The high average age of primary operators on U.S. farms—56
years in 2002—has led to concern about the future of farming.
However, some potential "replacement farmers" are currently
working as secondary operators on larger, multiple-generation farms.
Today's commercial farms often require more management and labor
resources than one person can provide. Thus, some farms have more
than one operator, defined as anyone who makes day-to-day-decisions
about the farm business. For example, the principal operator's spouse,
sibling, or adult child may also be operators.
Until recently, U.S. farm data sources assumed each farm had one
operator. New data show that this assumption understates the count
of people operating farms by 800,000. USDA's 2002 Agricultural Resource
Management Survey (ARMS) asked respondents to report the number
of operators on their farms and to provide more detailed information—such
as age and major occupation—for up to three operators. Understanding
multiple-operator farms is important because they produce a disproportionate
share of agricultural output. It turns out that the 32 percent of
U.S. farms with multiple operators account for half of agricultural
production.
Of the nearly 700,000 multiple-operator farms, only 12
percent are multiple-generation operations, with at least 25 years
difference between the ages of the oldest and youngest operators.
This percentage increases with farm size, reaching 25 percent for
multiple-operator farms with at least $250,000 in sales. Multiple-generation
farms are also more common when the primary operator is either young
or elderly, making up 16 percent of multiple-operator farms when
the primary operator is under 35 and 22 percent when the operator
is at least 65. The share is only 9 percent when the primary operator
is 35 to 64 years old.
Multiple-generation farms number only 86,700,
so they could provide replacement operators for only a fraction
of the 2.2 million U.S. farms. In addition, some secondary operators
in multiple-generation farms perform fairly specialized functions—such
as marketing or field operations—and may not have the broad
experience and skills necessary to take over a large farm.
On the other hand, relatively few replacement farm operators will
be necessary for the larger, commercial-sized farms producing the
bulk of farm products. The 2002 Census of Agriculture estimates
that the 34,100 largest farms account for 50 percent of the sales
of farm products, and the 143,500 largest farms account for 75 percent
of sales. Replacing the operators of these farms from multiple-generation
farms is much more feasible.
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