Handing over the reins

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“The intern’s going to get the farm. She just doesn’t know it yet.”

I’m speaking to Kyle, a Vietnam ‘vet’ turned Texan rancher, at his homestead, Falster Farm in Winnsboro, Texas. We’ve been talking for about an hour. The conversation is sporadically interrupted by his radio chatter with the ‘intern’, Elizabeth:

“The bull’s gone got loose.”
“It’s already been sold.”
“I’ll look in the backfield.”

Over the course of the day, the search unfolds. I feel like I’m in an episode of The Archers.

I’m travelling across the midwest of America conducting ethnographies of agribusinesses on behalf of multinational oil company Shell. On every farm I visit, there is one prevalent theme.

Agriculture in America faces a recruitment crisis. In a country best known for its two coastal cities, you could be forgiven for not knowing that two-fifths of America is farmland. It is the largest mass of fertile, tillable land on the planet, and it divides into millions of holdings, farms and ranches, 95% of which are family-run homesteads that have passed down across multiple generations. But the current generation of farmers is an ageing one, and as retirement nears, so does the question of who can help run and, ultimately, inherit the farm.

Farms that have previously been passed down from father to son have no obvious successor. The volatility of the sale price of the grains market, the anti-social hours and isolation, combined with two once-in-a-generation crop failures in the past decade, make the precarity of being a farmer unattractive to the future generation.

Homesteads have survived and flourished in America on the basis that they can rely on family. Where they would have typically recruited family members, farms are now becoming dependent on hiring skilled labourers, such as teams of combine harvester drivers – known as cutters. Cutters are an agri-industry of their own – they are aware of farmers’ dependence on them and drive a high charge, eating into farmers’ slim and fragile profit margins.

In recent years, a solution to this problem has come from an unexpected source. Farms across the upper midwest have made use of the retiree and semi-retired population.

Clint, who manages the 2,500-acre Billings farm with his father, explains that the retirees are the ideal workforce: content with seasonal work, experienced and, vitally, people he could trust with his two most valuable assets – his machinery and crops.

Statistics from the Bureau of Labor confirm that this isn’t an isolated case. Over the past decade, the average age of hired farm labourers has risen steadily, from 35.8 years in 2006 to 38.8 years in 2017.

Other farms have reached more novel solutions for attracting a workforce. In Texas, a high-intensity blueberry farm has adopted a pick-your-own model as the easiest way to bypass a labour shortage.

Kyle from Falster Farm has sourced his workforce from further afield. Over the course of the year, he generally has six or seven volunteers – ‘interns’ in his own words – that work on his farm.

He reaches these volunteers via the WWOOFing network (World Wide Organisation of Organic Farmers) whose aim is to pass on organic farming techniques – only Kyle intends to take it one step further and pass on the farm, too.

The farm’s survival depends on Kyle finding the right successor. The quality of its produce and the trade relationships are the result of his specialist knowledge.

Kyle attributes part of his success to the unique calendar he follows. The chicks are all hatched by the moon cycle, while the schedule of sowing and harvesting follows the Roman calendar, so that he knows it is 234 days after the first full moon after equinox that the fields will be ready.

It sounds far-fetched and is hard to level with hardened Texan rancher Kyle. But his eggs have been shown to contain 500-times more vitamin A than industry benchmarks set by Walmart. And, as long as he can find it, the sale price for his lost bull is $7,000. The primary buyers of his produce are high-end restaurants in Austin, Houston and San Antonio.

As with many small-to-medium-size businesses, the relationship between supplier and buyer is personal, and depends as much on Kyle’s laid-back style as they do on the product. Without a successor in place to nurture and continue these relationships, it’s hard to imagine how they would continue to exist.

Often, and increasingly so, the solution for farmers is to sell up. Land and machinery can be sold as a package to the growing number of corporate farms. As ‘big-ag’ continues to consolidate the farm diversity, the total quantity of farms fell by 4% between 2007 and 2014, while the total amount of farmland stayed consistent.

Jeff, who runs a small soybean farm in North Dakota, has been repeatedly approached to sell the land to a soybean conglomerate but, as a young household, inheritance isn’t (yet) a pressing concern. However, for Kyle, in his late 70s and a farmer of five decades, there is no issue more pressing to him than handing over the reins.

Peter Lane is research manager at Bamm

This article was first published in the April 2020 issue of Impact.