By Carey L. Biron
WASHINGTON, May 16 (Thomson Reuters Foundation) – Four years ago, Maeve Taylor and her husband decided to quit their jobs and move their family across the United States to start an organic dairy farm in New York.
The couple used a federal loan to buy 35 cows and started to learn their new trade on a patch of rented farmland.
But when they began looking for land of their own they hit their first major hurdle. Even in an area with a long agricultural tradition and lots of farmland, there was nothing to buy – at least at a price they could afford.
“You’d think you could buy something, but hardly any of it is for sale,” Taylor told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.
“Wealthy landowners … live here as retirement homes or have purchased property as a vacation home.”
More than 31 million acres (12.5 million hectares) of U.S. farmland were lost between 1992 and 2012, according to a major assessment released this week by the American Farmland Trust – double previous estimates.
The advocacy group found nearly two-thirds of all U.S. development during that period was on farmland, taken over primarily by the expansion of urban areas and by low-density housing.
Experts say new farmers are being priced out by developers and the rural landscape risks being radically transformed as farms are split or sold as real estate, unless the government is prepared to safeguard agricultural property.
“We’re at a time in history where farmland isn’t being bought by farmers,” said Holly Rippon-Butler at the National Young Farmers Coalition, an advocacy group.
“Our limited agricultural resources could be lost to agriculture forever. That’s the urgency.”
Nearly 100 million acres — 10 percent of agricultural land in the United States — is expected to change hands by the end of the decade as elderly farmers retire, according to a 2014 government estimate, the first of its kind.
The average age of U.S. farmers — and agricultural landholders — has been steadily rising, to the point where today many are looking to secure a comfortable retirement.
Almost two-thirds of U.S. farmland is now managed by someone over 55, and farmers older than 65 now outnumber those under 35 by a sixfold margin, according to the Young Farmers Coalition, citing federal statistics.
