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Are we renegades?

I love the song "Renegades" by X Ambassadors, I pretend that they wrote the song for our little family of renegades.  Now, I'm not completely delusional, I know that they did not write that song for a family of farmers in the middle of Nebraska.  But listening to the song makes me think about our lifestyle and how it is vastly different than most families.  And how we are not living all that different than our pioneer ancestors, other than the glut of technology that we have, you know other than that we are the same right?  


This week National Agriculture day was celebrated.  This made me curious to know a little more about the number of farmers in the United States.  There was some good news and some not- so- great news about the farming forecast, at least according to the 2012 census.  I’m assuming the 2016 census isn’t available yet, but please correct me if I didn’t find it in my research.  By research I mean google search, lets be real people.
My little renegades
The good news:  Family farms own 97 percent of all farm land.  Why good news?  I had predicted that corporate farming, true corporate farming, would own more than just 3% of farm land.  I predicted that family farm numbers were actually shrinking.  In fact I was wrong, according the charts family farms are still thriving, most of the family farms were considered small with less than $350,00 in gross income.  Lets all remember that gross income is how much money is earned before subtracting expenses in earning income.  So the farmer never actually feels the gross income. 
1.https://www.agcensus.usda.gov/Publications/2012/Online_Resources/Highlights/NASS%20Family%20Farmer/Family_Farms_Highlights.pdf

And what is the not-so-great news?  The number of younger farmers is dramatically decreasing.  In 2012 there were 608,052 farmers age 55 to 64, compared to 214,106 farmers aged 35 to 44 years, where Farmer Brown and I would have been in 2012.  So my personal take away from this is that the younger farmers are going to need to farm more land than their parents did in order to maintain their farms.  And technology is going to have to continue to advance in order to allow them to accomplish this.  This makes me wonder what the future of farming will look like for our Brown boys, will they even have a chance to farm, if the number of farmers continues to decline like they appear to be in these statistics?  Only the future will tell us, let us wait and see what it all has in store for us.

https://www.agcensus.usda.gov/Publications/2012/Online_Resources/Highlights/Farm_Demographics/

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