1y ago

Back to the land: are young farmers the new starving artists? | A growing movement of millennials are seeking out a more agrarian life, but the reality is not always as simple as they hoped

www.theguardian.com Back to the land: are young farmers the new starving artists?

A small but growing movement of millennials are seeking out a more agrarian life but the reality of life on the land is not always as simple as they hoped

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I think the primary difference, at least in the hobby farmers I know who are young, idealistic, and just getting started, is that they aren’t expecting to scale the operation beyond some arbitrary point - beyond which, it stops being fulfilling and starts being a giant pain in the ass. Conversely, the dairy farmer I know who has the largest operation in the county is a stand up dude, who avoids cutting corners but is getting squeezed big time by small artisanal operations with street cred and big, industrial operations with margins. The middle, where there used to be a huge swath of family farms, is a bloodbath of debt and suffering.
I imagine most of these new hippies are trying to stay small.
- Yeah I grew up with a friend whose parents owned a ranch (one of the biggest in the area, but still a family operation) and the way he told it, they didn't really make money, they just (usually) made enough to keep up the payments on their mountains of debt. The main reason they're even doing it is simply because their family has been doing it for generations, not because they're turning much of a profit
  
  Even just getting buy, working and earning from my own land sounds far better than just about anything else. Something special about work being part of life rather than something to seperate out.
- FYI medium sized dairies are being squeezed out by the government back oligopolies in milk processesing that completely control the milk prices.
  Many of them also do not have enough land base to feed their animals and manage the waste. The cost remedy this is prohibitive due to mega corporate investment firms buying up land at extremely high prices.
  
  Yep, that’s what I was driving at. If you’re a “medium” the cards are stacked against you and there are very few levers to pull (if any) to level the playing field at all. The only reason the mid-sized guy I know is able to survive is that he owns all his land outright and his family has been amassing acreage for three generations. Even still, he’s in a tough spot and the mega farms are buying up what is left of the family farms all around him and doing crazy shit like trucking manure across the state on a scale that he just can’t compete with.

It really depends if you are doing for yourself or want to make money at it. There was a big boom here for hobby farms and i would say more than half have moved away back closer to the cities. At least 3-4 near me thought they could buy land and it magically grows crops. I spent a lot of time helping them get gardens in and explaining soil etc. They lasted 1 year. " too hard" or "too much work"...

Great article that discusses a lot of the good and bad of living an agrarian lifestyle. Simple definitely does not necessarily mean easy, but it can be rewarding by both qualities.
Something that comes to my mind is that you can definitely live a purely agrarian lifestyle like it were the 1800s or older as long as you take the lifestyle lock, stock, and barrel with it's benefits and hardships; people have been living this way for ages. But, I think what most people want are the benefits afforded by this lifestyle (the simplicity, feeling close to nature, working with your hand, etc) but to also enjoy the modern luxuries we're accustomed to (like technology, healthcare, etc), but it's really difficult to make this lifestyle support these desires.
What's worked for me is a hybrid lifestyle. I have a small house and a little land, I raise a big garden and my wife cans, so we grow most of our own food, but it's not a business, though we sometimes sell to a local restaurant and on Facebook when we have extra. We work really hard and try to be frugal, but we both also work part time jobs to make money, which gives a better return on investment for our time than we can get trying make it Simple living lifestyle support our modern needs. So we incorporate modern life employment to make simple living feasible and comfortable, but strive for simple living to make modern life minimized and tolerable.
Have a great day everyone!

This is the best summary I could come up with:
The young people coming into the profession are fueled by idealism but, like the hippie generation before them, and the many traditional farmers who have been driven out of the industry by its brutal economics, the reality of life on the land isn’t as simple as they had hoped.
More than 100 members of the group, which was founded in 2010 in New York’s Hudson Valley, lobbied lawmakers on Capitol Hill during an unseasonable snow spell last month to push some of their priorities – improving access to farmland, credit and markets, better support for training young farmers – ahead of a vote on the 2018 farm bill’s reauthorization.
Brian Estes, a 33-year-old NYFC memberfrom Washington state, says the group’s day of lobbying in DC, which involved flying in farmers from all over the country, showed how many young people are interested not just in agriculture but in changing policy.
At the dawn of the 1970s, amid growing consciousness of environmental degradation and unrest over the war in Vietnam, young people were feeling the urge to get back to the land – a kind of lived protest.
Even Henry David Thoreau, whose book Walden helped inspire future generations to live closer to nature, failed at self-reliance in many ways, and has been derided for accepting home-cooked meals from his mother and entertaining visitors, since his little cabin at the pond was actually quite close to a busy railroad, not isolated as his text suggests.
But 1970s-era experiments shouldn’t be completely written off, as their positive legacies abound, including an enthusiasm for fresh and organic foods, a thriving artisanal market and a growing commitment to clean energy.
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