We desperately need more young farmers in this country.
“If we do not repopulate our working lands, I don’t know where to begin to talk about the woes,” U.S. Deputy Secretary of Agriculture Kathleen Merrigan told The Washington Post this April.
The average age of the American farmer is 57 years old and rising. There are but 120,000 American farm operators age 34 and under. There are 1.3 million American farm operators age 55 and older.
In 2009, I picked up a video camera in order to start documenting something that looked hopeful. As if they had seen a poster with Uncle Sam’s pointing finger, young people with college educations — but absolutely no background in agriculture — were showing up on small organic farms in my home state of New Jersey, seeking training. In many cases, the self-appointed mission of these young people wasn’t just to farm, but to farm as sustainably as possible. I made a film about it, titled The Farmer and the Horse.
The problem is, at least in Jersey, there’s no straight path for young farmers to follow if their goal is to make enough money farming to actually own the farm. (Farmland prices here are the second hig... Read more
