aging farmers
“I’d like to cock him one”
Sixty years after the Double T dairy farm went into business in California's Central Valley, owner Tony Azevedo sold his cattle, partly due to unrelenting drought and partly out of frustration over disagreements with his son on transfer of the business to a new generation.
Are older farmers a sign of multi-generational operations?
One of the most-reported statistics about American agriculture is the rising average age of farmers - 58.3 years in the 2012 Census of Agriculture, an increase of 1.2 years from the 2007 census, writes economist David Widmar at the blog Agricultural Economic Insights.
“Harvest of Change” looks at thinning farm population
"The Iowa farm family, with its deep community roots, extended family ties and a large dose of savvy born from living close to the soil, finds itself at the epicenter of a new cultural and economic landscape," says the Des Moines Register in opening its "Harvest of Change" series. "In rural America, the aging of the population and ever-bigger farms enabled by technological advances are already depopulating the countryside."
In farming, age is just a (wrong) number
The average age of U.S. farmers seems to climb ever higher — it rose to 58.1 years in the 2022 Census of Agriculture. But the country is not going to run out of farmers, or of food, said an analysis published by the American Enterprise Institute on Tuesday. The operators of the largest farms, which produce half of U.S. food, fiber, and feed, are notably younger than farmers in general, based on different and more detailed USDA data.