YOUTH FOR OUR FARMS
One of the trends about which I am most concerned – a trend which means more to me than all of the tables of statistics which are offered as proof of the farmer's economic status – is the trend which can be found in almost every farming area in the country – and that is the mass exodus of young people from our farms.
The young people just don't come back to the farm after school or the service.
They move away to the city or to other states. And while Mr. Benson may talk about reducing the farm population for greater efficiency, I am worried about this trend. I am worried about what is going to happen to our soil when there are no young people to take over the farm. What is going to happen to our rural churches and schools and small town stores that so depend upon our young farmers and their growing families?
But on the other hand, can we blame our young people for being honestly worried about the whole future of agriculture? They can go to the city today and keep up with inflation. They can join unions and have some say about their wages. They can go into business and have some say about their prices. They can produce oil and have some say over production – or enter it.
But if they stay on the farm they have no real voice in their economic future. They can't influence their prices – they can't single-handedly reduce surpluses or cut down on their yield. What they plant in the spring they must harvest in the autumn. And they have seen in recent years how prices fall, farm income falls, and parity falls – at the very same time that business prices and wages keep going up.
And, more importantly, the costs the farmer himself must pay keep on going up. There is no flexible sliding scale for his tax bill, or his mortgage payments, or his household expenses or the cost of replacing his machinery. The farmer is the only man in our economy who has to buy everything he buys at retail – sell everything he sells at wholesale – and pay the freight both ways.
There is no easy solution to this problem. There is no simple formula by which we can encourage young people to make farming their career. But we should be able to offer them more than the dreary prospect of ruinous competition. We should at least be able to develop a farm policy and economy which adequately rewarded their labor, required only a modest capital investment, offered the benefits of ordinary modern conveniences, and provided an incentive productive efficiency.
Our youth ask no more. They are entitled to no less.
The disparity in farm and urban income is not a new phenomenon. It even existed under Democratic administrations. But in recent years, it has become more pronounced. The average farmer earns less than 50 cents per hour. The average factory wage today is $2.23 per hour. Country living has its advantages – but it cannot overcome such an inequality in income. We cannot expect to hold our young people on the farm when they are able to earn over four times as much money in the city.
Of almost equal significance is the trend toward larger and larger farms, requiring more and more capital. The Administration policy – if the lack of any policy can be said to be a policy – fosters this trend. It promotes the giant corporation farm and absentee landlords. It requires an investment that few young farmers can afford.
But our whole vitality as a nation depends upon a contrary course. The Congress must take steps to make credit facilities available to a young farmer purchasing the necessary machinery and equipment – and he must also be protected against corporation farm raids upon the market which will drive prices below the cost of operation.
Finally, we cannot induce our youth to return to farms that are without telephones, without electricity, and without labor-saving devices they knew in college or in the city. We are proud of the REA program which has brought the benefits of electric power to 96% of our rural areas. But the official administration policy of no new starts is stifling the further development of REA cooperatives. The Administration's attitude toward telephone coops has resulted in a sharp curtailment in loans to such organizations – despite the fact that 40% of our farms have no telephones and most of the other 60% have poor equipment.
Certainly it will be difficult or impossible to expand and improve rural electric service if the Administration succeeds in raising the interest rates to co-ops and placing them at the mercy of the same financial institutions that serve private utilities.
In short, say our younger people, if this is what is to happen to our farms, it is not worth the tremendous investment required now to take over a farm – more money than most of them have in the bank in these times – just to get caught up in an endless trying to keep ahead.
That is why our young people are leaving the farm today. They do not ask for any favored treatment. They do not want the government to do everything for them. But neither are they impressed with slogans about a free market – if it is only a freedom to go bankrupt. They do not trust those whose promises have been consistently broken – they do not listen to those who take credit for the rain but not for the drought. And they are not very optimistic after this Administration has spent billions of dollars on this problem in the last six years and only succeeded in making it worse.
But let us hope that the Democratic Party can reverse this trend – that a new program and a new attitude can give our young men and women an opportunity to farm, to compete, to make a success of it. To keep those families on the farm – and to keep our farms under a family – are two essential goals of any Democratic farm program.
Source: David F. Powers Personal Papers, Box 33, "'Youth for Our Farms,' WI, 10 March 1960." John F. Kennedy Presidential Library.