We’re losing our farm kids—and if we fail those who remain, we’ll forsake the future of farming.
This fact hit home for me last year, as my son worked on a 4-H project. He gathered f from local high schools across four generations and tracked the steady decline of children who come from farming families, as he does here in Iowa.
The numbers are striking. Around 67 percent of the seniors in his great grandfather’s graduating class in 1949 grew up on farms in our area. For his grandfather’s class in 1972, the figure fell to 58 percent. For his father in 2000, it slipped to 38 percent. And when he graduates in 2029, it will plummet to just 8 percent.
That’s quite a dropoff, from two out of three to fewer than one in ten. And we live in America’s agricultural heartland.
This decrease is not the consequence of non-farmers moving to Iowa County, which is between Des Moines and Cedar Rapids in my state of Iowa. The size of our population has remained stable for more than a century and a half. In 1870, precisely 16,644 people lived here, according to the Census. In 1950, the number dipped a little below 16,000. In 2025, the population was back up to about 16,500.
The trend toward fewer farmers is a reality and we need to adjust accordingly. Better technologies such as improved tractors, GM seeds, and regenerative methods mean that it takes much less labor to grow much more food. The reality is that people raised on farms can pursue careers elsewhere as doctors, engineers, first responders….and teachers.
This is my own story: Although I’m very active on our family farm, I’ve also devoted over 20 years of my life to teaching and mentoring. However, my heart brought me back to the farm.
The loss of farmers poses special challenges. A growing number of Americans have no connection to agriculture. The average person is about three generations removed from the farm, according to a common estimate.
The upshot is that many people don’t know where their food comes from. This can lead to inaccurate ideas about food production, which can turn into bad public policies.
The solution is in the schools. We must strive to educate everyone about agriculture, starting here in Iowa County.
One of the best things farmers can do is open their operations to educate. This includes school groups: “Your farm can be a classroom,” wrote Judith de Vor in a column earlier this year.
There’s nothing like observing a farm up close: learning how farmers plant crops, fight weeds and pests, and care for livestock. This is the most effective way to defeat misinformation and overcome ignorance.
We must teach the teachers, too. My personal goal is to have farm visits qualify as a formal part of professional development for area teachers.
This touchpoint will allow teachers to have first-hand experience when teaching about farmers and food. It will have the additional benefit of giving teachers a better understanding of the farm kids who sit in their classrooms. Farm kids may be shrinking in number, but they are also the future of food production—and we’ve got to keep them engaged in their schooling, especially as today’s farmers adopt new tools and technologies.
If my own kids eventually take over the family farm, my grandchildren may discover that they’re even more outnumbered than farm kids now—and they’ll need a proper education from teachers who are in tune with agriculture.
My dad had a saying: “Education is one thing nobody can take away from you.” That’s still true, but only if we deliver an education in the first place. If we fail, we won’t just wonder what happened to the farm kids—we’ll wonder what happened to our food.
