Young people can start farming, and are doing so every day. You just don’t hear much about it unless you live in true farming communities, because these guys usually don’t put up blogs every time they wipe a hen’s ass. Frequently, they have relatives (parents, grandparents) who are farming or start working on farms. To go this route, you have to hustle up extra income by doing custom work, taking a town job to put some money back. If you grew up on a farm or in a small town, this ain’t a news flash, but to pilgrims who don’t understand you might need to go short on sleep in calving season or put in 3-4 days straight in planting or harvesting time and not be able to piss around on the web and whatnot, it’s a tough beat.

The sad truth is that there are a helluva lot of people who have a sense of entitlement and who aren’t willing to work hard, day in and day out, get dirty and shitty, and do without some luxuries to make a go of it. That’s true in farming and many other jobs where manual labor is required. When I used to build silos, there were a lot of guys that never came back after the first day; same with building stone walls.

To the poster trotting out the tired “let’s slam rednecks” material: maybe you should get over yourself. There’s nothing wrong with people who have ATVs and drink a couple beers and watch NASCAR — they are the backbone of many rural communities. Rural teens training pairs of oxen — you need to flush out your headgear.

Maybe I shouldn’t have used South Dakota as an example. Maybe I should have used Back of Beyond, New York; or Way Out In the Sticks, Illinois. My point is that our current reality is that land that is close to urban amenities (“culture”) is way too popular to be reasonably-priced farm land, unless we can institute land use laws which protect farm land as farm land and keep it priced and taxed as farm land — not priced and taxed for its “highest and best use”. The problem here is that property rights fanatics are ready to go to war to preserve their “right” to do any damn thing they want with their land including and especially develop it as non-farm land.

Telling property owners that they “ought” to be willing to sell their property to young families who want to farm for a price that is a small fraction of what they can get from a developer is guaranteed to get you laughed out of the room if not out of town.

Young people who want to farm someplace other than Up the Boohai, Nebraska, need to be organizing and agitating to change our property rights laws, not allowing republicans and other greedheads who want to eliminate the whole concept of land use planning to take and hold power in middle America.

I certainly understand farmers who want to turn their farms into retirement annuities by selling them to developers. Farmers have been getting the dirty end of the stick from just about everybody in this country for a very long time. As long as the U.S. doesn’t provide any real social safety net and it’s every man (and woman) for themselves, then people will do what they need to do.

Our farmers are screwed by our capitalist market system and our government has the gall to pressure European governments to stop supporting their farmers so that cheap American agricultural products can screw their rural people, too.

And I hope you didn’t think that I was blaming Oregon’s predicament on farmers. Most of them opposed the “takings” initiative because they realize that our land use laws are what protects Oregon agriculture.

BTW, you’re right about South Dakota being better off as prairie. Check out the Great Plains Restoration Council at http://www.gprc.org/
I think there is an excellent chance that circumstances may eventually bring back the prairie ( or The Great American Desert, as it was called in the mid-nineteenth century.)

As for your critique, fair enough, but let me play Devil’s Advocate right back.

First of all, the average farmer in South Dakota is almost 60 years old, so his kids aren’t the 14-24 year olds you were talking about – his kids are 25-45.

Second, I wouldn’t be willing to farm in South Dakota – no *WATER* -depleted aquifers, hideous water right laws, long term drought projections that scare the heck out of me and prairies that would be better as prairies. Not to mention right wing politics galore. Those things do matter for quality of life. But that doesn’t mean I don’t want to farm.

I’ve occasionally thought of picking up and moving to Malaysia or Belize to farm (or various other places), but the other issue is that I value my family connections, and I’m not willing to have my kids never know their grandparents. So those are big things for me – it isn’t that I don’t care about farming, it is just that there are other factors in there. So I don’t think you are being quite fair.

As for the farmers wanting to be able to afford assisted living someday – I can’t say I blame them that much. Their kids don’t want the land, they often don’t want their kids to be farmers – because the work is incredibly poorly paid, stressful and dangerous – and this is the only alternative to poverty they have.

I admire Oregon’s history of progressive land use, but I’m not convinced that the blame falls on teh farmers and their grandkids, so much as the yuppie assholes who want the houses in the first place .

Just for the sake of argument .

Sharon

Anway- I farm- but I wouldn’t want to live in South Dakota. Sometimes I want to do something besides farmwork- and I want likeminded people to hang with. And farming, for me, is not 3,000 acres of wheat. So to state that people who are serious about farming must be willing to do it anywhere is unfair. Some of us like to grow produce and sell it at Farmers’ Markets and places like that. So we need to live closer to “the action”.

In terms of retired farmers sitting on their land waiting to sell it to a developer- unfortunately for many farmers their only wealth is in their land- other than that they have nothing. Farmers in general earn so little- they don’t have 401K’s, IRA’s, Pensions, etc. Just their land.

ANI

I was being a bit of a devil’s advocate in that post about today’s young people and their disinterest in occupations that don’t fit the celebrity lifestyle model. But it’s truer than many think and getting truer all the time.

Why else are there all these elderly farmers who might pass their farms to their kids (or a relative’s kids) to farm if any of those kids had any interest in farming?

Really, how bad does a young family want to farm, if they are unwilling to move out to South Dakota or anyplace else that’s not near some “culture”? Either farming is important to them and they can take their culture to remote agricultural land (not so difficult or isolated as it was 100 years ago) or being close to shopping malls, night clubs, big schools, and other facets of urban culture is important.

Having one’s cake and eating it, too, is always the more popular option, but it’s rarely possible and in the situation we’re discussing, it’s mostly not.

And yes, city slickers moving out to McMansions on 10 acre ranchettes and driving up property prices are a big problem in some areas. But so are farmers who regard their land as their retirement fund and know that they can get a much more comfortable or even luxurious retirement if they sell to a subdivision developer. After all, land use in the United States isn’t based on what land should be used for, it’s based on what is called “highest and best use” which means, in most cases, single-family homes on the largest piece of land available. After that comes multi-family housing, commercial, industrial, and way down on the list, agriculture. Truly screwed up, I know, but reality nonetheless.

As long as our society enshrines “property rights” as the be-all and end-all of land use law, then farm land which happens to lie in an area where people with money want to live is going to get subdivided and built on. At least as long as petroleum supplies and the economy make it feasible.

Here in Oregon, we have the nation’s most advanced land use laws and they were doing a darn good job of protecting farm land from development. But a couple of years ago, republicans, libertarians, property rights-uber-alles fanatics, and big corporate landowners spent a boatload of money to convince a majority of Oregon voters that our laws had unfairly deprived landowners of the right to make as much money as they wanted to from their land.

Now, we’re fighting desperately to undo the horrible damage that deceptive initiative did to our land use laws which have been a source of pride and a beacon to forward-thinking people from other states for 30 years and the main reason for Oregon’s lack of sprawl, close-to-cities farms and protected scenic beauty.

ANI

Furthermore, my generation seems to be divided into two groups: one is the one that the media focuses on. The Paris Hiltons and such. But also the upper middle class kids who’ve never worked, have IPODS and such, and meet the stereotype you present.

The other group actually comprises the majority of us. And we work our butts off to make ends meet. Many of the kids I know are working 2 or 3 jobs to pay the rent and buy groceries. Watch tv? When? Others are only working one job but using that, and financial aid (mostly loans) to try to get through school in the hopes of getting a better life. What they don’t know is, with wages begin what they are, and their student loan payments, they’ll be making about the same as they did at Macdonald’s. Read Generation Debt, as Sharon suggested, or Strapped, to get a good look at the challenges facing the tail end of Gen X and all of GenY. (I’m on the border between the two, btw.)

Here’s one other thing that bothers me about our cities. Most of them simply are not sustainable in the long run, or maybe not even without cheap fossil fuels. They are simply too big and wasteful. You might be able to grow half of some cities food inside it, but not of a place like New York City -and even then the other half has to come from somewhere. I just don’t see anyway to feed 8 million people (the current population of New York City) from the surrounding farmland. I also see no way to deal with the waste generated by that many people, provide them with water, etc, without cheap fossil fuels. And what will happen when those things are no longer available?