SUburban and rural markets have plenty of young people interested in farming. Farmers simply need to 1) pay better, 2) make the jobs a little more employee friendly, and 3) learn how to do effective employment outreach.
The trouble comes when so many farmers are able to get away with it that other farmers can’t compete without doing the same. Crack down on illegals and their employers wherever they are!
SUburban and rural markets have plenty of young people interested in farming. Farmers simply need to 1) pay better, 2) make the jobs a little more employee friendly, and 3) learn how to do effective employment outreach.
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Not sure about your premise. I live in dairy country. In the high school, *farmer* is an insult. One farm family I know used to tease the oldest daughter that she would marry a farmer. She would cry.
The farmer’s kids grow up seeing how little their parents get to keep. I hear all the time from neighbors that the kids, now adults, do not want to inherit the family business. They don’t want to have to sell it just to pay the estate taxes, either.
I hire a couple of kids from a huge family to do yard work. They have turned their labor into a business. They just bought a lawn tractor....the older one is 14. I was so thrilled to discover them, because for years there were no teens around who would do this sort of work and if I found someone, they were useless. These boys work hard and earn the $10 hour they are paid. And that is the absolute minimum pay for casual labor out here. House cleaners _start_ at $15/hr while building a client base and go to $30 as quickly as possible.
In the families I know that milk, the wives clean udders, hook up machines, clean machines, clean tanks until the day comes when they simply cannot do it any longer. It is hard physical labor for little profit. Relief milkers are hard to find. Many simply sell the herd. I know people who have even quit row crops, mainly due to the cost of diesel. Instead, they raise feeder calves, which is more profitable. It’s a rare farm family that doesn’t have someone working off the farm.
Great comments. One would think that with all the clamoring about eating organically grown products, saving the earth, and ensuring that they do whatever they can to make the farm animals feel loved, more people would just jump at a chance to put something other than their mouth to work and head for the farm. Not exactly how one would go about making a task, such as muckin’ out stalls, more alluring though.