Nation’s Farm Population Ages as Rural Youths Seek Jobs Elsewhere

Grant Bafus has helped out on the family wheat and barley farm in southeastern Washington’s Palouse country “ever since I could tie my shoes.”

Now 19, the Washington State University freshman is pondering his future: Should he pursue a career without farming’s financial uncertainty and sunup-to-sundown hours?

Or should he keep the family’s farm tradition alive and do his own small part to infuse new blood into an aging U.S. farmer population that has grown increasingly gray for more than two decades?

“If I take over, it will be the fourth generation,” Bafus said. “I almost feel obligated to my ancestors to carry on what they started.”

He hasn’t ruled that out, but he’s majoring in finance with hopes of landing a job as a farm-credit banker.

His father, Darrell, hopes to pass the farm outside Endicott on to his son. But he also wants what’s best for Grant, the only one of his four children pondering a career working the land.

Two sons are considering engineering careers, and a daughter wants to go into medicine.

“With the price of wheat the way it is, farming is just a less desirable profession,” Darrell Bafus said. “Any student who graduates from college with the right degree can get a pretty good-paying job.”

At 50, Darrell Bafus is younger than most of his peers.

The average age of U.S. farm operators--those primarily in charge of the nation’s 1.9 million farms--was 54.3 years in the most recent agriculture census, conducted in 1997.

Census data collected by the Department of Agriculture every five years show a continuous upward trend since 1978, when the figure was 50.5 years.

Meanwhile, the proportion of the nation’s farm operators age 44 or younger declined from 31% in 1992 to 27% in 1997.

Washington mirrors the trends. In 1997, the state’s farm operators averaged 54.2 years--a year older than in 1992--with those 44 or younger making up 25% of all farm operators in 1997 compared with 29% in 1992.

Annabel Cook, chairwoman of Washington State University’s Department of Rural Sociology, said the age figures would be lower if farmhands also were counted in the census data.

“But farmers would still be old compared with other occupational groups,” she said.

The biggest factor in the graying of America’s farm population is the decreasing size of farm families, Cook said. Today’s farmers are raising fewer children than their parents.

“There just isn’t much of a pool of children available to take over the farms,” she said.

The current price slump for many farm commodities--including soft white wheat prices for Pacific Northwest growers--may be luring some young people out of the fields, Cook said.

“But I think each farm generation has some kind of a crisis they deal with,” she said. “I’m not sure the current situation is more extreme now than it has been in past decades.”

Calvin Beale, a Washington, D.C.-based senior demographer for the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Economic Research Service, said the farm crisis of the 1980s may be affecting the career decisions of young adults who saw family farms increasingly lose out to bigger corporate enterprises when they were children.

“A lot of them saw their families struggle, and they know about the increasing rate of consolidation of farms and the high amount of capital that has to be risked,” Beale said. “Because of that, they’re less likely to try farming.”

The strength of the nation’s non-farm economy also may be steering farm kids toward other careers.

Publicity over 20-somethings earning fortunes with Internet startup firms is fueling the trend, said Barry Roach, a Spokane investment advisor and insurance agent who helps farm families on estate matters.

“It’s hard for them to think of being on that tractor when they hear those stories,” Roach said.

Meanwhile, farm acreage nationwide has decreased along with the number of farmers.

“This is no longer an agrarian society,” Roach said.

Distaste for rural life and the lure of the big city may be steering fewer young people away from farming than in the past.

The Internet and satellite communications technology have diminished rural isolation for farm communities with adequate infrastructure, Cook said.

Many younger farmers increasingly are protecting themselves from commodity price swings by growing several crops and working in agricultural service industries as well as on the farm.

“There’s been an increase in farmers having other jobs, and an increase in cases in which the other job eventually becomes their primary job,” Beale said.

Chuck Schmidt, a 42-year-old who took over a Palouse farm outside Rosalia from his father, also runs an equipment dealership.

“When I started out in farming on my own, I couldn’t make enough money just from the farm,” he said. “If farm prices stay like they have, I might invest more in the equipment end of things.”

His father, 71-year-old Dick Schmidt, worries for his son.

“It used to be you could plant a field and be pretty sure things would come out well money-wise,” said Schmidt, who spends less time on the farm after nearly 50 years of growing crops. “That’s not always true anymore.

“I keep asking my son, ‘Are you really sure you want to stick with farming?’ I’m not sure how long he is going to be able to keep with it.”

His son thinks he can keep it up.

“It’s just a lifestyle I like,” he said.