Who is doing the farming?

Washington Ag Today January 3, 2011 One of the main misconceptions people may have about U.S. agriculture is about just who is doing the farming. In the general media we hear the terms factory farming and corporate agriculture a lot. Jay Lehr of the Heartland Institute, an economist and agricultural advocate who spoke at a grower convention in Washington last fall, addressed that question.

Lehr: “We haven’t lost haven‘t lost any significant number of farms in the last 35 years. In 1975 we had 2.16 million farms. We have over two-million today, 35 years later. Ninety-nine percent of those family farms. The anti-agriculture people want people to think that Wall Street is doing the farming. Ninety-nine percent of our farms are either single-family family partnerships, a few family corporations. One percent are non-family farm. They are big. The produce six percent of our agricultural output. But 94% of our output is the family farm and they are the same wonderful people that have been around this country for over a century. We need to re-educate the public of that fact.”

Another word often heard these days is sustainability.

Lehr: “People say oh, farming needs to be sustainable. Well, we have been farming in Washington for over 100 years. We are growing more on less land. What is not sustainable about that? We are not hurting the environment. We are not hurting our water supply, our air supply. But it is not enough to be, we have to talk about it. We have to convince the public that we are doing pretty much everything right and we are.”

And that is Lehr’s basic message, people in agriculture have to tell their story all the time, everywhere.

I’m Bob Hoff and that’s Washington Ag Today on Northwest Aginfo Net.

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