Farms rarely support the families that operate them. Without federal program payments, and off-farm earnings, most farms would not survive. Farmers are themselves among the first to observe the irony of their profession–hard, demanding, dangerous work that requires enormous expertise and training, and rarely pays a minimum wage. If one factors out equity, of course, in land and equipment.
Before World War II, agrarian reformers, urban and rural, envisioned a densely populated countryside where property-ownership conferred the substance of democratic citizenship. They sought to extend the material benefits of urban living to the rural: electricity, medical care, all-weather roads, cash income. They were largely successful, but the populace slipped out from underneath them.
Now I say that as if people simply slid away from the rural, and while demographically that metaphor may stand, in fact, people continue to be born and raised on farms; they sojourn between their city jobs and their parents’ and grandparents’ farms, helping them with planting and harvest. They dream of retiring to a bit of ground where they can farm.
And many do: The number of small farms is proliferating, even as the number of farms over 1,000 acres increases, and mid-size farms go under.
continued
Before World War II, agrarian reformers, urban and rural, envisioned a densely populated countryside where property-ownership conferred the substance of democratic citizenship. They sought to extend the material benefits of urban living to the rural: electricity, medical care, all-weather roads, cash income. They were largely successful, but the populace slipped out from underneath them.
Now I say that as if people simply slid away from the rural, and while demographically that metaphor may stand, in fact, people continue to be born and raised on farms; they sojourn between their city jobs and their parents’ and grandparents’ farms, helping them with planting and harvest. They dream of retiring to a bit of ground where they can farm.
And many do: The number of small farms is proliferating, even as the number of farms over 1,000 acres increases, and mid-size farms go under.
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