It’s really interesting because these kind of “Kids are leaving the farm!” stories go back basically to the industrial revolution. I imagine eventually it’ll be the case that most american farms are either purely industrial operations ran by corporations or “hobby farms” ran by rich people unconcerned with profit.
Edit: Apparently I didn’t RTFA, this is about farmWORKERS, not farmers. My point still stands about farms and agricultural practices further down. However, a scale of agriculture that requires extremely low paid, often illegal work force with no rights, is not a sustainable practice either.
The main issue is that you need a serious scale of operations to be able to earn money from agricultural practices, and that leads to a fairly monocultural crop, subsidies for certain crops and cog-in-the-wheel operations. So it is already heavily affected by industrial corporations. This is not just true for the US, it’s like this in the most part of the developed world. So the “family farms” tend to get outcompeted even when the farmers are pretty much working round the clock, and still with decreasing rewards and increasing loans while they have occasional crop failures. So it doesn’t surprise me if the next generation wants to experience life that isn’t a constant toil.
There are already “hobby farms” as well, not only run by rich people with horses and McMansions.
And then there is a homesteading movement, where families go the other way. They want to escape the rat race and settle down, have more time with their kids and be self-sufficient. Some even do it in an extremely frugal way, some in an eco way with permaculture instead of monoculture. Some are even ex-farmer progeny who want to get back to their roots in a smaller scale.
It’s really interesting because these kind of “Kids are leaving the farm!” stories go back basically to the industrial revolution. I imagine eventually it’ll be the case that most american farms are either purely industrial operations ran by corporations or “hobby farms” ran by rich people unconcerned with profit.
Edit: Apparently I didn’t RTFA, this is about farmWORKERS, not farmers. My point still stands about farms and agricultural practices further down. However, a scale of agriculture that requires extremely low paid, often illegal work force with no rights, is not a sustainable practice either.
The main issue is that you need a serious scale of operations to be able to earn money from agricultural practices, and that leads to a fairly monocultural crop, subsidies for certain crops and cog-in-the-wheel operations. So it is already heavily affected by industrial corporations. This is not just true for the US, it’s like this in the most part of the developed world. So the “family farms” tend to get outcompeted even when the farmers are pretty much working round the clock, and still with decreasing rewards and increasing loans while they have occasional crop failures. So it doesn’t surprise me if the next generation wants to experience life that isn’t a constant toil.
There are already “hobby farms” as well, not only run by rich people with horses and McMansions.
And then there is a homesteading movement, where families go the other way. They want to escape the rat race and settle down, have more time with their kids and be self-sufficient. Some even do it in an extremely frugal way, some in an eco way with permaculture instead of monoculture. Some are even ex-farmer progeny who want to get back to their roots in a smaller scale.