Old Farmers

One in three farmers in the United States is 65 or older.  In 2017, the year of the last federal agriculture census, the average age of a farm owner or manager was 58.6.  In that year there were 2,042,220 farms in the country.  That represents a loss of 173,656 farms over the previous two decades.

You can certainly see it in Towamensing Township, where I live.  The Johnson farm is now Beltzville Lake Estates.  The Norm Strohl farm is zoned for 30 some houses.  The Christman farm shrank from 460 acres to 23 acres, with the remainder now part of a state park.  I'm one of those old guys who can drive around and point to subdivisions and say, "I can remember when that was the Babe Haydt farm"or "that was Lee Dreisbach's farm."

I know very few farmers who retire.  They keep farming until they die, but they are dying out at a fairly rapid rate.

The statistics are taken from Corey Kilgannon, "As Farmers Grow Old, Who Will Replace Them?" New York Times, (Nov. 28, 2019), pp. A1, A26.