CENSUS DELIGHTS
As we approach the season of creches, presents, sleighrides, decorated trees, illuminated houses, gingerbread houses, and such delights, it’s worth remembering that the whole thing started with a census.
The Romans, seeking to manage the affairs of all their conquered territories—including Judea—required that everyone go to their ancestral home and register. That meant Mary and Joseph and the donkey traveling to Bethlehem, getting relegated to the stable, and being presented with Our Redeemer, Savior and Lord in miniature.
But this blog isn’t about Christmas. It’s a look at the fascinations of looking through a census—specifically the 2007 Agricultural Census.
It arrived through the mail as requested, or at least the findings for Geographical Area 45, Vermont, all 337 eight-by-eleven-inch pages of it, with that mass of data supplemented by 17-page Index, a 17-page Appendix A and a 34-page Appendix B. The same information was (and presumably is) available at www.nass.usda.gov, nass being the National Agricultural Statistics Service and usda being the United States Department of Agricultural. It came to me because I’m the owner of those two agencies—me and all the rest of the citizenry. Our tax dollars at work.
It would have been much harder to explore this compilation online. In print, the findings sit still and wait, and are easy to return and find again.
Perusing them proved unexpectedly interesting. To begin with, it was clear that agriculture is still a big part of the Vermont landscape. There were 6,984 farms of all kinds, occupying 1,233,313 acres, which works out to an average of 176.6 acres per farm.
The Census classified the farms as follows:
--small family farms, which broke down to limited resource farms, retirement farms, residential/lifestyle farms, farm occupation/lower sales, and farm occupation/higher sales;
--large family farms;
--very large family farms;
--non-family farms.
These were further broken down into the number of farms in seven categories of acreage: 140-179; 180-219; 220-259; 260-499; 500-999; 1000-1999; and 2,000 or more.
One might suppose that the size of the farms could be graphed along a slope from small for small family farms up to the very large and non-family farms. But the acreage figures were all over the lot, so to speak.
There were 32 retirement farms of 500 acres or more, and 31 of the residential/lifestyle farms cleared that bar, including one of more than 2,000 acres. There were 174 residential-lifestyle farms in the 260-999 acre range. The non-family farms included 23 with fewer than 179 acres, though a bulge of 98 such operations fell within 200-999 acres. Among those over 2,000 acres, 2 were large family farms, 19 were very large family farms, and 7 were non-family.
Some crops were completely absent: tobacco, I was proud to see; cotton, which is a huge drain on the land that carries it; and rice, though there are now farms experimenting with a variety that succeeds in northern Japan. Vegetables, on the other hand, accounted for $13,192,000 in sales, from 506 operations (which comes to $26,071 per. Not much gold in those golden russets, but you have to remember than several kinds of farming can coexist and even reinforce each other on the same land.
There were 218 farms reporting sales of corn, whose value totaled $4,890,000. But there were 232 producers of grains, oilseeds, dry beans and dry peas, who garnered $5,439,000 for their efforts. If you look at an ag census from the 19th century, you see that Vermont’s soils and climate are capable of producing a great variety of crops; it is only now, in an era of using corn for ethanol, cattle feed and sometimes directly as fuel, that it has achieved such prominence. For a lot of dairy farms, corn is an ace in the hole, a way to cut feed costs or recoup losses through cash sales, in the midst of dairying’s disconcerting milk price swings.
The section comparing the results of the 2007 Ag Census with a similar survey in 2002 show some interesting trends. In 2002, among the 6,571 principal operators of farms, 5,604 were men and 967 were women. By 2007, among 6,984 principal operators, the ratio had shifted significantly: 5,518 were men, while 1,466 were women. This suggests to me that women had started most of the new agricultural enterprises. A fair number of these appeared to be part-time operations: among the 967 women who were principal operators in 2002, 506 had farming as their principal occupation, while 461 had some other line of work as their principal activity; in 2007, of the 1,466 principal female operators, 728 were mainly farmers, while 738 mainly did something else.
One of the truisms about Vermont farming is that when one farmer goes out, others are likely to buy or rent the land and continue using it for agricultural purposes. In regard to hay, this did not seem to be the case; comparing 2002 with 2007, there was shrinkage in the acreage devoted to that purpose. In 2002, there were 1,229 farms with hay, on 190,716 acres, which produced 1,247,473 tons. In 2002, there were 1,090 farms with 168,948 acres, which produced 1,139,530 tons. Doing a little math, the per-farm average in 2002 was 1,015 tons, which went up to 1,045 in 2007. But that could have been because better weather brought a higher yield: the production per acre averaged 6.54 tons in 2002 but rose to 6.74 tons in 2007.
As you can see, anyone who likes to play with figures can find plenty of material in an ag census. Teachers, too, might derive some class exercises with relevance to their students’ lives. Farm labor, chemical applied, federal payments, machinery and equipment, woodland crops, organic agriculture and much more can be analyzed by looking at the overall figures and their trends.
I’ll leave you with one more data set, which offers some food for thought and something to check when the 2012 numbers come out. In 2002, for the principle operators of farms, the average age was 53.9; by 2007, this had risen to 56.5. Similar figures can be found related to the construction industry and to other lines of work involving serious physical labor.
In the past, in large part due to farm life and its traditions, this state has had a work ethic second to none. If young people are now losing that willingness to work, it bodes ill for us all. On the bright side, there seems to be a new generation concerned about the local and sustainable production of wholesome food, often on small farms that exhibit as much creativity as energy and have plenty of both.
Which trend will predominate? The numbers in the Agricultural Census will bear truthful witness—something that also seems to be in decline in our society.
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