Farming, the Demographic Challenge, and Justifying Case Selection

This book commenced with a question of global importance: in a world in which farming populations are ageing, who is going to provide the planet’s peoples with the “sufficient, safe and nutritious food” that is needed to meet the “dietary needs and food preferences for an active and healthy life” (FAO 2006)? In other words, where are the people who are needed to generationally renew farming? As explained in the introduction, addressing this question meant going against the grain of much research on youth and agriculture. Rather than seeking to understand youth’s apparent disinterest in farming and their exodus from the countryside, the research teams focused on those youth and young adults who stayed in, returned, or relocated to rural areas and were involved in farming (often alongside various other economic activities). Thereby, the case studies presented in this book have put in the spotlight the next generation of farmers. In this concluding chapter, we draw out some important issues emerging from across the chapters and reflect on key differences. This way, we reiterate the various pathways of becoming a farmer, the main challenges experienced by these young farming women and men, and the roles that policies and organizations could play in facilitating the process of becoming a farmer.

That global farming populations are ageing is beyond dispute. In the developed world, the average age of an American farmer was 59 in 2017, up from 57 in 2007 (AGDAILY Reporters 2020); in the European Union, one-third of farm managers were 65 or older in 2018 (Eurostat 2018); and in Japan in 2015, the average age of a farmer was 67 (nippon.com 2018). Farm populations are also ageing in the global South. Based on a restricted sample of developing countries, the average age of the head of a farming household is 50; in Sub-Saharan Africa, it is 32 (Arslan 2019). What do these figures mean? Are older farmers no longer replaced by younger farmers and, thus, are we facing a gradual disappearance of smallholder farming? This is indeed what some studies suggest by pointing at youth’s apparent disinterest in a farming future and their out-migration from the countryside. This line of reasoning would render the question of the future of smallholder farming a youth question. Or do farmers continue farming at an ever-increasing age, and does a new generation of farmers enter the vocation at an age when they are no longer “young,” chronologically speaking? This would imply focusing on the intergenerational dynamics shaping the various delays in the generational renewal of farming. As Ben White asks: “Are young potential farm successors reluctant to start, or are they unable to start because their parents are unable or unwilling to stop?” (2020, 9). Or, do these questions simply get the story wrong by reducing farming to an exclusive occupation that fails to recognize how rural livelihoods, increasingly, are about much more than the land and straddle the rural-urban divide? This would direct our focus to changes in rural livelihoods and agrarian relations. Creating space for these different explanations led to the methodological decision to focus empirically on youth’s and young adults’ pathways into farming.

In order to understand young people’s pathways into farming, this book adopted a comparative approach. It analysed four countries, which at first glance, might be thought to occupy very different levels of “development,” as illustrated in Table 15.1. If the level of development is evaluated in terms of gross domestic product (GDP) per capita in 2020, Canada has 4 times more income per person than China, 11 times more income per person than Indonesia, and more than 20 times more income per person than India. If evaluated in terms of economic structure, Canada is more reliant on services production than China, which is more reliant on services production than India, which is slightly more reliant on services production than Indonesia. If evaluated in terms of the Human Development Index, which compresses income per person, educational achievement, and health care status into one figure, Canada has significantly greater human development than China or Indonesia, which are roughly comparable, and both of which have greater human development than India.

Table 15.1 Comparative development indicators
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In agriculture, too, the countries appear at first sight to be quite different, as illustrated in Table 15.2. Canada’s average farm size is well over 200 times that of India, and even more compared to Indonesia and China. Canada’s farms are highly capitalized; in India and Indonesia the extent of capitalization per agricultural employee is a small fraction of that of Canada. In terms of productivity, there is also significant variability. Per unit of land, China is the most productive and almost twice as productive as India. However, per unit of labour, Canada’s productivity is 20 times that of China and even greater than that of Indonesia and India.

Table 15.2 Comparative agricultural indicators
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Notwithstanding these differences, there are also some important similarities. First, in all four countries, agriculture constituted by far the smallest economic sector in 2017, ranging from 16 per cent of GDP in India to 2 per cent of GDP in Canada (World Bank n.d.). Second, the vast majority of farms are often described as so-called family farms. In China, India, and Indonesia as of 2015, more than 99 per cent of all farms were defined by their respective states as family farms (Araghi 1995).Footnote 1 In Canada, the definition of family farms straddles at least three management categories, which together suggest that between 73 and 97 per cent of farms might be defined as family farms (Statistics Canada 2017: Chart 7). These diverse definitions of the family farm, which are not based upon the size or scale of production, nonetheless share a common feature: those who work on the farm come from the same family, which also means that not all who are part of the family work on the farm. In fact, as pointed out in Chap. 1, it may only be one family member who does so. Despite this common form of farm management, trends in farm size diverge; in Canada and China average farm size is increasing, while in India and Indonesia, it is decreasing (Lu this volume, Adamopoulos and Restuccia 2014).

Third, in all four countries, rural incomes are lower than urban incomes, although the magnitude of the dispersion differs. In India and Indonesia, urban-rural income gaps are narrowing, while in China they are widening (Imai and Malaeb 2018). Recent trends in Canada are less clear, but there is no doubt that net farm incomes in Canada have been subject to a trend decline for decades (National Farmers Union 2020). With relatively low incomes, it is not surprising that in Canada, China, and India, rural farm households face a significant issue with debt, although in China, the local government often takes responsibility for the debt burdens of rural households (GOI 2021; National Farmers Union 2020; Ye et al. 2021). In this light, in all four countries, farm incomes alone are an inadequate basis by which to support a household, and so in all four countries, rural livelihoods are built by diversifying income sources out of farming into rural non-farm and off-farm employment, which can include a significant element of rural-urban migration (National Farmers Union 2020; Schenck 2018; Kumar Das and Ganesh Kumar 2018; Han and Lin 2021).Footnote 2

Findings from the Case Studies

Pathways, Generation, and Innovation

The research teams worked with an age range of 18–45 years of age in order to capture people’s trajectories of becoming a farmer, which is often a long-drawn-out process that easily takes up to a decade (Monllor 2012, 10). In addition, the research team also inquired about respondents’ childhood recollections of farming, if any. In Monllor’s framework, these early encounters with farm work are not part of the pathway of becoming a farmer but are important experiences nonetheless shaping people’s disposition vis-à-vis a possible farming future (Huijsmans et al. 2021). Because of this sampling frame, some of the “young farmers” studied can be considered youths, while others are more appropriately referred to as (young) adults.

The literature on generational renewal in farming distinguishes between different pathways of becoming a farmer: “continuer” and “newcomer” pathways. The introductory chapters to the country case studies make mention of such “newcomer” farmers in all four country contexts. However, only in the Canadian part of the study and in isolated cases in Indonesia are newcomers (those entering farming without a farming background) captured in the study sample. In the Manitoba study, ten such newcomers were interviewed; half were women coming from non-farming families who married men with farming backgrounds. The remaining were two couples and one single man, who all entered farming without coming from a farming family. These latter three farming households practice alternative methods of production and use direct marketing—something that is much less common among continuer farmers. Without the prospect of acquiring agricultural knowledge and resources through the family line, their trajectories into farming comprise internships on other people’s farms and include an interesting case of a young couple developing a relationship with an older farmer leading to a succession plan in which the young couple would take over the older farmer’s farm while also benefiting from his mentorship. The Ontario sample included a larger share of so-called newcomers: 21 (versus 28 continuers). These newcomers typically entered farming at a slightly older age than their continuer peers and had established themselves as independent farmers, on average, at the age of 27 (versus continuer farmers, on average, at the age of 24). Other notable differences were farm size and farm type. The average acreage among the newcomers was 56 acres (versus 232 acres for continuer farmers), and newcomer farmers are more commonly involved in plant growing than in livestock farming. These differences can indeed be explained in economic terms on the basis of start-up costs, but also reflect a commitment to doing farming differently from the more conventional practices commonly found among the continuer farmers.

The Canadian study further notes differences in the educational needs and social networks of newcomer farmers. Whereas continuer farmers are part of a local, if deteriorating, social network of long standing, newcomers, by way of contrast, require technical training that they had not received and an entry point into the rural community from which they were, as newcomers, often isolated. Both were very important dimensions of success in that they afforded opportunities for learning by doing. In addition, newcomer farmers are more likely than their continuer peers to be driven by the social and environmental responsibilities that are met by a working engagement with nature as well as the autonomy that less hierarchical work affords, and these are important dimensions of their aspirations to succeed in farming.

These details from the Canadian studies sites shed important light on the question of innovation among the new generation of farmers. As we detail below, the research documented novel practices that characterize these farmers as a generation, but it would be wrong to consider young farmers as more inclined to innovate. Rather than linked to age, a commitment to doing farming differently appears, amongst other things, to be related to the different kinds of pathways of becoming a farmer (i.e., continuer, newcomer) as these related to very different motivations for entering agriculture.

Across the four study countries, our study confirms the importance of migration as part of being young and growing up in rural areas (Huijsmans 2019; Ní Laoire 2000). However, our coverage of the extended age range of 18–45 years illuminates that young people’s out-migration from the countryside and away from agriculture does not need to be permanent. In fact, having spent time away from farming and agricultural work is a common feature of the trajectories into farming of many of the new-generation farmers. Next to continuers and newcomers, we might speak of a third pathway into farming: returning farmers—those who have spent their childhood on a farm, leave the agricultural sector and the countryside as youth, and return some years later as young adults. The various reasons for young people to leave farming and the countryside are well-documented (in, e.g., White 2020), but how this period of migration affects their trajectories into farming has received less attention. In the Chinese study sites, returning farmers couple a dislike for the manifest class-based challenges of the hierarchical urban life they had experienced in the city with a strong recognition of the autonomous embedded entrepreneurial possibilities offered by diverse forms of rural enterprise in a rapidly growing rural economy. The attraction of rural entrepreneurial agricultural opportunities is especially strongly pronounced by men returning farmers. For women, more often it is social norms and expectations around marriage that led them to return, to work with their husbands while performing extensive unpaid care and domestic work. Even in such gendered scenarios, the urban experience could still be of benefit. For example, one of the Chinese respondents, who had worked in a restaurant in Handan city before she returned to the countryside upon marriage, reflected as follows: “We interacted with many different people and experienced many different things and have become more outward. It is also a very useful experience when we deal with other people as a farmer.” Further, several of the respondents from the Indonesia study sites commented on the role of migration in supporting innovation in farming. Working and living elsewhere, they had observed new farming practices or new crops, and the money earned through migration allowed them to experiment with such practices in their home villages as well.

The country studies also make some important observations about the category of continuer farmers. Across all four countries, schooling has taken a much more prominent place in the lives of the new generation of farmers than had been the case for their parents. First, intensified and expanded periods of schooling and the social value attached to it means that gradual and informal processes of agricultural knowledge transfer from parents to children cannot necessarily be assumed, even among continuer farmers. For example, Chap. 14 reports from a re-study in the village of Kaliloro (2017–2018) that “today’s teenagers are the first generation who, in many cases, have literally never set foot in their parents’ rice fields,” concluding that “deskilling and alienation from farming is well advanced.” The other side of the coin is that among the new generation of continuer farmers, more so than a generation ago, becoming a farmer has become an actual decision. An older farmer in one of the Indian study sites recollected how he had become a farmer. He expressed this clearly: “What aspirations? My father handed farming to me and said cultivate and feed yourself! That is it. I started farming young and did not consider anything else.” Second, it cannot necessarily be assumed that continuer farmers have access to land. In a context of widespread landlessness and very small landholdings, as was true for some of the Indonesian study sites in particular, continuer farmers are often sharecroppers or labourers on other people’s land or would effectively work as sharecroppers on their parents’ land if this land was too small to divide any further.

Regardless of pathway into farming or country of study, for the new generation of farmers, the internet plays an important role. The internet, and especially platforms such as Baidu, Facebook, WeChat, WhatsApp, and YouTube, constitutes an important source of information for tackling problems (e.g., pests) or learning more about new forms of farming (e.g., horticulture). In addition, some of the new-generation farmers also use online platforms for the marketing of their agricultural produce. This could take the form of simply checking prices, but it also enables forms of direct marketing. While offering new opportunities, the internet occasionally also creates new problems. For example, a 19-year-old farmer from one of the Chinese study sites was cheated when purchasing seeds online for a herb used in Chinese medicine: “Internet is not always a helpful assistant. I bought fake seeds online [Baidu] and it cost more than 3000 yuan.”

Land, Money, and Markets

When I first started, I kept wanting to buy land and I just didn’t have enough equity. You rent land and you can’t borrow enough money to put enough inputs in the ground to grow your crop. It was a constant battle to come up with the revenues to be able to plant the crop and get established, and then build equity so that you could buy land. I would say in my experience that’s the biggest barrier of getting in; it is just getting established without [already] having someone in the industry. (Woman conventional grain farmer, Manitoba)

The main barrier to becoming a young farmer is land. If you want to become a farmer, you must have land. Farming like I do, I’m really just a labourer, as I have to cultivate someone else’s land. (41-year-old farmer from Kulon Progo, who helps his father, a share tenant, farming 1500m2 of irrigated rice land)

The two quotes above come from very different agrarian contexts yet are surprisingly similar in content. For virtually all new-generation farmers, accessing land, let alone purchasing land, constitutes a main difficulty in becoming a farmer. In Canada, for the new generation of farmers who inherited some land, the amount of owned land does not meet the needs of the farm. In such circumstances, buying in more land is becoming increasingly difficult as the price of farmland is rising rapidly in both provinces, resulting in a problem of land affordability for women and men farmers. Credit constraints only tighten this problem. As a result, the new-generation farmers rely on renting in land, on cash lease, or increasingly on sharecropping.

In the Indian study sites, too, the biggest challenge facing young women and men farmers across the two states is declining land size, driven by families partitioning land among succeeding generations of men. Moreover, farms face increasing challenges supplementing the land that they own through rental. Processes of financialization are generating high land price increases, in light of which those who have land want to keep control of it as a hedge against risk.

In the Hebei study site (China), the principal challenges facing young women and men farmers are access to land and access to labour. In recent history, land was intergenerationally transmitted within households, but a lack of effective social protection means that older farmers increasingly rely on maintaining access to land to provide for themselves as they age. Thus, when young men farmers split from their familial home at marriage, land is a constraint. However, different from the other study countries and sites, in Hebei, the local government recognized this constraint and worked to overcome it by making interhousehold land transfers easier while at the same time supporting land consolidation to free up access to some land for young farmers recently split from their familial home. Moreover, unlike in Sichuan (China), local government provide the framework within which local brokers operate, resulting in better terms and conditions for the cucumbers produced by young women and men farmers as their products enter regional urban markets.

In Indonesia, the average farm size falls because of the subdivision of holdings arising out of the intergenerational transfer of land through inheritance. As a consequence, land holdings are becoming increasingly marginal in size. Such land transfers, when they occur, reflect prevailing social relations, particularly gender biases, with women far less likely to inherit land, and if they do inherit land, they inherit less land than men. Moreover, in Yogyakarta, rising speculative investment in land alongside growing absentee ownership has led to increasing land prices arising out of financialization. The result is especially challenging for the landless and near-landless. Across the three Indonesian case study sites, there was little chance of (aspiring) young farmers being able to access adequate amounts of land, including through purchase or rental, to commence completely independent farming. This constraint is strongly gendered; indeed, in Flores, the practice of village exogamy means that when young women marry, they move to their husband’s village, assuming responsibility for managing land but without any rights over that land. While village exogamy is common in the Indian field sites too, married women stand a relatively better chance of owning land through their husbands’ families than from their natal families. The land constraint is then exacerbated by the problem of low prices for farm products, generating low returns to farming and inadequate income flows, reducing the capacity to purchase land, if it were affordable.

While access to land, and associated credit markets, are essential in order to acquire the main resources for becoming a farmer, access to markets greatly affects the financial viability of farming. For example, in Sichuan, a principal challenge facing young women and men farmers is their market dependence. Commercial vegetable growing, the principal farm activity, meant that they had a lack of bargaining power with brokers, resulting in the challenge of fluctuating market prices. Efforts to overcoming the constraint of the market saw young women and men farmers shifting into more agroecological production methodologies in an effort to identify local vegetables as being safer for eating. It also required leveraging interpersonal networks, in part because both agricultural co-operatives and agricultural technology services are not designed to meet the needs of small and medium-scale young women and men farmers. Moreover, the lack of off-farm employment options meant that for those young women and men farmers whose market dependence was posing a risk to their livelihood, diversification provided the only means by which to try and overcome that risk. The most common form of diversification is into the burgeoning agro-tourism economy. In contrast, the Indian case shows that farming can be viable if there is the proximity to the urban markets that are a key determinant of farm profitability; in this light it is interesting that higher return crops are those favoured by young women and men farmers who are close to urban markets.

Commonalities and Contrasts in the Case Studies

Having reviewed the broad findings of the case studies, we can now turn in more detail to reflect upon the critical challenges facing young women and men farmers. There is a surprising number of common issues across the case studies, along with contrasts that reinforce the challenges facing young women and men farmers in Canada, China, India, and Indonesia.

The first obvious point to be made is that both aspiring and actual young women and men farmers face an agrarian crisis. In Canada, Sichuan, Madhya Pradesh, and Java, extensive price and market risks mean that being able to construct a viable livelihood capable of supporting a young farming family is a test that requires, at a minimum, an acceptance of and active participation in pluriactivity by members of the household in order to construct the foundations of a financially sustainable rural life. Indeed, the need for and extent of pluriactivity can lead to important doubts being raised about the utility of the family farm as a concept because in many situations in the case studies, it was common to find that only one household member had any significant engagement with the farm. Moreover, in many ways, the agrarian crisis drives the demographic and hence generational challenges that contemporary farming presents. The agrarian crisis is reflected in the demands that are met when trying to identify who precisely are young farmers, and in particular why, in investigating young farmers, it is necessary to expand the definition of ‘young’ so as to encompass the farming aspirations of young women and men that can take a very long time indeed to come to fruition.

The agrarian crisis is more than economic. It is also a gendered crisis. First, women play different but unique and specific roles across farming systems that are feminized to differing degrees. Their responsibilities for the delivery of social reproduction services means that coping with crisis generally falls upon the shoulders of women care providers within the household. Second, in the Indian context in particular, this also produces a crisis of masculinity. As women preferred to marry out of farming, young men farmers struggle in the marriage markets, thereby creating further barriers for realizing forms of social adulthood while becoming a farmer.

Second, we found youth’s out-migration from the countryside to be a prevailing reality in all four country case studies—a reality that is also strongly gendered. However, the case studies show that migration can be cyclical, including in Canada. This suggests that the lines may be blurred between being a farmer and being a non-farmer, a suggestion that is once again reinforced by widespread pluriactivity, and that rather than treating farmers and non-farmers as discrete categories it may be better to approach rural lives through the continuum of a life course perspective. The case studies systematically demonstrate that becoming a young farmer in the present times is a long process.

Third, a life course perspective can be used to understand the intergenerational tensions that are identified in the case studies and that impact upon young women and men farmers’ aspirations for and pathways into farming. In particular, farm succession, which governs intergenerational transmission of land, and which is important in providing the structural foundations by which young women and men can enter into farming, remains an area where open inter-familial conversations often continue to be unthinkable and, even where they do happen, remain strongly and pervasively gendered. In Canada, the lack of explicit succession planning is reflected in the exit of many young women and men from farming, to which they return later when the intergenerational transmission of land becomes more realistic. Similar, if not explicit, processes were witnessed in Indonesia. In the same vein, in Hebei province and in Indonesia, the lack of adequate social protection means that many parents are retaining land well into an advanced age, precluding access to adequate amounts of land when young men split from their familial home at marriage, and in so doing promoting out-migration. In India and Java, rising land prices due to financialization is also encouraging landowners to retain their holdings, reducing intergenerational transmission of land. In all four country case studies, the intergenerational transmission of land has strong gender dimensions, although the parameters of those dimensions are different in each case; in some instances, women are precluded from inheriting any land at all.

Farm succession demonstrates one dimension by which access to land is the most significant structural constraint facing aspiring and actual young women and men farmers in all four case study countries. The issue of access to land has more dimensions than this, however. The financialization of land is witnessed in all countries, barring China, and acts to restrict the supply of land while simultaneously driving up the price of land. Increased prices have made land less affordable both to buy and to rent, and in the Canadian and Indonesian cases has resulted in an increase in sharecropping. Restricted supply has made it more difficult to find land of an appropriate size; in the Canadian case, rental parcels are too large for small-scale young women and men farmers, while in the Indian and Indonesian cases, amounts of land available to rent are limited and are far less likely to be rented to young women in the instances where it was socially tolerated that young women might rent land. Furthermore, financial systems fail to compensate for these failures in land markets, as access to private sector finance for young men and women farmers is limited—and gendered—in all four countries. Finally, with constraints on access to land for young women and men farmers, there can be marked social differentiation in farming communities based upon scale of production, as inequalities in incomes and wealth are exacerbated.

Differentiation can also be noted in the production processes followed in all four countries, which are strongly gendered and shaped by generation. While many young women and men farmers pursue conventional production processes for commodity-oriented farming, which involves the heavy usage of externally purchased inputs, alternative production processes for organic and low-impact farming for more localized markets are also witnessed among some segments of young women and men farmers. More generally, the case studies demonstrate that young women and men farmers tend to be innovative in their decision-making, being willing to experiment in crop choices, production techniques, and marketing strategies to a greater extent than older farmers. To a degree, this differentiation also overlaps with the distinction between continuing and newcomer farmers, with continuing farmers being more likely to undertake commodity farming and newcomer farmers being more likely to undertake alternative farming. It also overlaps with the distinction between the rural born and the urban educated, with the urban educated being more likely to undertake alternative farming.

This study does not bring up explicitly the implications of climate change for (young) farmers’ present and their future. It did not come up in the interviews except when farmers expressed an awareness that weather posed a risk to farming, as would be expected. In the Tamil Nadu case study, farmers identify water scarcity and drought as significant constraints. In Canada, a young continuing commodity grain farmer was explicitly aware of how their production techniques were hydrocarbon-intensive and that there was a need to restore soil fertility. Yet none of these examples were linked by young women and men farmers directly to climate change, and climate change will shape the future of farming in Canada, China, India, and Indonesia, impacting upon the agrarian crisis, migration, farm succession, and differentiation. Young farmers’ views on and experiences of dealing with climate change will be important for future research.

Across the four country case studies, there is, in addition to commonalities, one very important contrast that serves to reinforce a key analytical point. In Hebei, two factors were demonstrated that served to result in young farming families opting to not only remain in farming but in fact to do so even when they believe it to be a second-best choice. The first factor is that for entrepreneurial young women and men farmers, farming remains an attractive occupation precisely because it offers the possibility of improved incomes, better livelihoods, and enhanced capabilities. This emerged as a result of the production of crops for niche markets in which prices remain favourable to farmers and possibilities for household accumulation remain. As a result, farming remains a positive choice rather than a last resort. Thus, unlike Canada, India, and Indonesia, in Hebei, farming offers a viable and indeed attractive livelihood, especially when compared to limited urban options. At the same time, unlike in Canada, India, and Indonesia, in Hebei and in Sichuan, significant state support was on offer for young farming families to manage price and market risks, again increasing the attractiveness of farming and its capacity to retain young women and men. The point here is that the contrast between China and the other case studies demonstrates a commonality: that the intergenerational renewal of farming requires farming to provide a livelihood that offers improved life chances for young women and men farmers and their families. That this may require pluriactivity is neither good nor bad, as historically smallholder farmers have always engaged in pluriactivity in order to sustain and enhance their livelihood, and many successful women and men farmers opt for pluriactivity in order to sustain rising incomes. Moreover, the intergenerational renewal of farming requires a supportive policy framework that brings with it the active support of the state to sustain young farming family livelihoods. Thus, in the Kebumen (central Java) case in Indonesia (Chap. 13), local government eased land constraints to a limited degree by actively managing the distribution of small amounts of land to young men farmers. Indeed, one could say that active state support is a necessary condition for dealing with the demographic challenges that contemporary farming faces. That support is precisely lacking in Canada, and most of Indonesia, where state agro-pessimism has resulted in only providing an accommodating policy framework for large-scale export-oriented commodity agriculture governed by world market prices. Livelihood possibilities and state support mean that the autonomy that many young women and men farmers seek can, to a degree, be realized.

Cumulatively, the case studies demonstrate that the widely articulated view that young women and men have an aversion to farming as an occupation is misleading. Rather, young women and men face economic and structural issues in their lives that significantly limit the viability of farming as a livelihood for a family, which together with the perceived attractions of urban life—shaped now by widely available social media—can lead to a decision to migrate, whether it be in Canada, China, India, or Indonesia. Whether that decision is fixed and settled, however, is not clear cut. Issues of access to land, access to training and education, and access to community and state mechanisms of social support can be seen in the case studies to have a bearing on the finality of the decision. What has the most bearing, however, as is seen in all of the country case studies, is the capacity of farming to provide a viable, ongoing, and sustainable livelihood for young women and men farmers that ensures not only intergenerational security, but also improved intergenerational livelihood possibilities and capabilities for their families. In effect, the rural work of young women and men needs to be revalorized, rather than devalorized, as it currently is in contemporary commodity farming. When farming does provide such a livelihood, young women and men farmers can realize their aspirations.