Across the United States, the farming community is aging. According to the National Agricultural Statistics Service, the average age of a farmer was 58.1 in 2022, a 0.6 year increase from 2017. As this average rises, we see that the older generations are fanning more than the younger ones; a fact that raises some alarms in terms of accessing food and goods.
If the next generation isn’t producing food and raw materials, how are we going to feed ourselves or produce goods when current farmers retire?
So, why aren’t young people farming as much as the older generations? The National Young Farmers Coalition – a nonprofit working towards an equitable future for farmers set out to find an answer. Every 5 years, they survey current, former, or aspiring farmers in the hopes of understanding their challenges.
This survey helps them understand how to support farmers and gives them good insight into barriers young people face when beginning to farm. The 2022 survey, in a partnership with the University of Wisconsin Survey Center, surveyed over 10,000 current, former, or aspiring farmers.
They considered participants under 40 as “young farmers”, which made up nearly 4500 of the responses. In this survey, participants were asked to rate how challenging they found different aspects of fanning/starting a farm.
From the results, they found that access to land was the most common challenge for young farmers. Many rated that finding available and/or affordable land was either “very challenging” or “extremely challenging”. In fact, 59% of the young farmers struggled to find affordable land!
Financial concerns were also among the top challenges—the most common being a lack of money needed to start and grow a business (41% of young farmers). Additionally, the cost of both personal healthcare and employee healthcare were also a financial concern for young farmers.
Finally, many young farmers (35%) stated that they don’t get enough money from their products to cover the cost of producing it. For them, fanning would not be a viable source of income. These challenges were often experienced at a higher rate by farmers who were black, indigenous, or people of color.
