The Handwriting on the Barn Wall

Mommas, better encourage your babies to grow up to be cowboys!

Growing food requires labor. Not only must you put in a lot of hours, but those hours are hard, dirty, and often dangerous. And the per-hour pay is very low, whether you are farm operator or farm worker.

Consider those grapes you are snacking on while you read this. The National Farmers’ Union says the farmer’s share of each dollar you spend on groceries is now 14.3 cents. That 14.3% has to cover land, liability insurance, mortgage and production credit interest, fences, barns, equipment, fuel, fertilizer, herbicide, pesticide, seed, breeding stock, feed, minerals, medications, veterinary bills, freight, fees, taxes, miscellaneous supplies, and….. labor. So, you paid $4 for that pound of grapes? The labor cost share for fruit has been around 30% lately. That’s 57.2 cents going to the farmer with 17 cents of that paid to her farm workers to plant, stake, spray, prune, and pick those grapes. The farmer pays her workers before she pays herself, of course. And if my own experience is any indication, that farmer purposely does NOT count her own hours. If you do start counting your own hours, you will soon quit farming.

In the year 1800, 75% of the US population worked on farms. In 1900, that share had dropped to about 40%. By 2000, the percentage was under 2%. In 2020, farms employed only 1.2% of the US population.

Percent of the Labor Force Employed in Agriculture, United States, 1800 to 2000 Sources: Weiss 1992:22; Integrated Public Use Microdata Series: Version 3.0 (Ruggles et al. 2004).

The high percentage (75%) of the US population working on farms in 1800 gives some context to our founding fathers’ vision for the US. They thought that agriculture would always be the foundation of this country. Thomas Jefferson wrote that “Cultivators of the earth are the most valuable citizens. They are the most vigorous, the most independent, the most virtuous, and they are tied to their country and wedded to its liberty and interests by the most lasting bands.…” Jefferson also said, “Agriculture is our wisest pursuit, because it will in the end contribute most to real wealth, good morals, and happiness.” Hence our founders’ emphasis on farming and land and real property rights.

Those of you who were awake in high-school civics class will recall that the voting franchise was limited to male landowners in 1800. Those of you who were awake in that class despite having spent 5-10 hours working on the family farm the day before will recall thinking that Thomas Jefferson and James Madison had time to write the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution – spending months in legislatures and congresses – because they were not farming their land with their own hands. They had hired workers and slaves doing the actual farm work. Jefferson’s Monticello was about 5000 acres. Over the course of Jefferson’s life, about 600 enslaved people and 100 free men worked on Jefferson’s lands. Madison’s Montpelier was about 3000 acres and about 300 enslaved people worked that land during the Madisons’ ownership.

After decades of exporting more agricultural production (in dollars) than we imported, our agriculture trade balance has gone negative in four of the last five years (2019, 2020, 2021, and 2023). The fifth year (2022) had only a small trade surplus. Not long ago, there were headlines attributing these recent agricultural trade deficits to a shortage of farm labor inside the US. I’ve been digging in this manure pile ever since to understand this connection. My quest has become a little more urgent with the policy proposals of our incoming administration.

Both my personal experience and my research tells me that labor shortages have been a major factor in smaller farms consolidating into large farms. Only very large farms can afford to buy labor-saving equipment like robotic milkers and combines. Costly mechanization to deal with a shrinking labor workforce has also driven farms to specialize. In 1900, the average farm was about 150 acres and sold 5 different commodities. By 2000, the average farm was about 450 acres and sold only 1.25 different commodities. By this measure, my family farm’s evolution was fairly typical: we were selling corn, beef, and pork in 1970. We were selling mostly lamb, with a small sideline of beef, by the early 2000s. I suppose I should include the sale of wool from our sheep, but we didn’t even get enough from that to pay the shearer. In our case, additional specialization pressure came from the expertise required. In a highly-regulated system with small margins, you have to know a great deal about a perishable product to get it safely to market within those margins. All my ideas to diversify into other products were still-born due to the labor shortage.

One huge reason for the current farm labor shortage is the aging of the US population. For my family’s first decade in farming (1965-1975), the median age of the US population dipped below 27 years. Now it’s just north of 38 despite the “invasion” of fairly young immigrants. Looks like our country’s median age will be over 45 by the end of the 21st century – unless there is a mass deportation of immigrants which will increase the median age. The US population is aging faster than the global average. Keep in mind that the “global average” includes many countries with a higher median age than ours. The US doesn’t even make the top ten oldest. Offsetting these are quite a few developing countries where the median age now is under 20.

Rural America is aging faster than urban America. In 2020, the median age was 43 years in rural US communities versus 38.8 years for the entire US population. Comparing the age distribution of US rural and urban populations, it’s pretty clear that lots of rural kids head for the city right out of school and spend their prime working years there. They move back to the farm after a career outside of agriculture. Some even take up farming again, when they are no longer dependent on the farm to pay for things like health insurance. Farmers 65 and older are the fastest-growing farm-operator demographic, and Medicare is a major reason for that. There are now as many farmers over 65 as under 55. The median age of farm operators is now over 58.

The aging of the US population over 200 years from Demographic history of the United States - Wikipedia. Note the large impact of the Great Depression and World War 2 on US population median age. Birthrate went down and then lots of farm boys and girls lied about their age to join the military. Those who survived WW2 didn’t all go back to farming. Many took advantage of the GI Bill for education and desk jobs.

The US median age is going to stay higher than the global median age for at least the rest of this century. Data for this median age comparison comes from database.earth. You can compare median age trends of individual countries at OurWorldinData.org.

From Jennifer Cheeseman Day et al, “A Glance at the Age Structure and Labor Force Participation in Rural America,” US Census (census.gov).

The workforce on our family farm in Virginia over fifty years confirms these national demographics. In the 1960s and 70s, we would get work-seeking calls from a lot of teens, usually boys from the High School’s vocational-agriculture program. Our high school ag program wasn’t open to girls until the mid-1970s when a classmate of mine – one of only two immigrants in the school – succeeded in convincing the school to let her take agriculture. She did not feel welcome in that class but she persevered. She became a pillar of our community, farming for decades with her husband and pursuing a second career as a Methodist pastor, “circuit-riding” in her pickup to cover three small churches every Sunday.

Few older men would come looking for farm work in our early days (1960s and 1970s). My parents were more receptive to hiring older workers than most farmers. They figured those older workers had valuable experience that they lacked, being relative newcomers to farming. Sometimes there were interesting dynamics associated with how much respect those older farm workers had for us. The TV sitcom “Green Acres” was popular then, propagating some negative stereotypes. Do you remember that the New York City transplants on Green Acres were World War 2 veterans, with Oliver being an Army Air Corps pilot? Well, my Dad flew B-25s in WW2. The neighbors addressed him with “Colonel” but I suspect that they added “Crazy” to that title when out of earshot. Dad and Mom were innovators, and innovation usually looks crazy – right up until it works better than what everyone else has been doing for years.

We had some interesting employees in the early days. I recall Dad’s words when he discovered that the new neighbor whom he had hired to help rebuild our farm bridges — Agnes washed them away in 1972 — had a doctorate in philosophy from an Ivy League school. “What in the world are you doing standing here in this muck?” Dad demanded. “Feeding my family,” was the learned philosopher-turned-farmhand’s reply. “My wife and I have three kids. Plato and Socrates aren’t exactly hiring.” He was boot-strapping his own small farm operation just up the road.

As time passed, young adults willing to work for farm wages tended to be those who fell out of the bottom of the labor market rather than those who loved farming. My father had a soft spot for “giving a person a second chance,” so we may have had more than our share of these folks. I recall one young man who had a drinking problem, although he claimed that a childhood injury was the reason he couldn’t reliably show up for work. He came to work one day drunk enough to make advances on me. I was a young adult then, and farm-girl strong, so he didn’t get very far. Yes, that was his last day on our farm. He later sobered up and ended up making much better money as a welder’s assistant and then as a welder. Funny, that childhood injury stopped bothering him when the work was inside and paid three times as much.

As the years passed, the people looking for work on our farm got older and older. During the last twenty years, applicants often limped up the driveway, having no car. They usually wanted just parttime work to “earn a little cash under the table” because the local doctor had gotten them on disability so he could get them medical care. The disability payment was not enough to keep a roof over their heads and food on the table and a reliable car. Farm work was not compatible with their disability status. As much as I felt for their situation, I couldn’t pay “under the table.” Plus, providing transportation to and from work was usually not something I could do as I juggled my mother’s care, the farm, and the business that paid for my own medical care. Often, these unscheduled “interviews” would end with me driving the unfortunate soul home with something that would make their lives a tiny bit easier: firewood, a coat, or a pair of Grandad’s sadly-empty boots that happened to fit them. One cold fall morning, we loaded up a small woodstove along with firewood to heat the applicant’s ancient camper trailer sitting on flat tires – the only home he could afford on his disability. Another time, “home” was a small cabin at the end of a rutted dirt road, with outhouse advertising the lack of indoor plumbing — and this is the 21^st century. A big part of the rural labor problem is a shortage of inexpensive rural housing, a shortage made worse by zoning and anti-growth ordinances implemented by wealthy retirees.

We’d still get the occasional teenager looking for work in the last decade. Most were in for a rude surprise at how hard real farm work was because they hadn’t been raised doing it. Some thought I was a terrible boss because I did not allow ears to be plugged with music players while doing jobs where not being able to hear everything and everyone around you could get someone hurt. Hiring teens has gotten more legally complicated in recent decades. In Virginia, you can start working for pay at 14 on someone else’s farm, with your parents’ permission and outside of school hours. However, teens under 16 can’t do any paid work that is considered hazardous by the Department of Labor and Industry. This includes farm work involving large livestock. Working for your parents on the family farm, none of those rules apply, although you can get in trouble for missing too much school. You also don’t need a “youth employment certificate” on file at the school if you are working for your parents. The restriction on hazardous work also doesn’t apply. I tend to tilt against over-zealous government bureaucrats, but then I remember the injuries and deaths that punctuated my formative years on the farm as well as my own close calls. Maybe I have to temper my criticism of these labor regulations – but the hazards of farming deserves their own newsletter.

I don’t think all modern teens are softies, however. Some teens are the hardest and best workers ever. I especially appreciated Amanda. She was firm on $10 an hour when most teens were lucky to get minimum wage ($6.55 then). She was worth every cent, whether in the barn or the field or rebuilding the farmhouse porch. She was also the changing face of US agriculture: women are increasingly likely to be the primary face of farming. Of course, women have been farming since there was farming. Anthropologists tell us that women invented agriculture. But for many years in American agriculture, women held farms together working behind the scenes. Now, they are recognized as owners, managers, and field workers.

Some farmers have built bunkhouses and advertised “internships” to young suburbanites and urbanites with a yearning to experience farm life and food production. That’s one way to get very cheap labor from highly-motivated, energetic people. You have to teach them a lot and work through their naiveté and inexperience, but you get a lot of nearly free labor. I suspect many of these programs are a bit on the exploitive side. Amanda came to us from what was supposed to be a veterinary-assistant training program. After two weeks of cleaning that farm’s barn for bare room and board and not a whiff of anything that smelled like veterinary training, she decided that she wasn’t going to learn anything she didn’t already know about cleaning barns. She had already served that time taking care of her own horses, thank you. She quickly proved that in our barn, paycheck included, blond ponytail flying as she forked dirty straw out of lambing huddles or maneuvered the skid-steer around gates and livestock waterers or flung bales of straw over fences. Poison ivy was the only thing that slowed that young lady down.

The problem with hiring hard-working teenagers is that farming is usually a job they are moving through. Even the ones that love farming move on and up. Last I heard, Amanda was building up her own greenhouse business as well as raising a young family. Her husband was a farm boy who quickly figured out that he could make a lot more money as a mechanic for the local tractor dealership than he could growing food, with health insurance for his family as part of that deal, so Amanda is the full-time farmer in that family.

Those great teenage employees who don’t grow up to be your competition are going to college or at least to better-paying jobs with better working conditions – and a much more exciting social life in a city. In Virginia, the state minimum wage law and overtime law excludes agriculture workers. The federal minimum wage law applies to all farms, but it’s still only $7.25 per hour, about $15,000 per year for full time. Guess what the poverty line is in Virginia? $15,000. Hard to imagine how anyone survives on that in an area where rents start at over $1000 per month. Fortunately, the median wage for an experienced farm worker in Virginia is now almost $15 per hour, about $30,000 per year without overtime. That’s less than a third of the median income for all Virginians. Zillow says the median 2023 rent in rural Virginia was $18,804 per year, so you have to wonder where the folks earning only minimum wage are living.

While starting from this low place, the average national wage for farmworkers has been keeping up with inflation and possibly exceeding inflation; in January 2024, the USDA says that farmers were paying as average of $19.49 per hour for crop workers, 5% more than in January 2023. Livestock workers are averaging a little less. The Department of Labor disagrees with USDA on average farm worker wages and says their national hourly rate is more like $14-$15 per hour. The federal Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) exempts agricultural employers from the requirement to pay workers “time and a half” for hours over 40 hours per week. So the 80-hour week you just worked to help your employer through lambing and spring planting and first cutting of hay all happening at once? All 80 hours at the same hourly rate. The USDA data shows that farm workers average over 40 hours per week for the entire year.

What about fringe benefits like paid vacation and health insurance? Ha! Last time I had a farm employee, Virginia law prevented me from buying that employee an individual health insurance policy or directly assisting them with paying the premiums on an individual policy in any way. I had to buy a group employment policy or nothing. And no, you don’t pay enough for your food for a small farmer to buy group health insurance for her 1.5 employees. The Department of Labor’s 2019-2020 survey of farmworkers showed that only 26% had employer-provided health insurance. Employers struggle to cover health insurance for themselves and their own family working on the farm. A farmer has to gross over $350,000 to get her own family of four up to federal poverty level with basic health insurance.

Despite the popularity of “Green Acres,” CBS cancelled it and other shows based in rural communities in 1971 as part of a “rural purge” in response to criticism that they didn’t have enough programming featuring suburbanites and urbanites. They even cancelled “Lassie.” So rural Americans started seeing the easier life in the city on their televisions, during the rare moments they could spare to watch it. No wonder the kids all left the farm for a different kind of “green.” A young person can earn a lot more at entry level moving stuff around a warehouse than an experienced farm worker does out in the field. In that warehouse, you aren’t baking in the sun or freezing in the snow – and it’s likely they will train you to use a forklift while they pay you far more than you’d make back on the farm. Better yet, go to college for a desk job. Farmers have good reasons to mortgage the farm to pay for their children’s college education.

So, what’s a farmer to do? Mechanize her operations, if she can afford it. Farm machinery has come a long way since Cyrus McCormick’s first harvester. A modern tractor or combine is a lot like an airliner. You don’t drive the machine so much as supervise it. Autopilots, GPS guidance, monitoring systems. The downside? Each machine costs a fortune, over a half-million dollars. And they need skilled operators. A robotic cow-milker costing a quarter million dollars still needs someone on duty all the time. And to pay for that machine, you have to be milking hundreds of cows three times a day, seven days a week. There are still many jobs that just require hands-on care. I can’t imagine a machine that could automatically find a ewe having trouble lambing and help her give birth. Rest assured that US farms are going to need some workers for the foreseeable future.

Data from USDA National Agricultural Statistics Service shows a leveling out in farm consolidation and labor reduction with mechanization since about 1990

In recent years, the average number of workers per farm has leveled out at about 1.5. That’s not counting the farm operator and unpaid family labor. The Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) projects 116,400 new job openings in US agriculture every year this decade just to maintain the current workforce as people retire or move into other fields. This is after BLS factors in increasing productivity, technology, and mechanization. A little rough math – using BLS’ projected ag labor vacancies for the remainder of this decade versus our current population of 15-19 year-olds being shy of 22 million – suggests that US agriculture will need 3% of all our young people coming of age. Since this decade has been net-negative so far on US agriculture trade balance, I assume that we need even more people joining the US agricultural workforce to restore our trade surplus. Are you encouraging your kids to consider farm labor as a career choice? I suspect the refrain in your house more like that Waylon Jennings song: “Mammas, don't let your babies grow up to be cowboys… Let ‘em be doctors and lawyers and such….”

This is what the collision of demographics and limits to automation come down to: We can import food, or we can import labor. Right now, we are importing some of both. Immigrant cowboys have ridden into town to save our farms and domestic food system. Next time, we’ll get into whether they are the heroes or villains in the story of US farming.

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Animated chart of Population Distribution:

Chart: US Population Distribution by Age, 1900 Through 2060 | American Enterprise Institute - AEI

Other population statistics:

Demographic history of the United States - Wikipedia

Median age - 2021 World Factbook Archive

Global Median Age 1950-2024 & Future Projections | database.earth

Compare all countries of the world here: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/median-age

A Glance at the Age Structure and Labor Force Participation of Rural America

USDA ERS - Atlas of Rural and Small-Town America

https://www.macrotrends.net/global-metrics/countries/USA/united-states/rural-population

Percent-of-the-Labor-Force-Employed-in-Agriculture-United-States-1800-to-2000-Sources.png (850×726)

Increasing share of US Food that’s imported:

USDA ERS - U.S. Agricultural Trade at a Glance

U.S. agricultural trade deficit could reach record high this year - Marketplace

USDA ERS - Agricultural Trade

Composition of US ag workforce from the Department of Labor:

Findings from the National Agricultural Workers Survey (NAWS) 2019–2020

USDA Report on the 20^th Century:

The 20th Century Transformation of U.S. Agriculture and Farm Policy

USDA National Agricultural Statistics Service:

Farm Labor: Number of Farms and Workers by Decade, US

Bureau of Labor Statistics on Agricultural Workforce:

Agricultural Workers : Occupational Outlook Handbook: : U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics

United States Population by Age - 2024 Update | Neilsberg

2022 Census of Agriculture Impacts the Next Generations of Farmers | USDA