1994 Annual Report for LNC94-067
Future Farmers in Sustainable Agriculture
Summary
The Minnesota Food Association’s Future Sustainable Farmer Project attempts to describe background and skills successful 21st century sustainable farmers will require and offer insights into their traits, attitudes, and social priorities. The purposes is to help address educational and community barriers with which future sustainable farmers are faced. Quite often, sustainable farmers find that publicly funded institutions do not provide information, education, and training they need. Meanwhile, they may be faced with a lack of support from those who look with suspicion on their practices. The future of a reliable and safe food source, healthy communities, clean water, and productive land may rest to a large extent in the hands of tomorrow’s farmers and today’s educators.
The results of this report and the dialogues form the basis of a job description that highlights the backgrounds, skills, knowledge, education and experience a future farmer will require. The skills and knowledge identified in the study will also be compared with the various land-grant curricula to determine how well university courses match needs of future sustainable farmers. In addition, the Minnesota Food Association has begun work with land-grants to increase and enhance universities’ sustainable agriculture offerings. The profile of the sustainable farmer of the future will not mirror that of farmers of previous generations. The farmer of the future may or may not have grown up on a farm; the future farmer may have lived his or her entire life in the city. The future farmer may be a man or a woman, born in the U.S. or elsewhere. One certainty is that the traditional image of a farmer is likely to change. The sustainable farmer of the future will do more than just grow food, raise animals, and make a profit to support the family; he or she will serve as an educator, protector of the land, and community builder. The future sustainable farmer will require patience and ability to think and plan long-term. Significant manual and intellectual work as well as special management skills will be required. The future farmer will view quality of life and living within his or her natural financial means as a top priority.
To help future sustainable farmers acquire and maintain skills they will need to farm sustainably, educational institutions will have to rethink not only what they teach, but how they teach it and who they view as their customers. Land-grant institutions are in the position to lead the way with programs geared at preparing students from a variety of backgrounds to become farmers and help current farmers to improve their skills. Efforts should also be made to encourage greater exchanges between researchers and farmers so that the work the universities produce is sure to match the needs of their intended audiences, which will include in increasing numbers sustainable farmers.