John Mattingly
We’ve heard a lot recently about Peak Oil, Peak Phosphorus, and even Peak Zinc. According to a Wall Street Journal article last fall, the smart money is investing in zinc (anybody know a good zinc company?). But seldom do we hear about the decline in the U. S. farmer population, a demographic reality that can be legitimately called “Peak Farmer.”
People have heard numbers such as a single farmer feeds 190 people, or the farmer population is less than 1% of the U.S. population, but these numbers obscure the considerable disagreement as to what constitutes a “farm” and thus a “farmer” in these various statistics. There are hobby farms, investment farms, and production farms operated by farmers who derive all their income from farming and file only a Schedule F on their taxes. My reference here to Peak Farmer is to that last group, the one to which I am a retiring member.
Also, when mulling the nature and future of the farmer population, it’s well to remember that an estimated 22% of the U.S. work force functions either directly or indirectly in the ag industry in a supporting role. For every farmer out there in the field sitting on a tractor or combine, there are about 22 people in mining, manufacturing, chemical and fuel production, and even a stable of paper shufflers — all of whom are essential to that lone farmer. But that lone farmer is in danger of disappearing.
A joke floated around recently: Five Federal FSA (Farm Service Agency) employees stand outside their office, hangdog faces, a CLOSED sign hanging from the door. A reporter asks, “Why are you closing this office that provides such critical services and subsidies to farmers?” The supervisor of the office replies: “Our farmer died.”
There can be little doubt these days that more farmers are headed for assisted living than the tractor seat, which mirrors a larger demographic shift in the U.S. as a whole. In 1950, kids under the age of 5 were 11% of the population, while those 45 to 50 were 5%, and those over 80 about 1%. This resembled the geometry of human populations historically: a pyramid with the base composed of younger people and each ascending cohort older and smaller. Today, that’s reversing, or inverting. The U.S. presently has more 55-year-olds than 5-years-olds, and in a mere 15 years, it’s projected that, with increasing life expectancies and declining birth rates, there will be more people in the U.S. over the age of 85 than under the age of five.
The Census Bureau estimated in 2000 that about 40% of U.S. farmers were older than 55. Today, it’s an easy guess that over half U.S. farmers are approaching the ripe old age of 70. And farming tends to be hard on the body: a lot of sedentary sitting on rough-riding machinery, exposure to chemicals and dust, and stress from vulnerability to weather and markets. Maybe this has something to do with the fact that 80% of U.S. farm workers are now foreign.
If you drive in the rural areas today, or go cross-country, you seldom see farmers in the field working. Back in the 1960s, when I started farming, I never had trouble finding a neighbor at work if I had a need or a question. And I made a few trips through the greater Midwest each year to admire the work of my cohorts and stop to ask them questions about what they were doing. I occasionally encountered a grumpy old fud, but the great majority of farmers not only stopped and talked to me for hours, several of them asked me in for dinner.
I learned a lot by asking questions, and that strategy for learning was possible because there were more farmers out there in the field, most of them willing to embrace any young person interested in the profession. One of the reasons you seldom see farmers out working the fields today is that farms are now bigger, operated with large equipment that works so fast it’s an accident to see one in action.
Fifty years ago many small farmers owned an 80-hp tractor (at most), 4-row equipment (6-row was considered extravagant), and a combine with an 8’ header. Chances were pretty good you’d see a number of farmers out in their fields because small equipment took longer to get the jobs done. Now, fields are worked with 300-hp tractors, 30-row equipment, and harvested with big teams of combines with 30’ headers that roll in one day, move out the next.
From a shrinking cohort of older farmers, another factor points to Peak Farmer: very few young people today are excited by the prospect of becoming farmers. My own son declined a relatively easy entry into the profession for solid economic reasons, articulated in a prior article in this publication. It takes a lot of capital to become a farmer, and even if it didn’t, very few kids tell their high school career counselor, “I want to grow up to drive a tractor.” This is why most new ag tractors and combines have both English and Spanish on the instrument panel. It’s also why tractors are becoming more and more robotic. Presently, there are systems available with which one man can operate up to 8 tractors from home, using satellite guidance systems.
It’s an odd question, but one that must be asked: what would the U.S. food production system look like without production-level farmers? True, there are a growing number of small organic farms and CSAs (community supported agriculture) players out there, but think for a moment about the sheer volume of product and produce we consume each day as a person, a family, a town, a state, and finally as a nation. Think of how many semi-loads of produce flow into even small towns every week, and you quickly see that the small farms represent a refreshing, but almost indistinguishable link in the overall supply chain.
As consumers we have become accustomed to a great variety of items in our supermarkets. We pick through the perishable produce to get what we judge to be the best, setting aside a carton of blueberries if we spot a thread of mold, an apple with a bruise, a avocado with soft spots. We have up to 40 different kinds of potato chips to chose from, 50 assortments of bottled drinks, 20 styles of bagged lettuce, and 10 preparations of mustard. The list goes on and becomes more and more ample, or absurd, depending on your perspective.
A declining farmer population, running parallel to a consumer population now habituated to ready availability and expanding variety, will eventually lead us in one of three directions:
1. Our ag system will compress to such an extent that we will be forced to join the rest of the world and eat unprocessed food, aka: eating close to the sun. Instead of buying half a pound of potato chips at $4 a bag, we’ll buy 50 pounds of potatoes for $6. We’ll buy in bulk, we’ll eat the basics. This is also known as Living Within Your Beans.
2. We’ll go super high tech and our perception of food itself will change to one of getting our nutrients from highly processed, concentrated sources such as meal-replacement powders, liquids, and bars, together with a pill or brain implant that gives us the sensation of pleasurable consumption.
3. Cease to exist as a species and be eaten by the other species who never expanded their population beyond their sustainable food supply by way of farming.
John Mattingly cultivates prose, among other things, and was most recently seen near Creede.
