Farmers that are killing themselves grow commodity products. The people who are leaving corporate jobs to become farmers are wanting to farm specialty products like organic products or high end products like mushrooms, flowers, wine, or specialty cheeses. The problem is that the farmers who grow commodity crops live in areas that are not suited to growing specialty crops (the middle of the country) so they can't switch. Specialty crops are mostly grown on the west coast and the east coast where there is better soil and in some cases more water think Central Valley, Willamette Valley, Hudson River Valley. https://modernfarmer.com/2013/08/cashing-in-specialty-crops-...

I also expect commodity farmer have significant debt and illiquid assets (namely all the machinery necessary for large-scale commodity farming as well as related lands), and most likely contracts with agro distributors to fulfil.

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.

It's not just what they grow, but how they grow it and sell it. The soil on many mid-country farms is bad because of years of growing with chemical pesticides and fertilizers and bad practices, something that is potentially reversible with alternate growing methods.

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 grass is always greener". I grew up on a dairy farm, its easy to romanticize it but the reality of waking up to literally chip and shovel frozen shit at 5am (almost daily chore to clean barns in winter) gets old after a decade. I worked hard to get out of farming and never want to go back. I love my tech job.

So true, I sometimes quip that growing up shoveling manure on our family dairy farm was excellent preparation for the corporate world I now work in. This life is so much easier, everyday, I'm warm and dry.

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 life is so much easier, everyday, I'm warm and dry.

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.

The people leaving tech for farming are not mucking barns, they’re managing farms and hiring people to do the hard work. Think of more as a new-plantation, rather than a farm. I worked on a horse farm as a kid, and like you it was backbreaking, shit-shoveling, hay-slinging work. Now I have a good friend who owns horses, but she “has people” who do the hard work. She rides, and grooms a bit... money you know?

As someone else who also grew up on a dairy farm (UK), it's very hard to find reliable people to do the work. I can understand that as an office job has a lot of attractions compared to being out in rain in the winter darkness. They will often leave with no notice and it can be very hard to find someone reliable to replace them.

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.

My sister used to quote this to me when we were younger: "If you want to make a million with horses, start with three million"

> I worked hard to get out of farming and never want to go back.

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.

I dunno, man. I spent a few days working on building a house in the pouring rain, and it was better than the last 5 years I've been doing behind a computer. Only reason I didn't quit then and there is because I have financial obligations.

That's the difference between "a few days" and "a decade"

And that one choses to do it, rather it chosen for you.

I remember that discussion. I also remember the major criticism was that a good portion of the people who are moving from tech to farming were already independently wealthy enough to bootstrap their farm into a good place. And on top of that getting to choose where their farm is located. Contrast that with a farmer who may have inherited what he has from his parents and may not be in as good a financial state, or their land holding is too small or has too much local or regional competition to make it profitable.

Why is that a valid criticism? Doesn't that just boil down to "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?"

It's not criticism, it's responding to the question asked.

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?"

That's fair but the comment I was replying to posed it as a criticism (maybe that it was posed as a criticism in the original thread, which I have only a vague recollection of). That's what confused me. I agree it seems like a perfectly valid response.

The point is that a rich software developer's idyllic romanticized farming experience might not match with an actual farmer's soul-crushing experience. That's the reconciliation.

> Doesn't that just boil down to "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?"

Is that not a valid criticism?

I mean, inheriting a farm is inheriting a lot of money. Were family farmers perfectly rational economic actors, they'd presumably sell their inherited farm and use the proceeds to buy one more suited to the newer, locally grown, organic type farms that are more insulated from the economies of scale that are driving them out of business.

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.

One issue at least in my own state that has eliminated many family farms is the inheritance tax rate judges the value of the land on its highest possible economic value of use. This means getting taxed on subdividing the entire property and developing it not taxed on the value of the land if kept as a farm. This lead to every generational change over of a family farm to generally have to halve the size of the farm and then have a new development of NIMBY's surrounding them steadily. The farm lobby in my state has been pushing a bill to base the inheritance tax on the farm value of the land if the land is kept in production as a working farm for 15 years following payment.

I can't speak to anyone else's experience but when my uncle took over the (CA Central Valley) family farm he didn't experience a windfall. And most years he made more money at his side job (substitute teaching) than from the farm.

The windfall option is selling the farm, not keeping it. And if you inherited something that nobody wants to buy then obviously you're in a poor situation.

But did he inherit it, or bought in? If he bought in at market rates (or even at a low double digit discount), it would be 'buying a job' which is seldom very profitable. That's very different from inheriting but not wanting to sell because of sentimental (economically suboptimal) reasons.

Selling a farm isn't like selling a house, you can go years with no offers.

Real agricultural land prices have been on a relatively steady increase since the mid-80's (which further suggests the issues with family farms are due to economies of scale crowding out family farmers, rather than farming itself being unprofitable). So I'm skeptical they're that difficult to unload, especially given that inheriting a farm probably isn't something that catches many people by surprise.

I guess my hang up is that it seems pretty self-evident. Yeah, money makes things easier. I don't think any of the software developers on this site making 3-5x the median individual wage will argue against that. Assuming for a moment that "money buys things" is a valid criticism of some independently wealthy software developer buying a farm (?), what's the proposed solution to that?

Instead of "criticism" read takeaway or insight, rather than criticism of the preference. I think they are saying, the new farmers can choose that path because they have fall back, not that they have a better farming plan or better farming insight over generational farmers.

Of what?

Not the phenomenon itself — everyone should be free to pick a new career as circumstances and desires change — but of some interpretations of that phenomenon.

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.

You can have a rural life, and not be hurt by the vagaries of farm prices etc.

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'.

That's pretty much how my grandmother manages her land. A guy I went to high school with now plants and harvests it. The normal stuff: soybeans and corn.

An orchard would be sweet.

JoeAltmaier says>" he pays rent on the land and suffers the risk all himself."

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.

Can you go into greater detail?

What happened to your mother's relatives?

Very stark difference between choosing the trade and it being handed to you. If you choose to go into the trade, you still have a way out that a lifelong farmer doesn't.

It also doesn't help that rural America is dying in general, but that's a different matter.

Large-scale industrial farming (hyper-competitive, boring, "work") vs. small-scale hipster farming (microgreens, heirloom vegetables, heritage breeds, "lifestyle")

The person cited in the article was not a staid farmer. He adopted no till, and other at the time, avant guard farming techniques, so i think that mischaracterizes at least him.

They're both 'farmers' in the sense that a guy programming plc's in a factory and an ml/ai guy coding linear algebra optimizations are both 'programmers'. Close to 0 overlap in job markets, prospects, career paths etc.

Probably some kind of extorsion going on. E.g. Monsanto selling seeds for exorbitant prices. Financial constructs that farmers can't get out of, or other business practices that make farmers desperate.

>How do we reconcile on the one hand farmers by trade leaving and wannabe farmers wanting to join a farm life?

Stardew Valley