By Mónica Cordero
Beginning farmers are often described as the future of American agriculture. But the 2022 Census of Agriculture shows they are not simply younger versions of today’s farmers. Their age, work patterns and farm characteristics paint a more complicated picture of what it means to start farming in the United States today.
USDA defines a beginning farmer or rancher as someone who has operated a farm or ranch for 10 years or less.
The average age of a beginning farmer in the United States is 47.1 years old, more than a decade younger than the average U.S. farmer. Nearly one-quarter of beginning farmers are under 35, compared with fewer than one in 10 U.S. farmers overall. Beginning farmers are also far less likely to be 65 or older.
Brooks Lamb, special adviser for strategic communications at American Farmland Trust, a nonprofit dedicated to protecting farmland and helping farmers gain access to land, said many beginning farmers enter agriculture later in life, often as a second career or retirement vocation, after building savings or financial security elsewhere.
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