The Pew Charitable Trusts

Web sites like HotJobs and Monster.com offer employers and career seekers thousands of opportunities to find each other every day, but you likely won't find listings on them for one of the nation's most visible and time-honored occupations: Farming.

That hasn't stopped family farm advocates and state governments from Maine to California from borrowing the concept of online job listings in their steadily expanding effort to help the nation's aging farmers locate possible successors.

In Maryland, the state launched its online database in 1998. It now includes basic information about farms and interests from eight landowners and 42 prospective farmers designed to facilitate partnerships that could eventually transfer farm businesses from one set of capable hands to another.

"The focus is on making it easier for new farmers to get into farming," said state agribusiness development administrator Valerie Gonlin.

What's the concern? Federal data shows that farmers older than 65 outnumber those younger than 35 by more than three to one nationwide. More than one-third of all farmers in the country are within ten years of retirement, even though a recent survey of Iowa farmers indicates that few have made any plans to do so.

For many in the farm policy community, the age issue is fundamental, more significant than even the crop subsidies and conservation benefits at the core of the debate over the Farm Bill. "We've got a whole bunch of old people and very few young people and that's where the problem is going to lie: Trying to get those young people into agriculture," says attorney John Baker, who directs the Beginning Farmer Center and the Farm On program at Iowa State University.

In many cases, farm families have little interest in carrying on once the head of the household retires or dies. The unfavorable economics of farming have threatened it as a way of life for decades and no one knows the strains of farm life like the children who grow up on them.

Whether or not a farmer's child or grandchild is ready to take over the business, families face difficult choices about the fair distribution of the estate. " Many farmers keep going until they drop dead. And at that point, if the family hasn't planned, you've got a fight on your hands," says spokeswoman Mary Heinricht of the American Farmland Trust.

In recent years, federal and state governments have addressed the farm transition issue with extensive loan programs favoring young farmers and with farmland preservation measures designed to offer farmers a potentially lucrative and environmentally conscious option to simply selling out. But, as the most recent figures from the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) show, the numbers of farms and young farmers continue their precipitous free-fall from the peaks they reached in the first half of the twentieth century.

"Matches" means the number of successful farm transfers that each program claims to have directly facilitated. Wisconsin Farm Link coordinator Gwen Garvey emphasizes the educational function of farm transfer programs. "We do not consider [the number of successful farm transitions] when evaluating our success," she says.

When he explains the entry problems faced by prospective farmers, Baker says the math is simple. "In the 1950s, interest rates were about two percent on borrowed money and farm [profit] margins were between 35 and 40 percent. So you could borrow a heck of a lot of money and you could pay a farm loan within about three years. Now you can't get it done in thirty."

Current interest rates are closer to eight or nine percent and profits on many crops down between two and four percent, he says. USDA estimates that the average farm household requires about $500,000 in assets to support it. "I'm not Alan Greenspan, but I don't think you can make it work at that level," Baker says.

Now, statewide farm transfer programs have made it their mission to try a more personal approach.

In the early 1990s, farm advocates in Iowa and Nebraska separately decided that a new tool was needed. Show older farmers a satisfactory exit and younger hopefuls a reasonable entrance, they said, by teaching both how to navigate land and business transfers successfully.

Generally, the transfer programs operate in part like a dating service. Farmers and prospects size each other up through basic profiles. An interested farmer may invite a prospect to come to work on the farm. If the match works for both parties, they set up a business agreement in which the junior partner may build equity in the business over time and conditions are established under which the transfer is made.

Apart from the matchmaking service, farm transfer programs try to teach older farmers how to plan for their retirement, keep the land in agriculture and still have an inheritance to leave their families.

Growing Population of Older Farmers

Sources: U.S. Census Bureau; U.S. Department of Agrilculture, Economic Research Service

Maryland Farm Link and Iowa's Farm On are two of 20 states with state or privately-run programs participating in the non-profit, Iowa-based National Farm Transition Network. Another multistate helping hand to young farmers, the Growing New Farmers Network, ties together efforts in 12 northeastern states and is working on a Web site of its own.

"Some states have been very interested and other states haven't. There's a learning curve on this," Baker says.

Jon Butler of the Center for Rural Affairs in Nebraska says the U.S. Senate's version of the Farm Bill includes $15 million for the development of local and regional beginning farmer assistance programs with the same basic goals as the statewide transfer programs.

Bush Administration agriculture policy advisor Charles F. Conner told the nation's governors in Washington for their annual winter meeting Sunday (2/24) that while the White House continues to prefer the House version, it supports the range of beginning farmer provisions included in the Senate bill.

Meanwhile, more states are developing or considering farm transition programs. In 2000, the Virginia General Assembly charged the state Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services with the creation of both a statewide farmland preservation program and Virginia Farm Link. Agriculture officials began to develop the programs last year.

In Missouri, the Department of Agriculture has begun studying farm transfer programs in other states with an eye toward designing its own once the state's budget rebounds. Similar discussions are underway in North Carolina. States are trying to learn more about trends in retirement and the fate of farm businesses as well. Here, too, heads are turning toward Iowa for guidance.

In addition to his work with agriculture students at Iowa State, Baker also serves as NFTN's coordinator and consults with states and non-profit groups developing programs around the country. Several states, including Pennsylvania and Virginia, are in the process of replicating the 2000 Iowa farmer retirement survey, which Baker borrowed from an English agronomist who used it to study farm demographics in Great Britain, France and Canada.

In Virginia, interest in learning more about farmer's retirement plans grew among state officials after research showed that 70 percent of the Old Dominion's privately-owned farm and forest land 50 percent of the state's entire land area is likely to change hands in the next ten to 15 years.

"That's a substantial amount of land that's going to transition across the generations," Virginia assistant agriculture commissioner Bill Dickinson says. "It is an awesome figure."

While no other state has performed the same analysis, Baker says the 70 percent turnover estimate is probably very similar in other states. He and others say preservation programs that pay farmers not to sell their land to developers are a valuable but often insufficient response.

"Farmland doesn't stay farmland unless it's farmed. If you're in Iowa, it will go back to tallgrass prairie eventually. If it's [in] Vermont, it will go back to forest," he says.

And if it's Virginia, AFT's Mary Heinricht observes from her office in Culpeper, it may go to housing subdivisions and new strip malls. A Stateline.org comparison of USDA and Census Bureau data found that seven of the ten states to draw the most new residents during the 1990s Arizona, California, Florida, Georgia, North Carolina, Texas, and Virginia - have farmer populations older than the national average of 54.

Anti-sprawlers have long argued that development drives up the price of land, effectively slamming the door on young people who dream of a farm and are long on time, energy and interest but short on capital.

At the same time, both Heinricht and USDA officials say the correlation between aging farmers and high rates of outward suburban growth may also reflect the interest of older retirees in secondary "country living" homes and small, niche-crop "farmettes" on the suburban periphery. If they have so much as the potential to produce $1,000 of marketable crops on their land, USDA data may include them as "farmers."

That's not the only question raised about the apparent graying of American agriculture.

Farm economy analyst Robert Hoppe of USDA's Economic Research Service does not dispute that current age trends among farmers portend a possible crisis. But he says the image of farming dominated by elderly growers who don't know how to let go can be misleading.

The five-year Census of Agriculture only counts the head of a farm operation when gathering information on age. (The last census was conducted in 1997; results from this year's census are scheduled for release early in 2003). Also, the slow, steady upward creep of the average age of the farmer population suggests that more turnover is taking place than concerned observers recognize, Hoppe says.

If the scope of the problem isn't crystal clear, the answer is also far from certain. Shoestring budgets and staff that often dedicate little more than a few hours a week are problems particularly among state-run programs. Farm Link of Arkansas recently lost its lone employee to retirement and officials there say a replacement is unlikely until the state's budget picture improves.

Success has been mixed and Baker acknowledges that farm transition programs aren't fix-alls. On the upside, Iowa's well-established Farm On has played a direct role in the transfer of 90 Iowa farm businesses in its 11-year history.

And then there are younger programs like Maryland's, online database and all. Going into its fourth year, part-time coordinator Joan Schulz says Maryland Farm Link has conducted financial planning seminars and facilitated numerous meetings between farmers and career seekers. In her view, the program's value is indisputable.

But, she says, "we haven't actually had what I'd call a marriage yet."

Selected "Farm Link" Programs in Brief