WASHINGTON – As commodity prices drop and technology increases, the mid-sized farms that used to provide enough income to support rural families in Maryland are fading away, say agriculture officials.
With market forces making it harder to live off a mid-sized farm, career farmers are being forced to work ever larger, more scattered patches of land, while professionals who are taking on farming as a second career are opting for smaller farms that focus on niche crops.
Farms are “hollowing out,” said James C. Wade, director of the Center for Agriculture and Natural Resource Policy at the University of Maryland.
“The ideal, picturesque farm . . . it’s not quite as it once was,” Wade said.
Where about one-third of Maryland farms made between $10,000 and $100,000 in sales in 1982, those farms had fallen to slightly more than one-fifth of the total operations in the state by 2002, the year of the most recent agriculture census.
By that time, more than 60 percent of Maryland farms were bringing in annual sales of less than $10,000.
“It takes a lot more land to make enough money to survive these days,” said Valerie Connelly of the Maryland Farm Bureau. “In order to make a profit they have to get more yield per acre and grow more acres.
“It’s a lot more expensive to farm because we’re not using horse or plows anymore. We’re using expensive combines,” Connelly said. Farmers nowadays also invest more in fancy fertilizers, chemicals, and even global positioning systems, she said.
“In order to justify the larger equipment you have to have more acreage because the profit margin is so slim,” said Wayne McGinnis, a Baltimore County farmer.
And farmers have to become more specialized. One hundred years ago, McGinnis’ grandfather raised “sheep, hogs, geese, a few cows and some horses so on,” McGinnis said. But now, while McGinnis’ operation has grown to 1,800 acres, it is limited to corn, soybeans and some beef cattle.
That need for additional land is forcing grain farmers to travel long distances to boost their acreage, and is converting their farms into a patchwork of properties.
“In Maryland, the majority of farmers are farming parcels that are not contiguous,” Connelly said. “They’re picking up parcels wherever they’re available.”
Many farmers own some of their own land, but lease or rent the majority of the area that they farm. The landowners range from faceless people who live states away to retired farmer couples who want to preserve their property as farmland.
Vernon Chenoweth, 70, is one of those retirees. He still lives in a brick ranch house on the land he used to farm, although he’s since sold the property to another farmer. He signed a preservation contract 20 years ago to keep the land in agriculture, and said he never would have considered selling it to a developer.
“I don’t want to see everything developed,” he said. “I’m still a farmer. I like to see crops.”
McGinnis’ cousin, John McGinnis, farms land in Pennsylvania and Maryland. He said farm fragmentation has “got its drawbacks, but it’s also got some good points, because sometimes we get rain in one part of the farm that we don’t get in the other.”
But weather isn’t the only thing that is unreliable in a farmer’s life: Many farmers today run side businesses, in order to have a reliable income.
“You probably only turn a profit every five years if you’re in agriculture today,” said Mark Mullinix, a farmer who also operates a farm equipment business near Dayton. “You have to diversify.”
One way for mid-sized farms to do that is to expand to agro-tourism or direct marketing, Wade said. But, he said, not everyone can make pick-your-own operations or corn mazes and hay rides successful.
“It takes a different kind of person to do that kind of marketing because you’ve got to be very sensitive to people’s needs,” he said, adding that taking care of a field of crops is different from taking care of a customer.
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