Tumbledown Farm .9 Acres (give or take an acre or two)

Good News from Iowa

Hey! Just when we needed some good news, Verlyn Klinkenborg (in the NYTimes aticle link above) comes through with a little noticed and very pleasant surprise from the 2007 Census of Agriculture. The number of farms in Iowa has RISEN (!) to 92,856. Exactly 20 years after Gene Logsdon's seminal essay, "The Future: More Farms, Not Fewer" (Living at Nature's Pace: Farming and the American Dream), the news is getting better. The news is not purely good. Large farms continue to expand at the expense of more modest farms. But new farms of 9 acres or smaller are producing a greater variety of crops for local eaters. And the farmers on these small farms are younger, and the "primary operators" include more women. Though we might quibble with the survey's definition of a farm as "any place from which $1,000 or more of agricultural products were, or normally would be, produced and sold during the Census year," we must be gratified by the latest results. As Klinkenborg says, "This is a genuine source of hope for American agriculture." Amen to that!