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Back to the land: are young farmers the new starving artists? | A growing movement of millennials are seeking out a more agrarian life, but the reality is not always as simple as they hoped

Back to the land: are young farmers the new starving artists?

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/dec/17/young-farmers-millennials

A small but growing movement of millennials are seeking out a more agrarian life but the reality of life on the land is not always as simple as they hoped

Back to the land: are young farmers the new starving artists?

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themeltingclock

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I think the primary difference, at least in the hobby farmers I know who are young, idealistic, and just getting started, is that they aren’t expecting to scale the operation beyond some arbitrary point - beyond which, it stops being fulfilling and starts being a giant pain in the ass. Conversely, the dairy farmer I know who has the largest operation in the county is a stand up dude, who avoids cutting corners but is getting squeezed big time by small artisanal operations with street cred and big, industrial operations with margins. The middle, where there used to be a huge swath of family farms, is a bloodbath of debt and suffering.

I imagine most of these new hippies are trying to stay small.

bitsplease

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Yeah I grew up with a friend whose parents owned a ranch (one of the biggest in the area, but still a family operation) and the way he told it, they didn't really make money, they just (usually) made enough to keep up the payments on their mountains of debt. The main reason they're even doing it is simply because their family has been doing it for generations, not because they're turning much of a profit

logen

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Even just getting buy, working and earning from my own land sounds far better than just about anything else. Something special about work being part of life rather than something to seperate out.

The_v

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FYI medium sized dairies are being squeezed out by the government back oligopolies in milk processesing that completely control the milk prices.

Many of them also do not have enough land base to feed their animals and manage the waste. The cost remedy this is prohibitive due to mega corporate investment firms buying up land at extremely high prices.

themeltingclock

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Yep, that’s what I was driving at. If you’re a “medium” the cards are stacked against you and there are very few levers to pull (if any) to level the playing field at all. The only reason the mid-sized guy I know is able to survive is that he owns all his land outright and his family has been amassing acreage for three generations. Even still, he’s in a tough spot and the mega farms are buying up what is left of the family farms all around him and doing crazy shit like trucking manure across the state on a scale that he just can’t compete with.