Spreading the Word

Monday morning I had an interview with Marcia Taylor, an executive editor at DTN/Progressive Farmer.

She’s doing an article based on the new ag census. If you haven’t seen it, and you’re interested, you can check it out here.

Marcia specifically wanted to talk about new farmers—both young people just starting out and old(er) people who have come to farming as a second career (you may recall we did an entire Leader magazine based on folks who have double-cropped their careers, so I was well-prepared to talk about this as well).
There are more new farmers in this census—4% more farmers than in the census filled out in 2002. Farm numbers have been declining since the 1940’s, so it was nice to talk about the positive trend.

It was also nice to tell Marcia about our StartRight program, and how it’s specifically geared to young, beginning, small and minority (that includes women—according to the farm census data, there are 30% more women farming now than in 2002). Thank you to all of you for talking about our program, using our program, and supporting our program. It’s nice to know that we’re making a difference, and helping people get started.

Special note: we recently posted an overview of how well the System is serving ybsm farmers to our Facebook page. If you didn’t see it there, you can check it out here.