Countless articles on the challenge of raising the next gen of farmers. Cost of land is the biggest. You can’t farm it for enough income to pay for the loans to buy it in the first place. This means no new entrants into the biz unless inheriting land. Family farms have either consolidated for scale or have gone fully corporate. Land banking by wealthy speculators have driven the costs up enough to kill it.

All farming is dependent on temporary foreign skilled labour and/or heavy mechanization. Making it morally and ethically challenging to operate and crazy capital intensive.

Equipment makers like John Deere are using DRM to fuck over their customers with extortionate repairs and preventing the mechanically inclined to do repairs and maintenance on your own equipment you bought.

Farming is a wide series of skills and a large body of knowledge. It is NOT like gardening. You must master soil health and ammendments, breeding/propagating (plant or animal genetics), disease management, harvesting, various forms of processing, logistics, marketing, mechanics etc.

They saying is “If you want to make a million dollars farming, start with 5 million and in a year you’ll be there.”

Farmers that are aging out are having a hard time getting their kids to inherit the farms and continue the operations. Either as a “buy it from me at a good price to fund my retirement” or as a gimme when the farmer dies. It’s a ton of work and the payback is both low margin and risky as all hell. The good years often don’t make up for the bad and after struggling with all your blood sweat and tears there is nothing leftover but accumulating debt.

Enter climate change…

Some people with money and privilege get into hobby farming or permaculture. But it is not as a career, just a hobby.