America's aging farmers often don't have a family member to take over the family farm

As farmland changes hands, there will be far fewer family
farms in the U.S. (Photo by Johny Goerend, Unsplash)

Whether it's the unpredictable income, politics or little love for manual labor, many children of today's aging American farmers don't want to run the family farm. "There are more farmers 75 and older than under the age of 35. They are facing tough choices," reports Patrick Thomas of The Wall Street Journal. "Thousands across the U.S. are closing the book on farms that have been in their families for generations."

In today's farming economy, many farmers depend on federal bailouts, and even with that support, some still won't turn a profit. As a result, many farming families are selling their lands or claiming bankruptcy. 

Don Guinnip, a fifth-generation corn and soybearn farmer in Marshall, Illinois, doesn't think the future of family farms and their surrounding communities will be "pretty," Thomas writes. He told Thomas, "When farmers owned the land and lived on the land, they took care of the land and they formed communities that worked together and solved problems and took care of everybody. You’re not going to have that in the future.”

Like many children of farming families, Guinnip's children left the farm to attend college and move to bigger cities for professional careers. Thomas explains, "Children of farmers today have more opportunities to work beyond agriculture than they did decades ago, and families are typically smaller, shrinking the pool of possible candidates."

Seventy-four-year-old Guinnip thinks "he can maintain the current workload for a couple more years," Thomas writes. "He contemplates a day when a Guinnip no longer cares for the land that runs along Guinnip Road."