An endangered species?
Though most family farms in Utah are still hanging on, it’s not getting any easier.
“Some years you make a lot, some years you break even and other years you lose your shirt,” said Ross Bailey, a senior majoring in agricultural education.
“With the cost of equipment and land so high, you’ll never pay off your debt in your lifetime.”
The native of central Utah’s Fountain Green, Bailey chose to follow his father’s footsteps and pursue a job in teaching while working a farm on the side. He spends each summer working the family farm before returning to USU in the fall.
“Teaching school, I can at least have some sort of steady income,” Bailey said.
His classmate, Nicole Anderson, agrees.
“I would love to see more family farms out there, but most of them have another job just to help support the farm,” Anderson said. She wants to run a farm
after graduation like her family currently does in Benjamin, a rural Utah County community.
“The past few years, a lot of farms were sold around our land,” she said. “People are buying the land to put a horse or two out there. They let the
field just go to weeds.”
Bruce Godfrey, a farm management specialist at USU, sees such trends mostly in
Utah’s more populous counties. Weber, Davis, Salt Lake and Utah counties in particular continue to see an exodus of their farmers to Utah’s more rural counties. Residential developers then build on the farmland.
Beyond that, farms are relatively stable around the state, Godfrey said. Some
are losing ground, while others remain strong.
Bit by bit, though, more and more Utah families leave behind the family farm as the risks get to be too difficult. According to the 2002 Census of Agriculture conducted by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, 1,194 farms exist in Cache County, down almost 200 farms from the last Census conducted in 1997.
“Some farms are really quite profitable,” Godfrey said. “They are usually the exception, though, and not the rule.”
While most Utah farmers might be getting by, the state’s independent dairy farmers are just giving up.
“We’ve lost about 50 percent of our dairymen in the last decade,” Godfrey said. “But we haven’t lost any cows.
“Dairies have become much more concentrated in the hands of fewer hands,” he said. “A lot of small dairies are dropping out.”
Cache Valley residents may have noticed the change, as the county ranks number one in the state in the number of milk cows.
“Our family goes to bankruptcy auctions all the time,” said Drew Cardon, a
graduate student studying economics. His family owns a dairy farm in Benson,
on the west end of Cache Valley. Many of the valley’s dairymen have gone out of business in recent years, he said.
“When a farm goes under, the bank will sell off the land, equipment, cattle and sometimes even the house,” Cardon said.
With increasing pressures from larger dairies, more and more Utah farmers are forced to leave behind their business and livelihood.
“Every town used to have a dairy or two, but now the only dairies up and running are the big businesses,” Bailey said. “They run the dairy 24 hours a day with top-of-the-line equipment. Little guys just can’t keep up with them.”
The increasing cost of land is also a factor in deterring many from entering the farming profession. As homes move farther out into farmland, the selling
prices increase dramatically, Cardon said. Not surprisingly, many farmers sell their land to developers rather than to other farmers.
“The price of land is going crazy,” Bailey said. “Land that used to cost $500 an acre not too long ago can cost as much as $3,000 today.” Fewer people choose to enter the profession, given the hefty start-up costs.
“If subdivisions sprang up anywhere near our farm, our property value would triple,” Cardon said.
Expensive equipment doesn’t help, either.
“A decent, used tractor will cost you at least $30,000,” Cardon said. “A new one will run you $100,000. It’s like buying a house.”
And with fluctuations in the market, many Utah farmers lose out in the end.
“A small change in the market price can make a huge difference in your milk check at the end of the month,” Cardon said. “Our family has lost up to $3,000 in a month just because the price dropped on us.”
Cardon plans on pursuing a law degree after his time at USU. He doesn’t intend to return to full-time dairy farming.
“Debt and farming go hand-in-hand,” he said. “You’re always worried about how you’re going to pay off a loan.
“You just can’t expect to make a decent living raising cows,” he said. “It’s hard to make a stable income, and I don’t want to deal with the headache.”
-jcox@cc.usu.edu