“What would you say to these young people who don’t want to work?”

There it is, the elephant in the room. Young people, it seems, don’t want to work. In agriculture, the labor shortage is a crisis. Do a simple search of “agriculture labor shortage”, and you may think twice about tossing day-old leftovers into the trash. Nationwide, across the board, agricultural operations are having trouble simply getting people to show up and do the hands-on dirty work that will always be required to make the land bountiful and manage livestock.

All of the impressive white-collar mergers and billion-dollar mega consolidation that is occurring in the food industry; the million-dollar technological masterpieces known as farm equipment that now take up the entirety of a country road and then some; the space-age automation that is now standard for farm livestock management and reduces the individuality of our animals to numbers on a spreadsheet; all of it is but a house of cards, poised to topple for the simple fact that individuals at the ground level are refusing to show up and get their hands dirty.

Can you blame them?

What we are seeing is the natural, predictable, and totally understandable reaction to the fact that farming has been made inaccessible to the very people that it ought to be serving. It’s not that young people don’t want to work; it’s that there is nothing for them to work for.

Here’s what I mean:

Two generations ago in a post World War II America, my grandfather could purchase a 250-acre farm and expect to pay it off within his lifetime for either a retirement nest egg or an inheritance to leave for his children. 

Those days are long gone.

One generation ago, the price of higher education in America was actually affordable. My parents both earned Masters Degrees. Upon graduation, neither owed so much as a penny in student debt. In fact, the concept of student debt was unheard of to my parents’ generation, and my mother laughed at the notion of borrowing money to pay for college, “That’s why you worked a summer job!”

Those days are long gone.

I came of age in the late 1990s, at a time when you could purchase an acre of farmland for two or three thousand dollars, if the seller was feeling particularly greedy. My first vehicle was a brand-new pickup truck that was custom ordered from the factory. It even had my name on the window sticker. Just 20 years ago, you could buy a decent house around the $100,000 mark, but why on earth would you buy a house for that price when you could build one for half the cost?

Again, those days are long gone.

If I were coming of age today, my custom-ordered pickup truck would cost more than triple what it did in 2002. The concept of a higher education without debt is so foreign, that U.S. national politicians actually run election campaigns on “canceling” or “forgiving” student debt, rather than address the monstrosity that it exists in the first place. The price of an acre of farmland has ballooned into absurdity. Get this: no joke, if I were serious about selling my 350-acre farm, I can promise you with absolute dead-set certainty that if I advertised it for $20,000 per acre, I’d have it sold by the end of today.

Farm machinery has become so ridiculously complex, with price tags to match, that tractors and equipment from my dad’s era of farming are actually fetching new-machinery prices. This, for the simple fact that older equipment was actually engineered to be worked on and maintained by the owner/operator, and without the dystopian nightmare of dealing with proprietary operating software.

And of course, we haven’t even touched on the unaffordability of basic, fundamental health care. A fun statistic that describes all you need to know about the hopelessness of the American Health Care System is this: For every practicing physician in the U.S., there are two people who work in medical billing. That’s right — America has twice as many people working in medical billing, than actual practicing physicians. Believe me when I say, Veterinarian health care is next.

And as a farmer, I am completely removed from the very people I ought to be serving. Screamed from the mountaintops: All you need to know about what is wrong with the U.S. Dairy Industry is to recognize that here in Wisconsin, it is easier to get raw fish sushi than it is to go to a dairy farm and get milk.

It’s not that young people don’t want to work. It’s that there’s nothing for them to work for. What’s the point? Literally, everything that has defined the American Dream has been priced out of existence. Today, farming is feudalism. Farmers do not produce food; we produce commodities. Farms are factories. Farmers are frackers. Long gone is the individuality, creativity, and accessibility that used to define my profession.

It’s not that young people don’t want to work. It’s that we — the adults — need to make what we have accessible. It’s up to us.

— Dan Wegmueller is the owner of Wegmueller Farms and his column appears regularly in the Times. His website is https://www.farmforthought.org.