Farm families strive to keep up with treadmill of modern agriculture

MADISON, Wis. — The challenge for many farm families is they work with small margins and high risk.

“The risk comes in the form of constantly changing markets and weather and now the impact of climate change where we see these rain events occurring on an annual basis we use to think occurred once per century — 11- to 12-inch rainfalls in a single watershed,” said Dan Smith, president and CEO of Cooperative Network that supports 200 cooperatives in Wisconsin and Minnesota.

“Also, the competition for land and resources and the need to constantly change and adapt all the time that the family is changing, aging, and mental and physical health is deteriorating as we try to keep up with the treadmill of modern agriculture,” said Smith during a Digital Dialogue hosted by Grassland 2.0

Grassland 2.0 is a collaborative group of producers, researchers and public and private sector people working to develop pathways for producers to achieve increased profitability, production stability and nutrient and water efficiency through grassland-based agriculture.

“It’s amazing that through all of this we have so many farm families that work so hard to stay there and how many generations removed from the farm still feel that pull back to the ancestral land,” said Smith, who has been involved in the agricultural industry for 40 years.

“They remember being with their parents, grandparents or great grandparents on the farm and it really holds that cultural lock over the time of this constant change in agriculture.”

It is ironic, Smith said, that the agricultural industry which values heritage, tradition and the family tie to ancestral land has to deal with constant change.

“That change is driven by advancements in technology, genetics and nutrition,” said Smith, who grew up on a Wisconsin dairy farm. “We can do things today in agriculture that when I started farming in 1978 would have been a pipe dream — the technology, precision agriculture and equipment have changed dramatically in the course of one person’s career.”

Over the last several decades, good interest rates have provided credit to farmers to grow and expand, Smith said.

“That has brought another generation onto the farm and the result of that is specialization and consolidation,” Smith said.

“We’ve seen new markets emerge like organic and we’ve also really entered into the international market which has changed agriculture a great deal,” he said.

The American consumer has gained a lot from these advancements in agriculture.

“We have the world’s most plentiful food supply, we spend the lowest percentage of income on food and that food supply is consistent, safe and reliable, which is the envy of the world,” Smith said. “It has freed up much of our society to pursue other interests so we have a small percentage of people left at the farm.”

However, Smith said, there are also losses.

“We’ve lost a significant part of our vibrant rural population and small towns, engagement in rural communities and main street businesses, strong school districts and the support system of many rural businesses that supplied farmers,” Smith said.

“We’ve strayed further from our farm heritage and land ethic and that’s a result of absentee agriculture,” he said. “I think a farm needs a farmer and a lot of farms don’t have a farmer dedicated to that piece of land 365 days a year. You can’t uphold that relationship in a landlord-tenant, absentee commodity-driven agriculture.”

Smith serves on the board of directors for the Wisconsin Department of Agriculture Trade and Consumer Protection.

“At one of our board meetings, a person in the dairy processing industry said he believes that we will lose one-third of the dairy farms in the state in the next five years,” Smith said.

“Most of the dairymen are in the 60s, a lot don’t have kids returning to the farm, most are on farms that need a tremendous amount of reinvestment and they’ve been trying to keep up with the treadmill of agriculture,” he said.

Many dairy farmers, Smith said, are in a sandwich generation.

“They are caught between the responsibility to the generation that went before for continuing the farm and the next generation that that has found other ways to live and is probably not returning to the farm unless major changes are made,” he said.

Smith sees opportunities and challenges ahead for farm families.

“In a perfect world I think we would be able to recreate a new land ethic that can utilize the new technology, but still protect our precious natural resources,” he said.

With remote work, Smith said, there are some opportunities to repopulate rural communities.

“We have a long ways to go to reboot our rural communities and to refill rural schools,” he said.

Farming is a business, it is constantly changing and the United States has a wonderful food system, Smith said.

“But we’ve paid for all of that at a cost and the cost has not been totaled yet,” Smith said.

“There are a lot of people who have big decisions to make about their future as they age and the type of rural culture and agricultural ethic we’re going to develop in this country,” he said.

For more information about Grassland 2.0, go to www.grasslandag.org.