By: Frank Giles, Growing Produce
Coffee shop talk among growers often revolves around insects and diseases, markets, and the weather. They’re all worthy topics to address in order to hopefully bring home a good and profitable crop. But, another challenge is brewing in agriculture that has been years in the making — the aging of America’s farmers.
According to the 2012 Census of Agriculture, Florida mirrors the national trend with a current grower average age of 59.8 years. To gauge how heavily skewed the aging trend is, the census shows that Florida growers ages 25 to 34 only make 5.1% of the population and growers ages 35 to 44 only make 11.9% of the population. Likewise, growers ages 55 to 64 make up 31.9% of the state’s grower population and those ages 65 to 74 represent 24%...