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Because farming is so central to our nation’s identity—and its idea of itself—this future can feel fraught. In 2012, the USDA forecast that most (70 percent) familyfarms would transfer hands over the next 20 years. Will familyfarms as we know and love them survive, and how do the ones that are thriving now do it?
At Farm Credit of Southern Colorado, we take great pride in supporting the families who shape agriculture in our region. The Mattive family of Worley FamilyFarms has spent generations cultivating success in the San Luis Valley, and their story is one of resilience, dedication, and innovation.
The American familyfarm is the cornerstone of our nation—but is its existence in jeopardy? As the land of the free and home of the brave, the American familyfarm has been a foundational part of this nation and the meaning of independence. According to the 2022 ag census, familyfarms still dominate U.S.
This was soon after the Zachmans founded Feathered Acres Learning Farm & Inn with substantial startup expenses. Trisha says niche markets like this are critical to keeping small familyfarms like theirs alive. “If Niman gives us the opportunity to just be a small familyfarm,” says Trisha. “We
Earlier this year, CAFF kicked off a massive project in the San Joaquin Valley to help support familyfarms there and strengthen the local food economy, in partnership with UC Agriculture & Natural Resources (UC ANR) and the Central Valley Community Foundation (CVCF), among others. Why take on such a big project?
In fact, from 2008-2016, croplands expanded at a rate of over one million acres per year, with the eastern half of the Dakotas leading the charge. In 1971, the soils on his familyfarm in Ohio contained 0.75% organic matter and a pH as low as 4.2 ton/acre/year. Unfortunately, 69.5% in some spots.
Kava has endured a long history of adversity, said Lakea Trask, a Hawaiian farmer and local activist who cultivates kava and other Native crops for Kanaka Kava , his familysfarm-to-table restaurant in Kailua-Kona, on the Big Island. Hawaii is a state of small farms, he said, with more than 90 percent measuring less than 50 acres.
On June 29th, Lopes FamilyFarms hosted a field day with Community Alliance with FamilyFarms (CAFF) in Princeton, CA focused on rice and duck farming, a Biologically Integrated Farming System (BIFS). For more information on Lopes FamilyFarm follow them at Lopes FamilyFarms. *All
The farm is now a Site of Nature Conservation Interest and a testament to the value of farming with nature. Withers does not own all of the land on the farm, and this has left her vulnerable. The potential impact on the farms wildlife could be devastating and concern for this is ongoing.
By his senior year, Williams was trying to figure out how to return home and take over the familyfarm. Williams, his wife Hannah, and their toddler Lyle now live on Williams FamilyFarms, sustainably and humanely raising pigs and farming about 400 acres of cropland.
Iowa is the number-one pork producer in the United States, but it has relatively few hog farms. Large factory farm facilities have replaced smaller familyfarms. The state lost nearly 90 percent of its hog farms from 1982 to 2017, according to U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) Census data.
The exhortation by Benson and Butz for farmers to “get big or get out” finally came to fruition, with the average size of a farm nearly doubling from 650 acres in 1987 to 1,201 acres twenty-five years later. Black farmers now represent just over 1 percen t of all American farmers.
An example from our familyfarm is shown below. To determine the cost of erosion, I used the NRCS tolerable soil loss or “T” value for our farm of 5 tons per acre. The Daily Erosion Project and other research has shown that this is roughly the average soil loss per acre in the Midwest. What’s the value of that?
. “The Brighter Future Funds Emergency Resilience Grant is not only meant to help ease immediate hardships but also provide stability for the future, says Ashley Brucker, Senior Manager of Grantmaking, Brighter Future Fund & Farm Viability tells Food Tank. The fund has distributed over US$4.5
New research published in Nature Sustainability projects that, if trends continue, the number of farms across the world will be sliced in half by the end of the 21 st century as consolidation of land, wealth and power reshapes our farming and food landscape. The marginalization of smaller-scale farms has severe consequences.
“We lost 10 percent of our saleable Christmas trees that year,” says Leanna Anderson, owner of Aldor AcresFamilyFarm in Langley, British Columbia and treasurer of the BC Christmas Tree Association. Photo courtesy of Aldor AcresFarm. Photography courtesy of Aldor AcresFarm.
“Of 400 farms in our county, only five are organic,” says Matt Fitzgerald of Fitzgerald Organics in Hutchinson, Minnesota. His 2,500-acrefamilyfarm is patchwork across 40 miles of land the family owns and leases, and grows organic corn, soy, wheat and specialty crops such as beans and peas.
“When I start my own farm, I will need to have off-farm income to live a balanced, happy life.” When I started Jupiter Ridge Farm in 2017, I did—and still do, like many traditional familyfarms. Why is running a small-scale farm more like an expensive hobby? But why is it like this?
Tiffany Stanley runs A Different Chick Farm, a Certified Organic familyfarm on just under 6 acres in Johnson City, Tennessee. She is participating in OFRF's Farmer Led Trials (FLT) Program to explore options for making on-farm compost to reduce input needs and increase fertility on her farm.
My Land Advocacy Fellowship with the National Young Farmer Coalition empowered me to share my experience of growing up on the familyfarm with my senators and representatives offices on Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C. Across the country, farmland is being lost to development at a rate of more than 2,000 acres per day.
The ice cream shop is an extension of the Nicholson family’s sixth-generation, 120-acrefarm in nearby Ferndale. More Eyes Per Acre As one of California’s oldest cheesemakers, Rumiano Cheese has a storied presence in the North Coast’s dairy shed.
Her familyfarm is located in Waupaca County outside of Ogdensburg where she cares for a herd of nine dairy goats, two horses, hay fields, bees, a large kitchen garden, and more. Eventually the couple settled on a 80 acrefarm, where they’ve been for the past 34 years. The field was very skewed towards men.
Meet some Midwestern agrarians, some of whom come from conventional farmingfamilies, who are using their land to reestablish the connection between trees, animals, and food production. Wendy Johnson’s ‘natural savannah’ Wendy Johnson and her husband, Johnny Rafkin, own Jóia Food & Fiber Farm, in Charles City, Iowa.
Recognizing the vital role that four-legged friends often play on familyfarms and ranches, Farm Bureau launched the Farm Dog of the Year contest several years ago now a popular feature of the American Farm Bureau Federations Convention.
Prime farmland, it attracted countless farmers, including the Black farmers seeking to fulfill the promise of “40 acres and a mule” that followed the American Civil War. But Black farm ownership has dropped dramatically over the years, with just 1,500 estimated to remain in Arkansas today. But the process hasn’t always come easily.
Outside of Charleston, South Carolina, in the picturesque marshes of the Kiawah River, sits more than 100 acres of working farmland. But unlike neighboring farms that focus on production for faraway markets or keep a single family afloat, the farm at Kiawah River is supporting 185 families who live in the surrounding homes.
Upon leaving her familyfarm to study agriculture at Stanford, she took up a work-study program investigating the economic viability of grass-fed beef. “It The same year that Carman returned to her familyfarm, a case of bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE), also known as mad cow disease, was detected in the US.
tons of American agricultural soil per acre, costing farmers and ranchers US$44 billion annually and taxpayers nearly US$100 billion. a cattle rancher outside Atlanta, Georgia, an advocate for Black farmers, and a Democrat; and Rick Clark, a Republican fifth-generation farmer with 7,000 acres of row crops in Warren County, Indiana.
Eric Boor took over his great-grandfather’s nine-acrefarm in southern Iowa four years ago. When they first started, many in their family and community doubted that they could successfully farm this way. Today, the Boors’ farm “looks completely different,” according to Mikala.
Nut farmer Benina Montes of Burroughs FamilyFarms in California says she chose to certify her almonds with ROC because of the environmental and economic benefits of ROC’s practices and brand. “By Her familyfarm has been organic certified since 2006, but it only adopted the ROC standards in June 2022.
In one interview, a farmer told me that he had been offered $40,000 an acre for his land, money that would make him an instant millionaire. The subdivision in Sugarland’s song is called “Shady Acres.” Jason Isbell’s “Last of My Kind” calls out a familyfarm becoming a Wal-Mart parking lot. Subdivide, give it a name.”
During that same time, production has grown, as only farms of more than 200 hectares (approximately 400 acres) have increased in number. According to the recently released 2022 Census of Agriculture , the largest four percent of US farms (2,000 or more acres) control 61 percent of all farmland.
As Brian Paddock walks through his 12-and-a-half acres of almond trees, he’s taking in everything. Treehouse Almonds sources nuts from roughly 50,000 acres in California’s Central Valley, and Gardiner’s familyfarm provides about 20,000 of them. Photography courtesy of Burroughs FamilyFarms.
In addition, they may have been told that the carbon emissions for each litre of milk produced by intensively managed ‘fully housed’ cows, is less than the emissions from lower-yielding, mainly grass-fed cows – in other words, the cows that I and thousands of other dairy farmers look after on our familyfarms.
Between the years 2017 and 2022, America lost almost 20 million acres of farmland. Despite this rapid decline, the average farm size increased five percent to 463 acres. This ag census data highlights the trend toward farm consolidation as more and more familyfarm operations are feeling the pressure to go big or get out.
Hartland, Vermont, farmer Kerry Gawalt of Cedar Mountain Farm and Cobb Hill Cheese was chosen to receive the third annual ‘Fantastic Farmer’ title and a significant award of $5,000 from the A. Pizzagalli FamilyFarm Fund.
While her family has been farming for at least four generations, there isn’t enough land for all of Alaina’s siblings to return to the familyfarm. And these days, few new farmers can afford to buy land, according to Alaina: In the Imhoffs’ area of Iowa, farmland can sell for as high as US$25,000 per acre.
The differences between plots were calculated to $18/acre for tillage (which is conservative considering the cost of diesel), $25/acre for rye cover crops and $40/acre for multi-species cover crops. pounds of phosphorous per acre. pounds per acre. In 2021 the corn was sold for $6.80/bu pounds of nitrogen and 1.78
On the back 16 acres of Walla Walla Community College, 30 Red Angus cows stand munching on hairy vetch, ryegrass and other cover crops that were planted to help restore the soil. Most of the people in our ag program are coming from an agrarian background but are trying to be innovative with new ways to approach farming,” says Leventhal.
The Precision Farmer Case Study One inspiring case is a midwestern farmer who adopted drone technology and IoT sensors across their 500-acre corn farm. By analyzing aerial imagery, they were able to pinpoint areas suffering from nutrient deficiencies on their farm.
Acres of Ancestry Initiative/Black Agrarian Fund The Acres of Ancestry Initiative/Black Agrarian Fund is a multidisciplinary, cooperative nonprofit ecosystem that aims to regenerate custodial land ownership, ecological stewardship, and food and fiber economies in the American South.
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