Decline of family farms continues, but some trends promising
Published February 27, 2014
Editorial by Winston-Salem Journal, February 26, 2014.
The American family farm is a proud tradition that has long been in decline. Farmland continues to disappear, according to the latest government survey, and while the farms that remain have grown in size, the profit per acre has dropped.
That’s a sad state of affairs, but there is a bright spot. Agricultural experts say the movement toward locally-grown food is creating hope for a comeback of sorts in family farming.
“Traditionally, this trend of fewer farmers and larger farms has been going on for a while,” Mark Tucker, director of the Cooperative Extension Service in Forsyth County, told the Journal’s Wesley Young. “We are seeing an increase in the number of folks who would like to start farming and farm on a local scale.”
The U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Census of Agriculture reported 50,210 farms in North Carolina in 2012 on 8.41 acres, the Journal reported. That compares to 52,913 farms in 2007 on 8.47 acres, a loss of 60,000 acres. That’s a much slower decline, probably due to the recession, than the previous five years in which 600,000 acres were lost. According to the North Carolina Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services, between 1997 and 2007 the state lost nearly one million acres of farmland.
“The profit per acre is down so they are having to grow on more acres,” Marvin Eaton, a farmer in Belews Creek, told the Journal. “We are growing about 200 acres of tobacco now, and it used to be around 100.”
The survey shows the average size of a North Carolina farm in 2012 was 168 acres, eight acres larger than in 2007. The average value of agricultural products grew 22 percent to $12.6 billion during that period, the Journal reported.
North Carolina farmers are also getting older, and three-fourths of them have been farming for 10 years or more, according to the USDA survey. Eaton told the Journal that his 23-year-old son Clayton intends to take over the farm and keep it in the family. And his two daughters, Melanie and Morgan, may work part time to keep it going.
That brings up another reality affecting American family farming – it’s hard for younger people to start farming unless they are part of a farm family already. “It is very expensive for one thing, and the availability of land is just not much there,” Eaton said.
That’s why the state’s farm preservation trust fund, which was created in 2005 and awards grants for agricultural development projects, and other programs, are so important.
In addition, the locally-grown movement holds the promise of a proliferation of small family farms in the future. We need more innovative programs to encourage this wholesome trend.
February 28, 2014 at 12:53 pm
Mike Armstrong says:
Organizations in NC, dedicated to farming and farm families should put more emphasis on processing packaging and marketing the farm products that are produced on NC farms. There are tremendous . opportunities with non- genetically modified foods, organic farming and the elimination of archaic law s that prohibit the direct sale of whole milk by our farmers. With a good portion of the world starving and naked, farmers should be able to profit.
