How do we reconcile on the one hand farmers by trade leaving and wannabe farmers wanting to join a farm life?
Regardless of soil suitability, you can't just shuck off a farm worth (tens of) millions, debt on the same scale (average debt-to-assets as of 2017 is ~13% and I would expect the farmers featured here are way worse) and throw out decades of experience to try and grow mushrooms, it's unlikely that it would make your clients and creditors happy. Even less so when you're in your 50s.
Commodity growers on huge farms distribute their food into large grocers potentially all over the world, to be sold at the lowest possible price. They must maximize yields at any cost to make money. Specialty growers sell into farmer's markets, CSA's, etc, at a much higher cost for the goods. This is why many of them are in coastal and affluent areas, where the buyers are willing to pay considerably more for local, fresh produce that has been grown organically.
The image of Blaske on the farm, illuminating the darkness, is a powerful one. “Sometimes the batteries were low and the light was not so bright,” he wrote, “But when you found the cow that was missing, you also found a newborn calf, which made the dark of night much brighter.”
Winter was the worst, fumbling around in the dark, the mud, the cold. Miserable existence.
This cannot be understated. No matter the weather, waiting for the train or walking to the office will never be bad compared to the past.
I don't see much progress on this, unless farming becomes profitable to employ staff on top wages or robots can become cheap enough to take over. Therefore, my family, though managing the farm, will often have to get involved in long hours manual labour.
I saw a documentary on Youtube about Italian dairy farmers, their kids wanted to get out so the farms started importing people from Punjab(India) who were already skilled in dairy handling.
Is that not a valid criticism?
I don't want to set up a straw man here, but a hypothetical analyst could look at this trend and think something special is happening with farming (as mc32 put: "[thinking] that they have a better farming plan or better farming insight over generational farmers") — picture a cover story with the headline "farming is back", now picture a less upmarket story titled "15 reasons to be a farmer (ear of corn emoji)! You won't BELIEVE number 12!".
Whereas it's an iteration of the eternal "strike gold, open a boutique" story.
But obviously people aren't such rational actors, and farmers have emotional attachments to their farms, the rural areas they grew up in, etc. And so they keep trying to make the old model work, increase their debt loads and hope things will turn around until its too late.
Q: How do we reconcile on the one hand farmers by trade leaving and wannabe farmers wanting to join a farm life?
A: "people who want to do x and have money can end up in a better spot than people who inherited x and have less money?"
Me for instance. I live on 80 acres outside Iowa City (a college town). The neighbor does the farming of half the land; he pays rent on the land and suffers the risk all himself.
So best of both worlds for me. I have my orchard, gardens, sheds, tractor (for mowing and plowing) and rural vistas. And work remotely at software for whomever, at about 10X the rate a farmer gets 'paid'.
Doesn't that depend on which way the wind blows (you can be exposed to airborne chemicals and organisms)? And what about the water supply - any problem with nitrates, for example?
I envy you to some degree, but my mother's relatives lived on farms and paid heavy dues health-wise for that.
What happened to your mother's relatives?
An orchard would be sweet.
It also doesn't help that rural America is dying in general, but that's a different matter.
Stardew Valley