The future for farmers and the rest of us

This is an insightful article on the future of food production in the US. The article rightly signals the decades-long exodus of people from farming as a real problem. The author further points out that the difficulty of young people's starting a farm exacerbates our loss of farmers. Farming demands land, capital, and knowledge, and the lack of these comprises a hurdle for would-be newcomers to farming. So there's no one to take up the reins as our aging farm population gradually leaves the business.

Farming has been so scorned in our society that farmers traditionally measure their economic success by their ability to enable their children to earn a living outside of farming. Instead of aspiring for their children to be better, more prosperous farmers, most farmers have wanted their kids to get into other careers. In my undergraduate years at a major state university, many of my peers studying agronomy were children of farmers who apparently wanted their kids to join the ranks of the big agroindustrial companies that make life so hard for farmers in the first place! There was no talk in my classes of using our knowledge and our degrees to become skilled farmers, but rather of getting into the cutting-edge fields of biotechnology and precision agriculture, which do little to improve life for the farmer but do a great job of diverting more crop value from the farmer's pocket to the corporate executive's.

As the article points out, the decreasing role of farming in our economy has historically had some upsides--if fewer farmers could provide our national food supply, more people could go into trades, manufacturing, medicine, science, literature, etc. These are all good things, and certainly a majority-agrarian society could benefit by trading some farmers for doctors, craftsmen, thinkers, artists. But in the USA of 2010, most people are neither doctors nor scientists nor grand intellectuals. In fact, of the 98% or so of our people that do not work in farming, I would say that a pretty small number work in fields that I could qualify as noble or necessary to our collective wellbeing. A good part of our populace earns its bread in such dubious pursuits as cashiering, office administration, marketing, sales, cleaning, accounting, lawyering, etc. None of these are truly productive. It's certainly necessary that someone sells you your clothes or your car or whatever, but it's not creating real wealth, and I don't think it's healthy that in most companies the production of their flagship products (Hamburger Helper or Bic pens or whatever) is but a minor part of their business, with most of the companies' resources dedicated to bureaucracy and convincing consumers that they should buy the product. Manufacturing and above all farming are the bases of a sound economy. Services and sales have their place, and in the present scheme of things they capture most of the value paid for manufactured and farmed goods, but services are necessarily dependent upon and subsidiary to more solid, tangible activities.

The author of the article claims that no one ever encouraged her as a child to look into farming as a possible career choice. I can second this, and add that once I declared my interest in farming and agronomy as a profession, I faced a lot of resistance, ridicule, and disappointment from many fronts (teachers, counselors, peers, though luckily never my parents). I even had a girlfriend who thought it was a shame that I should waste my intellect contributing to the production of nourishment and life, and should instead get into something like stock market trading (which creates absolutely no value, simply distributing to a few lucky individuals the gains in stock value deriving from speculation or real company growth).

Aside from the dubious value of many present-day professions that were created thanks to the abundance of workers "liberated" from the agricultural sector, the question remains how desirable it is that farming continue to hemorrhage its workforce. If no more than two percent or so of our US populace is engaged in farming, what is the benefit to the economy of "freeing up" some of these people to work in other sectors? The number is so small that it would have no effect on the larger economy, while it would have a massive effect on further compromising our nation's food security.