Saving America’s Family Farms: A Rural Revival

States like Nebraska – and my native Wisconsin – face one of the biggest challenges, and public policy opportunities, you are likely to find in America. 

Our family farms in rural areas across the country have been disappearing at the staggering rate of 45,000 per year on average for the past century. The incredible thing about that loss is how it has affected every single American family. Impacts include: 

• Higher food prices. Our food system is a modern miracle, delivering any type of food any time of year, but it also depends upon a food supply chain that’s deeply vulnerable. As we’ve lost our farms, we’ve made it harder for food to make it from the farm gate to the dinner table – especially during disasters like COVID and bird flu, when one big operation going down can have an out-sized impact on our food supply and drive up prices. 

• Struggling rural communities. As farms have disappeared, so has the economic base of many rural communities. Too many towns in rural America have seen disappearing farms, declining population, and loss of economic activity. 

• Risks to national security. Yes, you read that right – the Chinese Communist Party and other adversaries are buying up farmland to destabilize America. Some farmers will tell you investment from friendly foreign countries is a good thing, while others would never dream of it. But ownership by hostile foreign countries is a risk that has even spurred bipartisan concern. The best safeguard is a large number of small farmers, rather than corporate entities with no responsibility but a good return for their shareholders.

What to do? The good news is the resilience of our rural areas – a crop that’s grown no matter what the market will bring. 

The flipside of the staggering statistics on the loss of our farms are the nearly 2 million farms left. While the biggest farms produce most of our food, about 88 percent are small family farms ready to produce more of it. In other words: there are nearly 1.7 million hard-working farm families hanging tough. The way to help is to unleash more entrepreneurial opportunity: 

• Get government out of the way. We need sensible regulation, not the kind designed to curb big operations that ends up hitting small family farms the hardest. Diversifying subsidies is another way, allowing more market decisions to direct the course of American agriculture, rather than government picking winners and losers. 

• Unleash American innovation. Currently technology is leaving many family farms behind because it’s too expensive or impractical for small operations. We need our technology – especially that being developed by private sector companies most active in our agricultural states – to be affordable for farms of all sizes. It’ll mean more customers for those companies, and more food sources for all of us. 

• Capitalize on consumer demand. More people than ever care about where their food comes from. It’s time we all started acting like it. While very few people can find everything they need locally, everyone can take half steps toward our farmers – supporting grocery stores that carry local goods, as well as farmers’ markets, local butcher shops, direct-to-consumer options (from online marketplaces to farmers down the road), and more. 

The opportunity to solve these problems are within our grasp. The question is whether we seize the moment. 

Brian Reisinger is an award-winning author and rural policy expert who grew up on a family farm in Sauk County, Wisconsin. Reisinger’s book “Land Rich, Cash Poor” won Book of the Year from the nonpartisan Farm Foundation. He serves as senior writer for Midwestern-based Platform Communications and lives with his wife and daughter, splitting time between Sacramento, Calif. — America’s “farm-to-fork capital,” near his wife’s family — and the family farm in Wisconsin. He can be reached on his website at www.brian-reisinger.com