Who wouldn’t want this?

Beginning farmers, that’s who

Farming continues to suffer two losses: farmers and farmland. Farmers keep aging out of the profession, and new ones aren’t stepping up to take their place. Farmland keeps turning into homes, big box stores, malls and warehouses.

According to the latest agriculture census from 2022, total farmland acreage is about 880 million acres, down from 900 million at the time of the last US census in 2017. That’s a loss of 20 million acres. In response, Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsak said, “This survey is a wake-up call. It’s essentially asking the critical question of whether as a country we are okay with losing that many farms, okay with losing that much farmland? Or is there a better way?”

Over the years governments, land trusts, farmland preservationists and beginning farmer groups have tried to answer that question with programs to protect rural areas from development and return farmers to the land. One recent example funded by the federal farm bill is called the Transition Incentives Program, an initiative of the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Conservation Reserve Program. Farmers who had been paid to take some land out of food production and turn it into environmental service areas to control soil erosion, improve water quality, and enhance wildlife habitat were also paid to lease or sell some of their land to beginning or socially disadvantaged farmers.

Participation in this program has been low. A study was conducted by the Land Access Policy Incentives project to find out why. In a press release its researchers identified some key findings including:
>> the available farmland was not where the beginning farmers were
>> additional technical assistance and support were needed to help beginning farmers take on these properties

In other words, there was a mismatch between where established farmers were located and the farming systems they used, and where beginning farmers were and what they were equipped or willing to handle.

Development is steadily encroaching on the agricultural landscape, but even as the amount of farmland has been shrinking, productivity has been steadily increasing. US Dept. of Agriculture statistics show that total agriculture output increased on average 1.53% a year for the past 69 years, despite a nearly 20% decrease in farmland over that time.

To achieve productivity gains, large scale farms rely on capital and mechanization, Small plot intensive (SPIN) farmers use strategic growing techniques and efficient management to greatly reduce the amount of land needed for their commercial operations. Instead of agribusiness’s vast fields of monoculture crops. out in the countryside, their farms consist of backyards, community gardens, vacant lots and otherwise underutilized slivers of land. Though their models are very different, what unites both big and very small farmers is that they are finding profitability in making more from less.

There are aesthetic, cultural, and environmental reasons to protect farmland, but saving the country from famine is not yet one of them. The preservation urge may in part be driven by a yearning for a more benevolent time when agrarians lived in harmony with nature. It’s a past that never existed. Our pioneer farming ancestors drained wetlands, decimated ecosystems, cut down forests and polluted waterways. Farmers have always had to adjust to development. Farming is not and never was a steady state business.

While many of the challenges of farming get boiled down to land access, what is really at issue is the viability of the farming profession. Efforts to revitalize it overlook a current reality which is this:
>> many new farmers are starting their operations wherever they happen to be, which is on small plots in densely populated areas where the largest demand for local food happens to be
>> they grow and measure their revenue by the square foot, not acre

Most of the people alive today are several generations removed from the land. They are too young to have experienced a country of farmsteads, so expecting them to take them on again is not realistic. To attract new generations to farming they need to be appealed to, not with romantic ideas of how the world used to be, but rather in a way that takes advantage of all the knowledge accumulated to date and that reflects current cultural contexts.

Mostly without needing government support, the new farmers I work with have been figuring out how to harness the economic power and vibrancy of local agriculture and emphasize products that serve the country’s urban and suburban customers and their desire for fresh, nutritious, healthy food. They are using new models like SPIN Farming that, instead of conflicting with urbanization, leverage its advantages. Their practices are an opportunity to attract a broad mix of people who don’t come from a traditional farming background.

While government and farm supporters keep accumulating land access programs and worrying about running out of farmers and the ideal number of farms, their solutions focus on remaking new farmers into old ones. This only perpetuates the challenges that have been causing many of them to call it quits. SPIN farmers know that keeping a farm’s size manageable for an owner/operator and serving a narrow customer base are valid strategic business decisions, not a limitation or failure. Those who have expanded to several acres know that starting out small has contributed to their long-term success. They are making it all work as measured by two of the most important statistics of all — income and years in business.

In the end the issue is to get more new farmers started without initially having to relocate, change lifestyles or make sizeable investments in land, gear or infrastructure, and getting beyond the premise that farmers need to continually grow in size and expand their businesses. It is not only about getting more people started in farming. It’s getting them started in a way that they are profitable enough to want to keep doing it.

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Land Access Policy Incentives press release

SPIN stands for s-mall p-lot in-tensive.
SPIN Farming is a commercial production system designed specifically for growing spaces under an acre in size. It was developed in the mid-90’s by Canadian farmer Wally Satzewich. Those who practice it use gardens, community plots and vacant land to start and operate moneymaking farm businesses that serve the needs of local communities.