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New Survey of 1,000 Young and Beginning Farmers Reveals What the Next Generation Needs
Lindsey Lusher Shute, National Young Farmers
TIVOLI, NY –The National Young Farmer’s Coalition released a study today showing that the nation’s young and beginning farmers face tremendous barriers in starting a farming career. Building a Future With Farmers: Challenges Faced by Young, American Farmers and a National Strategy to Help Them Succeed surveyed 1,000 farmers from across the United States and found that access to capital, access to land and health insurance present the largest obstacles for beginners. Farmers rated farm apprenticeships, local partnerships and Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) as the most valuable programs to help beginners.
“If Congress wants to keep America farming, then they must address the barriers that young people face in getting started,” says Lindsey Lusher Shute, Director of the National Young Farmers’ Coalition. “We need credit opportunities for beginning and diversified farmers, land policies that keep farms affordable for full-time growers and funding for conservation programs.”
Report findings include:
78% of farmers ranked “lack of capital” as a top challenge for beginners, with another 40% ranking “access to credit” as the biggest challenge.
68% of farmers ranked land access as the biggest challenge faced by beginners.
70% of farmers under 30 rented land, as compared to 37% of farmers over 30.
74% of farmers ranked apprenticeships as among the most valuable programs for beginners.
55% of farmers ranked local partnerships as one of the most valuable programs, and 49% ranked Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) as a top program.
Lack of capital was found to be the biggest challenge for beginners. Although the USDA’s Farm Service Agency offers loans to beginning farmers, current loan rules often disqualify even experienced farmers with good credit and small loans are hard to come by. For real estate transactions, FSA loans take too long to process — up to thirty days to qualify and up to a year to receive funds – and the $300,000 loan limit doesn’t go far in many real estate markets.
Land access was the second biggest concern. Farmers under the age of 30 were significantly more likely to rent land (70%) than those over 30 (37%). Over the last decade, farm real estate values and rents doubled making farm ownership next to impossible for many beginners. …
Download Report (PDF)
(9 November 2011)
Suggested by EB contributor Piyush.
Fruit trees coming to an Unley street near you
Adam Ritchie, Eastern Courier Messenger (Australia)
FRUIT trees and vegetable patches might be planted in public places throughout Unley in a bid to encourage more people to do the same in their own backyards.
Unley Council has developed a draft Food Security Strategy to help the area become more self-sufficient when it comes to food production and reduce its environmental footprint.
Under the draft plan, sites for community gardens would be identified, every school in the area would be helped to establish food plots and seminars would be run to encourage more food to be grown in private backyards.
It also recommended more be done to ensure food was not wasted, including redistributing unwanted food to those most in need.
Unley Sustainable Communities member Peter Croft, who helped develop the strategy, hoped that by growing more food locally, the community could reduce its ecological footprint.
(5 December 2011)
Suggested by Michael Lardelli who wtites: “Sounds like a little undercover permie stuff to me.” -BA
Can we restore the prairie — and still support ourselves?
Wes Jackson, YES! Magazine
Since ripping open the prairie for modern monocultures, we’re losing soil and fertility. Agricultural pioneer Wes Jackson says there’s another way.
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… Before the coming of the Europeans the prairie was a primitive wilderness, both beautiful and stern, a wilderness that had supported migrating water birds as well as bobolinks, prairie chickens, black-footed ferrets, and Native Americans. Never mind that the Europeans’ crops would far outyield the old prairie for human purposes, at least in the short run. What is important is that the Sioux knew it was wrong, and that his words became regionally famous for the wrong reason. The story was often repeated precisely because farmer Christiansen, and the others who passed it on, thought it was amusing. To their minds those words betrayed the ignorance of the poor Sioux. As far as the immigrant was concerned, “breaking the prairie” was his purpose in life.
Agriculture has changed the face of the land the world over. The old covering featured the top level of biological organization—the ecosystem. The new cover features the next level below, the population. For example, a piece of land that once featured a diverse ecosystem we call prairie is now covered with a single species population such as wheat, corn, or soybeans. A prairie is a polyculture. Our crops are usually grown in monocultures.
The next most obvious fact is that the prairie features perennial plants while agriculture features annuals. For the prairie, at least, the key to this last condition resides in the roots. Though the above-ground parts of the prairie’s perennials may die back each year, the roots are immortal. For whether those sun-cured leaves, passed over by the buffalo in the fall migration, go quickly in a lightning-started prairie fire or, as is more often the case, burn through the “slow, smokeless burning of decay,” the roots hold fast what they have earned from rock and subsoil. Whichever way the top parts burn, the perennial roots will soon catch and save most of the briefly free nutrients for a living future. And so an alliance of soil and perennial root, well adapted to the task of blotting up a drenching rain, reincarnates last year’s growth.
… At The Land Institute, we are working on the development of mixed perennial grain crops. We are interested in simulating the old prairie or in building domestic prairies for the future. Conventional agriculture, which features annuals in monoculture, is nearly opposite to the original prairie or forest, which feature mixtures of perennials. If we could build domestic prairies we might be able one day to have high-yielding fields that are planted only once every twenty years or so. After the fields had been established, we would need only to harvest the crop, relying on species diversity to take care of insects, pathogens, and fertility.
This of course is not the entire answer to the total agricultural problem, much of which involves not only a different socioeconomic and political posture, but a religious dimension as well. But breeding new crops from native plants selected from nature’s abundance and simulating the presettlement botanical complexity of a region should make it easier for us to solve many agricultural problems.
As civilizations have flourished, many upland landscapes that supported them have died, and desert and mudflat wastelands have developed. But civilizations have passed on accumulated knowledge, and we can say without exaggeration that these wastelands are the price paid for the accumulated knowledge. In our century this knowledge has restorative potential. The goal to develop a truly sustainable food supply could start a trend exactly opposite to that which we have followed on the globe since we stepped onto the agricultural treadmill some ten millennia ago.
(22 November 2011)
In its recent issue, YES Magazine honored Wes Jackson as “Breakthrough #15: Revolutionizing agriculture with crops that grow like a prairie. -BA
FARM BILL of Health
Various authors, Farm Bill Hackathon
“FARM BILL of Health” was produced as part of the Farm Bill Hackathon. Designed by Jamie Leo, Henry Lau, Illya Bomash, Peter Krohmer and Trey Shelton, the presentation compares “My Plate” recommendations with government support to farms.
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Last week, Environmental Working Group (EWG) participated in our first ever “hackathon” organized by Food+ Tech Connect and sponsored by the Grace Foundation, Oxfam America and Glynwood Institute. Dozens of hacker/designers and policy folks came together in person and virtually for one day to craft various infographics around the farm bill and other issues in our food system. EWG submitted several ideas and background data to the event and worked with designers/hackers to fine tune the narrative and graphics. I’m happy to share the results with you here.
The first prize winner, entitled Farm Bill of Health, is based on EWG data and can be viewed here:
http://www.slideshare.net/FoodTechConnect/clean-bill-of-health
Thanks to Center for Livable Future and the designers for all their hard work on the short slide show and graphics.
A second one–entitled Cotton vs Carrots– is being featured as “infographic of the week” on Food+ Tech connect’s homepage. You can see it here:
http://www.foodandtechconnect.com/site/2011/12/09/infographic-of-the-wee…
Background on the hackathon and other examples of the graphics that were created are here:
http://www.foodandtechconnect.com/site/2011/12/05/farm-bill-hackathon-wi…
These infographics are all available to use, adapt and share as you see fit. We are grateful to the organizers and sponsors for making this event happen.
(8 December 2011)
Suggested by Elizabeth Lasensky.
