On the Farm

Family farms come in all sizes from 10 acres or less to tens of thousands of acres.

But there is trouble on the farm—starting with the difficulty a younger generation of farmers faces in getting started and earning a living. Many young families are discouraged from pursuing a career in farming by the expense of purchasing or renting land coupled with the inherent risks associated with farming—volatile markets, expensive inputs, erratic weather. The average age of a U.S farmer is 55.¹ As the baby-boom generation retires, the United States is less prepared in farming than in most other sectors for the approaching vacuum in experienced professionals.

Government farm policy has contributed to this problem. The federal government supports the farm sector—often very generously compared to other sectors. Farm policy rewards those who can farm the most land, leading to consolidation and rapidly rising land prices. High land prices are the main reason it’s so difficult for young farmers to get started. “Get big or get out” was the advice of a former Secretary of Agriculture to American farmers almost four decades ago, and this philosophy still dominates policy.

Another problem is the type of farming favored by government support. U.S. farm policy is structured to reward primarily growers of five crops: corn, soy, rice, wheat, and cotton. Fruit and vegetable farmers receive no direct government support, although the land they care for is eligible for conservation or “sustainability” payments.

Iowa is a fine example of the effects of government supports. Iowa farmers grow corn, lots of it. Indeed, “cornfields” is the first image in many people’s minds when the state is mentioned. But Iowa’s farmers grow little else. Few states dedicate a greater share of land to the production of food, and yet nearly 90 percent of the food Iowans consume comes from out of state. Because of federal commodity payment policies, it simply makes little economic sense for Iowan farmers to grow anything but corn.

U.S. farm policies urgently need reform. The archetype of the family farmer is commonly used as a bulwark against any significant changes in farm policy. But agriculture in the United States is an industry, a sophisticated enterprise that’s a far cry from the wistful images of the historic farmstead. The family farm is held up to U.S. taxpayers as the norm, but special interests with a lucrative stake in preserving the current system are behind this image.

A common justification for government support to farmers is that it benefits rural communities. Yet the areas of the country where government supports to farmers are most concentrated are not thriving communities whose residents enjoy a high standard of living. Consolidation has contributed to the steady outmigration of people from farm communities and the weakening or disintegration of those communities, a subject explored more thoroughly in Bread for the World Institute’s 2007 Hunger Report, Healthy Food, Farms, and Families. Farmers who receive large government payments are living well, bu t not the rest of their communities. “Per capita income in the farm-dependent counties of Iowa, Kansas, Minnesota, Nebraska and the Dakotas is less than three-fourths of income in the region’s metropolitan counties,” reports the Center for Rural Affairs, and “poverty rates are more than half again as high.”²

Issues