ST. JOSEPH, Mo. (AP) - Rodney Baublit enjoys tending 1,000 acres of row crops south of St. Joseph, but he nurtures a concern that such a livelihood may eventually disappear from rural America.
“I’ve been around farming all my life,” he told the St. Joseph News-Press (https://bit.ly/1HNRMmm ). “My dad farmed when I was young. It’s so hard for the younger generation to get started.”
He fears the agricultural pride will not carry over to would-be successors, once he and others are through tilling the land for a living. The sprawl of technology and attractiveness of other jobs out of the region are at least partially to blame.
Corporations that have set about swallowing up tracts of ground for their own purposes handicap the family farmer’s mission, according to Baublit. Raw economics give rise to more complex problems that must be surmounted.
“You have to try to keep costs down,” he said. “It’s hard … The family farm’s going to disappear if we don’t stop the corporations. Their big money’s going to make it where you can’t afford anything.”
Ray Schwarz raises an average-sized dairy herd between Gower and Plattsburg. He faces similar challenges to maintain his operation.
“Since the drought, we’ve been able to get back to normal,” he said. “We were blessed with the way things turned out.”
Crops he also grows on the farm produced yields last year that went way beyond expectations.
But Schwarz doesn’t share the belief corporations will ring the death knell for the family farm.
“We have learned to cooperate and work with corporate America,” he said. “The so-called stigma of corporate America, I’m not sure it’s a true picture.”
However, he said, corporations have been able to lure the young away from the family farm by offering high salaries.
“That’s the main reason why you don’t see many young people coming into agriculture,” he said. “It makes for kind of a tough situation.”
His family’s history with dairy traces back nine generations. He wants someone to continue milking cows at the dairy after he’s finished.
“Right now, I’m kind of looking for another generation to step in,” Schwarz said.
Dr. Patrick Westhoff, director of the Food and Agricultural Policy Research Institute at the University of Missouri-Columbia, said modern farming continues to transform as machinery advances. Operations are becoming larger, more specialized - or both, he said.
“The evolution of technology is part of the reason why farms are getting bigger,” he said.
Other challenges lie in the costs of land and farmers’ willingness - or lack thereof - to embrace advances in the industry.
John Ikerd, professor emeritus of agricultural & applied economics at MU, has done extensive research into the family farms of North America. He said the consolidation of agricultural land into large corporate farms paved the way for the North American Free Trade Agreement. Family farms in the United States, Canada and Mexico are all being consolidated into large businesses to compete in global markets.
“Perhaps the most important challenges in all three countries are government farm policies that increasingly support the industrialization of farming in a quest for economic efficiency,” he said.
Ikerd called farmers’ advancing age another obstacle to the traditional livelihood.
“Young people who do choose farming as their occupation also face a major challenge in gaining access to land,” he said.
There were 108,000 farms in Missouri as of 2010, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s National Agriculture Statistics Service. The state had 242,000 farms in 1950, the agency said.
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Information from: St. Joseph News-Press/St. Joe, Missouri, https://www.newspressnow.com
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