02/25/05 There`s more ag producers

02/25/05 There`s more ag producers

The Deputy Administrator of U.S.D.A.'s National Agricultural Statistics Service is scheduled to make a presentation today at the agency's Agricultural Outlook Forum in Washington D.C. And Rich Allen says thanks to information gathered from farmers and ranchers in the 2002 Census of Agriculture, they disproved a myth. That myth was that there are less and less farmers. Quite the contrary, the report on age and farm demographics shows there are more farmers and ranchers in the U.S. than previously thought. And Allen admits it could have something to do with how questions in the Census of Agriculture were asked. ALLEN: In the past, we've forced every farm operation to have just one operator, just the principal operator, which led to confusion for everyone. It led to statements like there are only two million farmers in the country, and everybody knows that wasn't correct. So this time we added the capability of multiple operators. We didn't know exactly what would be reported. But it turned out to be an extra million operators on top of the principal operators. In addition, another 3.5 million people live with those 3.1 million operators. So those total 6.6 million people on the farm were something Allen and N.A.S.S. were not expecting. ALLEN: The type of thing that people are often interest them is that how many people are associated with farming, either as operators or family members, you know, a lot of family members probably pitch in somewhere along the line, so we wanted to go ahead and collect the information on how many households were participating in the net income of the farm. All those stats were actually gravy on top of the original intent of the report, which was to determine whether farm operators had a plan of succession, through studying the age of primary, secondary, and third farm operators. ALLEN: We've found quite a number of operations where two of the operators named were twenty years or more different in age. We also found some operations appear to already had some sort of succession, because you have an operator now who's under thirty five or under fourty-five, and you have a second or third operator who's more than twenty years older. So then it looks like in those cases, that was part of their plan and they already implemented a plan. More details about the "What We Know About The Demographics Of U.S. Farm Operators" study can be found at the N.A.S.S. web site, which can be accessed through www.usda.gov.
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