A news release from Wyoming Public Media notes the following:
The article notes the following problem:
This year’s Wyoming Cattle Industry Convention is titled Educating for Ranching Success in the 21st Century. The average age of a U.S. rancher today is 57. Wyoming Stockgrower’s Association Vice President Jim Magagna would like to see that number go down.
And it goes on to note:
“A lot of our focus in recent years has been bringing young people into our industry,” he says. “We hear so much about the average age of ranchers creeping up. And so we really want to make it attractive for young people to be engaged in our industry.” Magagna says the best way to do that is to teach young people how to make ranching profitable. Consultant Dave Pratt will provide ideas for that in one session.
Well, making it profitable would help, but one of the best ways to do that would be for the thing most needed to be a rancher, land, to not be priced at playground prices. That, more than any single thing, is what makes ranching and farming today impossible to get into.
No doubt the average age is 57. And that's because those people were born into the places they are operating. There's no earthly way that a person who is 27, or 37, for example, who wasn't born into agriculture to get into it. None. Indeed the only only people from the outside getting into it are those who are very wealthy.
Indeed, since some point after World War Two, and I'm not exactly sure if it was as early as the 1950s or late as the 1980s, omitting price fluctuations here and there for peculiar reasons, this has been the case. Ranching is hard work, as is farming, with a generally low profit margin. If you have to buy land to do it, you'll never make the money back. Never.
This isn't an exaggeration. It's a fact. When large outfits exchange hands today only one of two things is occurring. If its actually being purchased as a production unit by a producer, he's basically exchanging one outfit for another. That's how he's affording it. If a person is purchasing from the outside, he's buying with something other than ever making a profit in mind, as he wont.
Now, this isn't a good situation for a lot of reasons. It means anyone from the outside, or even anyone simply surplus to a family operation, wanting to get a place of their own, at best must plan on leasing most of their ground. That is one way to do it, but there are always disadvantages to that. Otherwise, the only way younger people can get into agriculture is to work for an existing ranch, few of which actually hire outside of their own families. If they do, and some do, they tended to be owned by people who don't need to really make a profit at ranching, but that doesn't make the pay generous.
In an era in which a college education has seemingly become necessary for absolutely everything, then, that often means a person who feels drawn to ranching might have to plan on going to college for four years, getting a degree, and then working for wages that are fairly low. That's becoming increasingly common for some degrees in any event, and needs to be seriously examined in its own right, but it also means that this person, who is essentially pursuing a type of science degree, at some point is likely to consider the economic payoff of what he's undertaking, and undertake something else.
Land, is the key. This can be addressed. But it can't be addressed in an environment in which the only prerequisite to owning agricultural land is money. And that seems to be unlikely to be something that anyone is going to address in the near future.
So, kudos to the conference for addressing this topic. But until one of the topics is "land for the producer. . .must it be land for the wealthy?", nothing is really going to be achieved.
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