According to the Farmers Union’s Wertish, land prices have gone “by five or six times since the early 2000s.” For example, in the last session a farm tax credit bill was passed for farmers who sell land or equipment to a young non-family member.īut tweaks aren’t going to solve the problem of unaffordable land. State pols have attempted to help get young people back on the farm. “Why would you do that?’’ ‘Just useless buildings today’ “So you’ve worked yourself to the bone and there’s no profit,’’ said Frederickson. Then, according to Frederickson, it costs about $600 an acre to grow corn (the costs include land, equipment, seed and fertilizer.) If, as Frederickson says, the land yields 200 bushels of corn per acre and the farmer receives $3 a bushel, that’s $600. He offers the hypothetical situation of a young person who wants to be a farmer: If they somehow managed to find and buy 400 acres of land in south central Minnesota at $5,000 an acre, they’d be looking at as much as $2 million in debt. Without a long-held family farm to turn to, the Schwagerls have no doubts about wether they’d be able to do work they love doing:ĭave Frederickson, the state’s commissioner of agriculture, empathizes for young people who don’t inherit farmland but who want to go into farming. The biggest factor in that trend is no mystery: Accessibility to land. The state’s farmers are getting older (the average age is now around 55) even while it continues to get harder and harder for young people to get into farming. And that leads to the harshest trend in terms of what rural Minnesota is going to look like in the years and decades to come. The cost of land, equipment and seed coupled with low crop prices is a formula that equals debt. Indeed, no matter how hard they work, most small farmers can’t outwork the numbers. “This is potentially as bad as the 1980s. “We’re going to lose a lot of good people,” said Gary Wertish, president of the Minnesota Farmers Union. Agriculture experts predict that what’s left of the small farm lifestyle is going to take another hit this spring, when a combination of low commodity prices and high debt will lead to another round of foreclosures. Today, there are thousands of acres of farmland across Minnesota, but there is little room for young people who want to make a living on the farm.įamily farms, not to mention the main streets and churches that grew up around them, continue to fade away, like the old red barns that once dotted the Minnesota countryside. “When we had our first baby,’’ said Anne, 32, “we got thank you notes.” ‘The numbers just don’t work’ It’s a fact so well known among those in Greater Minnesota that when young people do move to rural parts of the state, they are sometimes greeted like conquering heroes. For all the attention Americans now focus on the sourcing of their food, there are a few young people trying to get into farming of any kind, let alone those like the Schwagerls, those trying to find niche markets with organic products or coming up with unique crops.
“For a long time, we’ve devalued food and the people who grow it.”īut they also know they are bucking a trend. What we eat, they believe, is a question of values. They are involved not just in their community, but in the organic and range-raised food movement internationally.
“But now we can’t imagine anything else.” “Farming wasn’t on our radar,” Anne said. The only thing Anne says the couple misses from that life of cities are grocery stores that are open 24 hours a day. Other than the brutally long days of the harvest season, they love everything about farming. But the price they receive is about triple the price corn farmers currently are receiving. The yield is about half of the yield of a hybrid, non-organic field corn. They’ve had two children and they’ve moved into “grandma’s house.” Though Peter’s father is a conventional farmer (corn and soybeans), Peter and Anne have tried to find a new niche in the ag economy.Īmong the non-GMO organic crops they grow is an organic blue corn, which is sold to an organic chip company. They moved to the family farm near Browns Valley in Big Stone County the western border of Minnesota.
HOBBY FARM FOR SALE MN PROFESSIONAL
After a few years in Florida, Anne Schwagerl and her husband Peter decided they wanted something different from a professional life of cubicles and 40-hour work weeks.
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