WASHINGTON, December 12 (By Maria Young for RIA Novosti) - Will Gilmer is a fourth-generation farmer on the land first developed by his great-grandfather in the US state of Alabama more than a century ago.
“I have an opportunity to step into the family business, and it’ll be mine someday,” he said in an interview with RIA Novosti.
“I’m outside. I get to play with the animals, drive tractors around. I’m living every little boy’s dream,” he said.
But in a nation founded largely by farmers who could feed their communities and live off the fat of the land, there is growing concern about just how viable that dream is today.
The American landscape has changed since the start of the 20th century when roughly 43 percent of the US labor force was comprised of farmers.
Today, that figure is less than three percent.
And with the decline, some fear farmers have lost the strength of their collective voices in the political battles that shape the nation.
“The real indication that we’re losing some of our clout is that generally you used to be able to get lawmakers on both sides to work out things like the Farm Bill, but it’s just not the priority it used to be,” said Gilmer.
Today just 16 percent of Americans live in rural communities, according to the US Department of Agriculture, which means 84 percent of the nation’s elected officials represent people who are not part of the rural landscape and who therefore have limited interest in rural needs.
The 2012 Farm Bill provides for everything from food assistance programs to price guarantees for farmers. It passed the US Senate, but is still languishing in the House of Representatives and it remains far from certain that the legislation will be passed before the end of the year.
“Why is it that we don't have a Farm Bill?” asked Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack in a keynote address to a farmer’s convention recently.
“It's the fact that rural America with a shrinking population is becoming less and less relevant to the politics of this country, and we had better recognize that, and we better begin to reverse it.”
“As a whole, the industry is in as good a shape as it’s ever been,” said Bob Young, Chief Economist with the American Farm Bureau Federation, in an interview with RIA Novosti.
“There’s as many folks in farming and agriculture production today as there was ten years ago.”
But the booming agricultural economy some farmers have seen hasn’t been felt in much of rural America, Vilsack said, in part because recent years have brought an important shift in demographics.
More Americans have moved to metropolitan areas, and those who have stayed behind have not fared as well financially.
“Our poverty rate in rural America is at 17 percent – significantly higher than it is in metro areas,” said Vilsack.
The answer, he said, lies with finding a new attitude in rural America – an attitude that is attractive, more strategic about which political battles to fight, less concerned with divisive details and more unified in its voice as a whole.
“We’ve got something to be proactive about,” Vilsack said. “Let’s spend our time and our resources and our energy doing that. I think if we do, we’re going to have a lot of young people want to be a part of that future.”
At 33 years of age, Gilmer is a new kind of American farmer: college-educated and social-media savvy, he not only helps run the farm but also runs …a website for the farm. He has a blog. And he’s produced dozens of videos about life on the farm.
“Coming out of college I realized a good portion of the people I was in school with had no idea about agriculture or how they got their food, and coming home I realized we’re just kind of isolated out here and nobody realizes what we do,” he said.
“To me the internet is a good way to get our message out. I can reach a lot more people over the Internet than I can in Lamar County, Alabama.”
Gilmer may be following in his ancestor’s footsteps. But he is also helping to forge a new path into the future.
Part of providing answers for the future, he said, “is putting our story out there and making sure while we’re putting food on other people’s tables, our own kids have food on their tables, too.”
