Life Essentials

Cathy Smith, CEO of Life Essentials, told me about how farms and farmers are changing dramatically. There's a lot of things. Weather is one thing the young people on the farms when they have children. A lot of the children want to take off onto another career instead of the farming. Because farming is hard work, it's hard. It's dangerous. The small farms is what I really concerned about because of the drop in the number of small farms. A lot of the small farms don't have enough revenue to support more than one family, and sometimes not even one family, unless they have some specialized type of crop or produce. With all the technology that we have in the world today, a lot of these kids want to do something else, and they haven't yet learned that there is technology needed on the farms. Also, with all the new things they do with the GPS farming, the self-driving tractors and combines, and such that there's a lot of technology there that some of the older farmers are not in or have a hard time learning to, because they're just not quite to that point where they want to even pick up a computer, let alone a cell phone or anything else. I come from a small farm we farmed here near Lafayette, Indiana, for sixty seven years. My parents are both gone now and when. For my dad retired from farming, he ended up renting the farm out. I have three sisters, so he told all of us girls that we should not farm. It's a non-profit organization. And with all of that intensely difficult work, it just shouldn't be that way.