
More than 500 people have participated in Rutgers’ Rue Ready To Farm program, with over 230 currently enrolled, according to Hlubik, who runs the initiative.
He hesitated to call the aging farmer’s problem a “crisis,” but insisted that “its importance needs to rise.”
