Who Wants to Be a Farmer?

Will there be a new generation of farmers to take the place of today’s ageing farmers? What are the experiences of young people who are establishing themselves as farmers, and how are these pathways gendered? How can young farmers be supported to feed the world’s growing population?

These are the questions that stimulated us and our colleagues in Canada, China, India, and Indonesia to join together in the multi-country research project Becoming a Young Farmer: Young People’s Pathways into Farming in Four Countries (2016–2021).Footnote 1 Each team used multi-sited case study research to bring to life the experiences of young farmers and would-be farmers, the various challenges they face, and important differences in their experiences both within and between the countries and study sites.

Thinking about young people and farming raises fundamental questions about the future, both of rural young women and men and of agriculture itself (Ní Laoire 2002; White 2012). The future shape of rural communities, and of the world’s agriculture, will depend to a large extent on these and future generations of young rural people and their interest in—and their ability to acquire the needed resources for—farming careers and livelihoods. In recent years, numerous panels of international experts have highlighted the ecological, economic, and social advantages of small-scale “family farming” compared to large-scale industrial agriculture. While “family farms” (including both small and large-scale farms) occupy around 70–80 per cent of all the world’s farmland and produce about 80 per cent of the world’s food in value terms, “small family farms” (of less than 2.0 hectares), which account for more than 80 per cent of all farm units, produce 35 per cent of the world’s food on only 12 per cent of all agricultural land (Lowder et al. 2021). Smallholder farms of this type thus generally achieve higher yields per unit of land—and higher yields per unit of non-human energy input, but less per unit of human labour—than industrial farming. They also provide better outcomes in terms of food security, environmental sustainability, employment, and community cohesion and development (FAO-IFAD 2019; Committee on World Food Security 2019, 2020; IAASTD 2009; Herren et al. 2020; Ricciardi et al. 2021).

If visions of sustainable agricultural futures based on “family farm” units are to be realized—as envisaged in the current (2019–2028) “United Nations’ Decade of Family Farming” (FAO-IFAD 2019)—the problems that young people face in establishing themselves as farmers have to be taken seriously and given much more attention than has been the case in recent research and policy debates (FAO 2014; White 2020; Committee on World Food Security 2021).

The world’s crisis-ridden agriculture and food systems, besides huge environmental challenges, are facing a looming problem of generational renewal. Farming populations are ageing, many farmers appear to have no successor, and it is widely claimed that young people are not interested in farming; smallholder farming in its present state appears to be so unattractive to young people that they are turning away from agricultural futures. While this generalization is to some extent a myth—as this book also hopes to show—there is growing and justified concern about the problem of generational renewal in agriculture, and it is finally getting some attention internationally. This has been recently reflected, for example, in the United Nations’ Decade of Family Farming (2019–2028) with its Action Pillar underlining the need to “ensure the generational sustainability of family farming” (FAO-IFAD 2019), and in various policy reports on the broader problems of rural youth livelihoods (IFAD 2019) and young people’s engagement in agri-food systems (Committee on World Food Security 2021).

Meanwhile, youth unemployment is increasing worldwide. Open unemployment rates for youth are three times higher than for adults in all world regions. In most regions, youth unemployment was rising even before the COVID-19 crisis (ILO 2020). Large-scale youth unemployment has long been a matter of concern in national and international policy discourse and is flagged in the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals,Footnote 2 but it is hard to find realistic proposals to address it.

Close to half of the world’s unemployed are youth (World Bank 2006, 2015), and many others are underemployed, having insufficient work, and/or precarious informal sector employment. In some regions, rural and urban youth employment rates are the same; in some others, the rural rate is slightly lower, but it must be remembered that significant numbers of young urban unemployed themselves originate from rural areas. Agriculture remains the majority world’s largest employer. As a sector that faces growing demand for food, fibres, and other products, if supported, it has the potential to provide decent livelihoods for many more. But various surveys in different parts of the world have all found that young rural people, including the children of farmers, do not aspire to farming futures; even in regions where agriculture is the most important contribution to rural livelihoods, agriculture is not the first option (Committee on World Food Security 2021, 26; White 2021).

Our study and this book come at a strategic moment, responding directly and concretely to these concerns whilst also challenging some widely held assumptions. We decided not to study young rural people’s apparent turn-away from farming, but instead to focus on young men and women who are—or are trying to become—farmers, the many constraints they face, and their efforts to overcome them. This also meant diverging from the conventional focus in youth studies on young people in their late teens and early twenties (or as in United Nations’ definitions, between ages 15 and 24). Many of the young generation of farmers featuring in this book did not become farmers during their youth as defined in this way; they embarked on the long-drawn-out process of becoming a farmer, sometimes in their youth or in later years after a period of migratory non-farm work or education.

The process of farm transmission and the intergenerational tensions that often surround it have been studied in detail in Europe, North America, and other late capitalist regions (Cassidy et al. 2019). Among other world regions, it is only in sub-Saharan Africa that we find a rich tradition of research on intergenerational tensions and conflict surrounding farmland, and young people’s difficult pathways into farming (for example, Skinner 1961; Quan 2007; Amanor 2010; Kouamé 2010; Peters 2011; Berckmoes and White 2016). On rural young people and farming generally, it is again in sub-Saharan Africa that research is relatively well-developed compared to Asia and Latin America (see, for example, Flynn and Sumberg 2021; Chamberlain et al. 2021). This was one reason for our decision to devote three of our four country studies to Asia.

Our study provides a comparative analysis of young men’s and women’s pathways into farming in four countries. As explained further in the concluding chapter by Haroon Akram-Lodhi and Roy Huijsmans, one (Canada) is a major agro-exporting western country characterized by modern, highly capital-intensive farming and fewer farms of increasing size (now down to around 272,000 farms and up to an average 274 hectares), which employ only a small fraction of the labour force. Farming in the other three countries in Asia (China, India, and Indonesia) is dominated by smallholder farmers numbering in the (tens of) millions, with farms of much smaller size (in India averaging 1.3 hectares (ha), in Indonesia 0.8 ha, and in China only 0.4 ha), and much greater proportions of the labour force depend wholly or partly on agriculture for their livelihoods. Despite industrialization and growing service sectors, agriculture is still the largest single source of employment in these three countries. But these countries also share some trends with Canada: smallholder farming is losing out to agribusiness (except in India),Footnote 3 the average age of farmers is rising, farmland prices are rising, and young people in rural areas apparently do not want to become farmers. Smallholder farmers themselves often say that they hope their children will find better work than farming (see for Southeast Asia, Hall et al. 2011, 118). At the same time, for those young people who are interested in farming, access to farmland—for both young “newcomers” to farming and would-be “continuers” from farming families—appears to be a major problem, with the possible exception of China. And for those who have some form of access to land, as a recent Prindex report shows, in nearly all regions of Asia, the perception of tenure insecurity is much higher among younger people (aged 18–45) than among older generationsFootnote 4 (Prindex 2020, 12, 25).

Our Approach, Guiding Concepts, and Methods

There are several key features worth noting. First, we agreed to focus on those who have become, are in process of becoming, or are aspiring to become, farmers. In contrast to the more common focus in youth studies, we did not limit the research to young people in the age range 15–24, which often leads only to studies on why young people leave the countryside and, for many of those who are on the way to becoming farmers, stops before their trajectory into independent farming is completed. Second, the life-history approach in our interviews with young farmers has enabled us to document the—perhaps obvious, but not always recognized—fact that “becoming a farmer” is not an event but a process, which in the majority of cases involves some period of non-farm work, most often through migration to urban centres. Capturing people’s typical mobilities between places and sectors during the first decades of life, the study contributes to rethinking conventional rural-urban and farmer-nonfarmer divides and does so from a life course perspective. Third, we have mainstreamed gender distinctions and also differences between “continuer” young farmers (those who have grown up in farming families) and “newcomer” young farmers. By concentrating on women and men who have managed, or are trying, to set up their own farming livelihoods at a relatively early stage in their lives, we aimed to contribute both to theory by clarifying the generational dimension in the social reproduction of agrarian communities, and to policy by clarifying the barriers that young rural men and women confront in accessing land and other resources as well as the role of policies, institutions, and young people’s own (individual and collective) efforts in overcoming these barriers.

Guiding Concepts

Our study in the four countries has engaged with the term “youth” in the chronological (age) sense as well as in the social (generational) meaning of youth, as a relative stage in the lifecycle, depending on the context. At the time of data collection, although the average age of a farmer across our sample of 378 farmers was 34 years, most had their first experience of farm work as young as 13 years of age and began farming independently when they were 23 years old (Table 1.1). The farmers that we interviewed are established as farmers or are well set on the path to becoming a farmer. This may not be true for the vast majority of youth outside of our study who aspire to or are trying to become farmers. Most youth do not become farmers when they are chronologically young. For many the process of becoming a farmer or aspiring to be a farmer begins when they are chronologically identified as “youth,” but only culminates in an independent farming existence many years later. Many are unable to get into farming right away for generational reasons, waiting to inherit land and other farm resources. Others may migrate or work in the non-farm/urban sectors to diversify their experiences, livelihoods, and to bring an investment into farming. For many women (especially in China, India, and Indonesia), farming as a vocation becomes possible only after marriage.

Table 1.1 Summary characteristics of young farmers in our research
Full size table

Combining chronological and social age allowed us to focus on the relatively young women and men who are (trying to become) farmers in specific contexts. We have not included farmers in their later adulthood, who might be 60 years old or more and are trying their hands at farming for the first time, notwithstanding the importance of such experiences in some countries. Thus, for example, when the two authors of this Introduction visited Sanggang village in Hebei province in 2016 and asked to be introduced to the youngest farmer in the village, they found themselves on the organic apple farm of 43-year-old Zhang Changchun, who had started farming at the age of 37 after a long period of migratory non-farm work (White 2020, 199–120). While Mr Zhang is not chronologically a youth, he is indeed a young farmer in the demographic context of his village. This has important implications for policy to support young farmers and the “generational sustainability of family farming” (FAO-IFAD 2019).

Our guiding research framework combines core concepts from the interdisciplinary fields of agrarian studies, youth studies, generation studies, and gender and development. Agrarian political economy allows us to depict and compare “the social relations and dynamics of production and reproduction, property and power in agrarian formations and their processes of change, both historical and contemporary” (Bernstein 2010, 1). It also helps us to better understand and compare the structure of the rural communities that we study, the possible future trajectories of the agri-food sector, and in particular, the underlying and continuing debate on large versus small-scale agricultural futures as well as the special characteristics of smallholder farming (van der Ploeg 2013).

Youth studies help us to move away from adult-centric perspectives that continue to dominate agrarian studies and development studies more broadly. It foregrounds young people’s own perspectives and priorities, thereby shedding new light on their paradoxical (apparent) turn away from farming in this era of mass rural un(der)employment (Cuervo and Wyn 2012). It also provides an important reminder of the need and the right of young people to be properly researched, not as objects, but as subjects and where possible as participants in research (Beazley et al. 2009). Key concepts that we draw from the “new” youth studies are the ideas of youth as actors in social and economic renewal, youth as identity, and youth as generation (Jones 2009; Huijsmans 2016). We complement this with a generational perspective that helps illuminate the “generational ordering” (Punch 2020) of agrarian structures. Viewing generation as a relationship is critical for understanding the various intergenerational relations, practices, and life course events frustrating and/or facilitating agrarian generational renewal. This includes issues of inheritance and the generational transfer of agricultural knowledge, but also young people’s often marginal position in farmers’ organizations and rural movements. It also directs attention to how the process of becoming a farmer intersects with other key life course events, such as education, marriage, and family formation.

For many or most young would-be farmers, becoming a farmer depends on the transmission of agrarian resources, particularly land, between the generations. Farm transmission is normally but not always between parents and their children; “extra-familial” transmission is increasingly common in late capitalist countries where many ageing farmers have no successor (see, for example, McGreevy et al. 2019 for Japan and Korzensky 2019 for Austria).

These ideas support a relational approach to studying young people’s experiences with farming, the dynamics of relations between younger and older generations, within the same generation, and their role in the social reproduction of agrarian communities (Archambault 2014; Berckmoes and White 2014). At the same time, young people are neither homogeneous nor exist in a vacuum; generation intersects with other important social categories such as social-economic class and gender (Hajdu et al. 2013; Jones 2009; Nayak and Kehily 2013; Wyn and White 1997). As already noted, our study incorporates a systematic focus on young women (would-be) farmers. Traditional agrarian societies are typically sites of heteronormative patriarchy in both gender and generational relations (Ní Laoire 2002; Stearns 2006). Young people are not passive victims within these patriarchal structures but exercise a “constrained” agency. This is most evident in the gender and generation-neutral term “family farm,” which hides the imbalances within families in ownership, access, and decision-making around resources and in the division of labour. Yet, as our research reveals, young (would-be) farmers, and especially young women farmers, confront or subvert these structures. At the same time, we hope that future research will focus on the impacts of sexualities and gender plurality on traditional agrarian contexts. Bringing these perspectives together has helped us to understand the intergenerational tensions that we see almost everywhere in rural communities, particularly young people’s problems in gaining access to farmland and other agriculture-related opportunities.

As already mentioned, another key distinction that we have adopted and further explored in this study is that between “continuer” young farmers (those who take over their parents’ farm) and “newcomer” young farmers (those not from farming backgrounds). There is a strong supposition that “newcomer” farmers are likely to be more critical of mainstream farming practices and innovators. By “family farming” and “smallholder farming” in this study, we refer not to the size (acreage) of the farm unit, but to the manner and “scale” of its operation, where owners or tenants themselves manage and work on the farm, often with the help of family members but not ruling out the use of hired workers. It can thus encompass both farms of half or one hectare in one of our Asian sample countries and farms of 100 hectares or more in Canada, depending on the manner in which they are owned, managed, and worked.Footnote 5

Our Methods

We aimed to look for commonalities, comparisons, and contrasts in the experiences and trajectories of young farmers between countries, between regions within countries, and within localities. In each country, the teams selected two sites (three in Indonesia), offering contrasts in forms of smallholder farming. In methodology workshops while preparing the project, the four teams developed together a set of general research questions, summarized below.Footnote 6

  • Agrarian context: What are the general patterns and trends of farmland ownership and access, farm sizes, and labour use? How have farmland prices changed? Who gets what in smallholder agriculture? What are the trends in the age structure of the farming population?

  • Becoming a young farmer: How do young people become farmers? What are the resources that they need in this process? What are the typical modes of transfer of farmland and property between generations? How are resources divided among sons and daughters? How do young people access land and credit? How do they acquire and develop farming knowledge and skills? What kind of social networks do they rely on and what support do they receive from these networks? How do young women farmers fare? What challenges do they encounter and how do they deal with them? How do they deal with social, economic, and other barriers to becoming farmers in their own right?

  • Young farmers and innovation: What are young farmers’ attitudes to conventional farming practices? Are young farmers in general, and newcomers in particular, more flexible and innovative with regard to farming compared to older farmers and continuers? What role do relatively new technologies such as mobile phones, the internet, and social media play in the innovation process and dissemination?

  • Young farmers in policy and agenda setting: How do agrarian and rural policies affect young people engaged in farming? Which policies make it more or less easy for young people to enter into farming? What specific kinds of support are available for young farmers? How do young people attempt to influence the level and contents of such support? Are young farmers organized? How are they involved in existing farmer unions, associations, and/or political parties, in dedicated young-farmer organizations, and in new modes of networking among young farmers (with particular attention here to social media)? How do they influence political parties and policymakers, and with what degree of success?

Qualitative, in-depth methods of inquiry are best suited to study young (would-be) farmers’ lived experiences and trajectories. Identification and selection of young men and women (would-be) farmers, both “continuers” and “newcomers,” was facilitated by the research team members’ existing local contacts and relationships, with farmers, (youth) farmers’ organizations, women’s organizations, and non-governmental organizations.

In each country, we aimed for 100 young farmer interviews. Our final sample consists of a total of 378 young farmers, covering newcomer and continuer farmers, established farmers and young women farmers. The primary informants were young men and women who (a) were already farmers in their own right, (b) managed farms that they may not yet own or control completely, but with a degree of independence (that is, not merely working or helping in their parents’ fields), or (c) were in process of trying to establish themselves as farmers (which may include “apprenticeship”-like stints on established farms), either by choice or lack of it.

Interviews were guided by a common set of questions while leaving research teams in the individual countries to address further country-specific issues and questions essential for the completeness of their own case studies. The interviews included a life-history component, starting from the respondents’ first childhood experience of helping on the farm and continuing with their work and livelihood trajectories after leaving school or college. This explains our decision to use the age range 18–45 years in selecting our “young farmer” samples. To avoid misunderstanding, it should be underlined that this was not because we want to expand the definition of “youth” or consider a 45-year-old farmer to be “young” but because—as we have already explained—becoming a farmer is often a long-drawn-out process, and we miss important parts of that process if we only interview those who have recently started farming. As the Canadian research team puts it: “we believed that it was important to include some ‘older’ young farmers in our study; farmers who are still young enough to remember their own experiences as young farmers but who might be further along in their journey toward becoming a successful farmer” (Nasielksi et al. this book, page).

We also interviewed some older farmers in the same locations to capture and compare their earlier experiences as young farmers and some young people who were keen to exit farming. Also included were (depending on the location and their relevance) non-governmental and community-based organization activists, farmers’ union members, staff of agricultural universities and other training centres, and officials of regional agriculture departments.

Table 1.1 provides a summary profile of the farmers that we interviewed. The average age of the farmer respondents is 34 years. Most farmer respondents in China, India, and Indonesia are married, with Canada having the lowest proportion of young farmers who reported being married. Nearly 90 per cent of Canadian farmers in our sample have more than 12 years of education compared to zero in China, 33 per cent in India, and 3 per cent in Indonesia.

Most respondents work full-time in farming in all four countries, but many combine farming with other income sources. For the majority in Canada, China, and India, farming is the primary source of income, while it is the primary source of income for only for 50 per cent of Indonesian respondents.

Nearly three-fourths of our sample already owns some land, although there is a huge variation in the acreage owned. In Canada it is more than 500 acres, while in China and Indonesia it is less than one acre. About 28 per cent rent land for farming, with the highest share of renters in Canada as well as sharing land or engaged in sharecropping. “Land sharing” could be as in community-supported agriculture in Canada or amongst family members as in India.

That not all of the land owned is obtained through inheritance is evident in that only 35 per cent of the 378 farmers in our sample report having inherited land. The lowest number of farmers to inherit land is in Canada (7 per cent), while in India it is 60 per cent and in Indonesia, 50 per cent. About 38 per cent of young farmer respondents expect to inherit land, with the highest number being in Canada.

All of the country teams have incorporated an explicit focus on the interactions of generational and gender relations. Researchers prioritized interviewing young women farmers, even in the case of couples where the male partner was (self) identified as the “farmer,” in order to identify the special problems of resource access and recognition that young women farmers often face. And finally, the selection of two contrasting research locations in each country (in Indonesia, three locations) has allowed the authors to draw comparisons and contrasts within as well as between countries and thus avoid country-based stereotypes of “the young (Canadian, Chinese, Indian, or Indonesian) farmer.”

As already explained, our field research aimed to privilege young people’s own perspectives on and experiences with farming, the challenges that they encounter, the ways that they deal with them as well as the impact that young farmers’ practices have on farming. This approach is consistent with young people’s right to be properly researched on their own terms and in their own perspectives (Huijsmans et al. 2014; Naafs and White 2012; Srinivasan 2014).

Organization of This Book

The book is organized by country into four sections. Each section begins with a country overview chapter, which serves to contextualize the case studies and summarize what is known about young people and farming from available studies and secondary data. These overview chapters also explain the choice of research sites in each country. The remaining two chapters in each section (three for Indonesia) present the results of our local case studies.

Each country team, while following a general set of shared guidelines, has chosen their own distinct style of presentation and writing, which also reflects different scholarly orientations and practices between the teams. We have consciously opted to preserve this variety, rather than squeezing it all into a standard format and style.

Findings

In the concluding chapter, Haroon Akram-Lodhi and Roy Huijsmans, members of the Canada and Indonesia research teams, respectively, have provided some inter-country and inter-locality comparisons and concluding reflections, based on the country overviews and case-study chapters. In this section, we highlight just a few general findings of our study that readers may need to bear in mind when reading the chapters.

Perhaps the most important contribution of our study is the way it has demonstrated that becoming a (young) farmer is a process rather than an “event.” While most respondents begun farm work as young as 13 years of age, the great majority of farmers in all four countries did not start farming independently until much later. The average age when respondents began farming independently was 23 years (Table 1.1), but for many this milestone came much later. After leaving school or college, young people typically go through a period of non-farm employment, frequently migrating to urban centres for work. This applies as much to the “continuers” (those from farming families) as to the “newcomer” farmers and as much to female as to male young farmers. It also applies to young graduates of vocational agricultural schools. This has many policy implications for the kinds, and the timing, of the needed support for young farmers, including education, land allocations, and subsidies. Most rural youth, including those enrolled in agricultural schools, are very unlikely to make a start in farming immediately after leaving school. This suggests that support for entry into farming—training, internships, help with accessing land, and other resources—may be needed much later in life.

Our study also provides a reminder that young rural people are generally landless, even if their parents have land. The only young people who may obtain access to parental land while still young are the children of land-rich farmers or those whose landowning parents die early. Most young farmers, therefore, don’t have access to parental land when they start. Even if there is access to land, gaining more control over farming, farm-related decisions, and earnings poses a challenge. Large numbers of young farmers start their farming life on rented land; sometimes, as we have seen in Canada and Indonesia, on land rented or sharecropped from their parents. This has clear implications for policy. In countries or regions where significant amounts of farmland are not privately but state or community owned (China, parts of Indonesia, Canada’s Crown Lands), there are many possibilities for allocation of use-rights on this land, at low rental rates, to young farmers. There are many examples around the world of good practice in government facilitation of young farmers’ access to land at reasonable rates (see, for example, Committee on World Food Security 2021, 56–61).

While the degree of gender discrimination (whether in law or social practice) differs between countries and also in some cases within countries, young women farmers face problems of resource access and recognition as farmers in the majority of our research sites. National and local efforts to counter these biases are important, but unlikely to emerge unless (young) women farmers emerge as a political force.

Young farmers’ pluriactivity—combining farm and non-farm incomes, with or without migration—is the norm in most cases, often at individual and certainly at the household level. This provides another insight for policies to support young people in farming: they need to recognize the reality that for today’s young farmers, engagement with farming is seen—as it was for many of the previous generations—as both a part life-course and a part livelihood activity. “Farmer” is an identity as well as an occupation; sometimes self-identified as in the case of Canada, and sometimes ascribed as the China situational analysis makes clear.

Another insight from the case studies is that “smallholder” farms are not necessarily “family farms.” In all countries, we find some young farmer couples sharing the burden of farm work and sharing farming decisions, sometimes also—but much less than in previous generations—helped by their children; but in all countries too, it is also common to find that only one household member has any significant engagement with the farm.

Are young farmers by nature innovative, or simply more innovative than older farmers? Our study provides reason to question this common assumption, as some previous studies have done (Sumberg and Hunt 2019; Chamberlain and Sumberg 2021). Young continuer farmers may find themselves locked into crop choices and farm practices that their parents established, as noted in the Canadian studies. Newcomer farmers, on the other hand, may come to farming with an intention to do things differently. The Canadian studies have a good number of respondents who identify as newcomers, while they are absent or rare in the other country samples. This is an area for future research.

Most government policies towards agriculture continue their long-standing focus on scale enlargement and promotion of industrial agriculture. To date, there is little evidence of any commitment—beyond lip service—to the support of alternative, more earth-friendly modes of farming.

Finally, our study found little evidence of young farmers emerging as a significant political force, whether locally, regionally, or nationally. Smallholder farmer movements, despite their long history, are generally weak, and young farmers’ movements in most cases are non-existent. Sustainable futures of the world’s farming and agri-food systems, and their role in providing the planet’s growing population with healthy, safe, and nutritious food while combating climate breakdown, are unlikely to be ensured by state policies and actions from above unless these are forced to act by large-scale and sustained pressures from below. In all of these matters, today’s young people are at the front line and it is important that their voices are heard.