At first I was surprised as I read each response that practically everyone who answered hadn't strayed far from home and many, if not most, took over the family operation! I guess I shouldn't be surprised at this since most of us did have to move off the family farm if we were fortunate enough to be raised on one.
Very few of the country's people farm for a living. We all know about the mass movement from the farm as other economies were created and jobs were more available there and better paying, too. Most people do not live on a farm today.
It wasn't that long ago that 90% of the population grew food. In my lifetime that has been reduced to one percent or less of the population who grows our food. Some use 3%, most use 2% but the truth is only about 1% or less of our population farm or ranch for a living. If you analyze just those people, you find only 10% of those produce over 90% of our food.
One farmer's work creates a lot of jobs. Here, much of it is part time, like truckers who haul grain seasonally or drive fertilizer trucks seasonally but more and more are full time as farms get bigger. Probably 6-8 or more jobs depend on one farmer's production. Agriculture has a huge impact on my local, state and national economy.
So where do you live and why? I only migrated 30 miles north of our home farm. My first job is the key part in that when I started teaching Vocational Agriculture at Blanchester Local School District. I live 8 miles east of that building 41 years later.
Someone in our geneology made a big move in the last 200 years. Heinrich Winckel made that move from Europe to Harrisonburg, Virginia in the 1700's. He migrated to Tennessee and his sons migrated to Highland County just south of here. My part of the Winkle clan has been here ever since. I am the sixth generation of Peter Winkle in southern Ohio.
I hope you find this discussion as interesting as I do. I learned a lot about people whose posts I read, some of which I knew and most I didn't.
It is a good topic for my Internet community.
Looks like good weather today before the cold rushes in a snow hits up north! One farmer had 2 inches of snow this morning in North Dakota so it isn't far off! It was hot there just a few weeks ago!
Ed
Farmers lost almost 30 millions of their own jobs in the past century, it hardly seems to compensate for the jobs they created, talking from a pure jobs perspective.
ReplyDeletehttp://www.agclassroom.org/gan/timeline/farmers_land.htm
I also wonder how many of these are for jobs that just profit from farmers and consumers, rather than do some actual transformation or processing work between the two. Like the people investing on ag commodities. A boatload of soy meal can for instance be sold and bought several times over between the time it leaves Brazil and the time it docks in Europe. I have seen it with my own eyes, and the purchaser bought its own cargo twice during the trip. They were not some trading firm, just some coop elevator in the South West of France, so at least the money stayed in the "ag family", but today, any idiot with an Internet connection can and does the same. None of that money goes to ag anymore.
I remember this coop had a whiteboard with names of ships and dates of departure/arrival to track their trading.
Machinery made it all possible, I guess. Greed fed the big machinery and the first big time operators were in force here in the 70's as the small farm disappeared.
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