All week we’ve been investigating where our food comes from. If we’re eating right, that leads back to a farmer.
Today the average age of the American farmer is 57 years-old. In the last 5 years, 35 percent of farmers turned 75 years or older. Last year, the country lost 10 percent of its dairy farmers. On top of the troubling demographics, kids growing up in rural America are less likely to join the agriculture business.
Without fresh young farmers, agriculture will become an endangered sector of our economy. In to save the day, however, are the “greenhorn” farmers. They are young, educated, optimistic, and concerned with the connections between food, access, the environment, social justice, and each other. And they are flocking to fill the rubber boots left empty on American farmland.
Severine von Tscharner Fleming, farmer, activist, and organizer with the "Serve Your Country Food" campaign, and Katherine Darling, from Two Mountain Farm, join us in the studio today.
National Young Farmer's Coalition
A Great New York Times Slideshow of "Food Fighters": click here
GOOD: Picking up the Ploughshare
Grist: Meet a young farmer leading a greenhorn ‘guerilla’ movement
