Corner Post Editorial:
Small family farms: Moving into the future or a thing of the past?
by Scarlett Miller, posted April 1, 2009
When I think of a family farm, I picture red barns, small farmhouses and a lone farmer bringing in the cattle. But I also think of these farms as a dying breed. But are small farms really disappearing? Yes. To an extent. But according to Georganne Artz, professor of agricultural economics at MU, disappearing farms are not as prevalent as the media and lawmakers have made them out to be.
The 2007 census of agriculture supports this fact by showing a minimal decrease in the category of small family farms. A small family farm is defined as having sales less than $250,000, according to the Economic Research Study conducted by the USDA.
According to Artz, the farm crisis in the 1980s and a bad period for livestock farmers in the 1990s changed what small or family farms are and will be. Rural communities once dependent on farms for survival have now switched to where the farmers are dependent on the community.
For example, farmers rely on off-farm income. According to the ERS Farm Typology Report published in 2005, farms whose operators reported farming as their major occupation and source of income made up only 33 percent of the Midwest’s farms.
Artz said overall, that media and lawmakers tend to generalize the issue to everywhere when it is specific places that still have an occurring problem. In most places the farms are still there. But they exist only because they changed by either getting bigger, moving with a trend, or specializing.
One trend is going organic. A ‘local foods’ movement is helping this trend. More and more people like to know where their food is coming from and also feel good about helping the small farmer. Organic items have gotten significant attention lately because they have health benefits. So there is a higher market value for organic rather than for traditional food, making it more profitable for the farmer.
Jerry Carpenter, a family farmer from Marion County, saw the way that smaller farms were going in the 1980s-90s and realized he had to do something to keep his way of living afloat. For Carpenter, this was raising hogs as he always had, but without antibiotics. He markets his livestock to a specific market in order to rise above the problems faced by traditional farmers.
Growing up, I saw the struggles of the small family farmer firsthand and always thought that that would be the way it would always be. But as I researched this article looking for all the doom and gloom evidence of small farms failing, there wasn’t any.
I soon realized what Artz was saying about the problem being too generalized to the whole United States when really the problem is very isolated. Yes, small farms don’t have it as easy as the bigger ones, but they have learned how to survive. Family farms still thrive in the U.S., just not the way they did 50 years ago. Small farms with traditional methods have a hard time scraping by in current times with factors impacting their profits including location, ability to manage the farm, what exactly they are trying to produce and the market conditions.
“There are opportunities,” said Artz. “They don’t have to be large to be successful, but they have to adapt.”
