Lawmakers Are Exploring Ways to Support Beginning Farmers
As more American farmers retire, leaders are looking to incentivize younger generations, who are faced with a number of challenges, to take their place.
The list of challenges young farmers need to overcome in order to start their own farm is increasingly long. Lately, getting into farming has been further complicated by the rising cost of inputs such as fertilizer, paired with the high price of land, climate-related extreme weather events and global supply chain issues.
And with the average age of the American farmer hovering at around 60—meaning many of them are on a fast track to retirement—leaders in the industry are looking to incentivize younger generations to get into the ag business with capital and credit.
At a July 14 hearing on the subject, called “A 2022 Review of the Farm Bill: The State of Credit for Young, Beginning, and Underserved Producers,” House Agriculture Committee chairman David Scott said: “We must ensure that the next generation of men and women who take the place of those retiring from this grand occupation have the tools necessary to continue to produce the food and fiber that we rely on for our existence.”
The meeting was one of many happening now and in the coming weeks in Washington as the House Agriculture Committee gears up to finalize the 2023 Farm Bill.
Historically, as addressed at the meeting, both young farmers and farmers of color have been passed over by lenders, while older, experienced farmers have been favored and granted more capital—resulting in a largely white and middle-aged demographic of farmers in America today.
Even with loan programs targeted specifically towards younger demographics, the process of getting the money needed to start a farm can be convoluted and slow, creating roadblocks on beginning farmers’ paths to success.
Scott called access to credit and capital a “pillar to establishing a successful agricultural operation” and said the discussion of how the federal government can support young farmers who are just starting out is an important factor for the future of farming.
But beginning the discussion now won’t be enough to mitigate issues for farmers starting out in 2022. Nathan Kauffman, vice president and economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City in Omaha, Nebraska, noted that, in response to all the rising costs in the agricultural industry, the demand for farm loans is expected to rise exponentially this year, while capital expenditures are expected to drop—for the first time since 2020—according to Successful Farming.
Still, lawmakers are searching for ways to resolve the issues within the agricultural lending system, as laid out in the meeting, and add new ways to support new farmers in the next farm bill, which will be released in 2023 and govern the industry for the next five years.
Follow us
Republish!
Republish our articles for free, online or in print, under a Creative Commons license.
Republish this article
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
Want to republish a Modern Farmer story?
We are happy for Modern Farmer stories to be shared, and encourage you to republish our articles for your audience. When doing so, we ask that you follow these guidelines:
Please credit us and our writers
For the author byline, please use “Author Name, Modern Farmer.” At the top of our stories, if on the web, please include this text and link: “This story was originally published by Modern Farmer.”
Please make sure to include a link back to either our home page or the article URL.
At the bottom of the story, please include the following text:
“Modern Farmer is a nonprofit initiative dedicated to raising awareness and catalyzing action at the intersection of food, agriculture, and society. Read more at <link>Modern Farmer</link>.”
Use our widget
We’d like to be able to track our stories, so we ask that if you republish our content, you do so using our widget (located on the left hand side of the article). The HTML code has a built-in tracker that tells us the data and domain where the story was published, as well as view counts.
Check the image requirements
It’s your responsibility to confirm you're licensed to republish images in our articles. Some images, such as those from commercial providers, don't allow their images to be republished without permission or payment. Copyright terms are generally listed in the image caption and attribution. You are welcome to omit our images or substitute with your own. Charts and interactive graphics follow the same rules.
Don’t change too much. Or, ask us first.
Articles must be republished in their entirety. It’s okay to change references to time (“today” to “yesterday”) or location (“Iowa City, IA” to “here”). But please keep everything else the same.
If you feel strongly that a more material edit needs to be made, get in touch with us at [email protected]. We’re happy to discuss it with the original author, but we must have prior approval for changes before publication.
Special cases
-
Extracts. You may run the first few lines or paragraphs of the article and then say: “Read the full article at Modern Farmer” with a link back to the original article.
-
Quotes. You may quote authors provided you include a link back to the article URL.
-
Translations. These require writer approval. To inquire about translation of a Modern Farmer article, contact us at [email protected]
-
Signed consent / copyright release forms. These are not required, provided you are following these guidelines.
-
Print. Articles can be republished in print under these same rules, with the exception that you do not need to include the links.
Tag us
When sharing the story on social media, please tag us using the following: - Twitter (@ModFarm) - Facebook (@ModernFarmerMedia) - Instagram (@modfarm)
Use our content respectfully
Modern Farmer is a nonprofit and as such we share our content for free and in good faith in order to reach new audiences. Respectfully,
-
No selling ads against our stories. It’s okay to put our stories on pages with ads.
-
Don’t republish our material wholesale, or automatically; you need to select stories to be republished individually.
-
You have no rights to sell, license, syndicate, or otherwise represent yourself as the authorized owner of our material to any third parties. This means that you cannot actively publish or submit our work for syndication to third party platforms or apps like Apple News or Google News. We understand that publishers cannot fully control when certain third parties automatically summarize or crawl content from publishers’ own sites.
Keep in touch
We want to hear from you if you love Modern Farmer content, have a collaboration idea, or anything else to share. As a nonprofit outlet, we work in service of our community and are always open to comments, feedback, and ideas. Contact us at [email protected].Lawmakers Are Exploring Ways to Support Beginning Farmers
by Shea Swenson, Modern Farmer
July 27, 2022
Modern Farmer Weekly
Solutions Hub
Innovations, ideas and inspiration. Actionable solutions for a resilient food system.
ExploreExplore other topics
Share With Us
We want to hear from Modern Farmer readers who have thoughtful commentary, actionable solutions, or helpful ideas to share.
Submit
First, the entrenched bureaucracy that runs the USDA and absorbs the bulk of funding should be fired and fined and/or put in prison. The decades of FSA employees and committee members violating the Federal regulations in order to abscond with farm ground has not been fully addressed or resolved even though class action suits have been won and these actions proven in courts over and over again. I don’t think there is any argument that agencies like the FSA, who now have their own layer of bureaucratic law enforcement, the National Appeals Division, to keep them on the straight and… Read more »