Thursday, October 2, 2008

Optimisitic View of Agriculture's Future

According to the FFA (Future Farmers of America) website, membership is the highest it's been in over thirty years. Interestingly enough, the decreasing number of people living on farms during the 80s and 90s hasn't affected the rise in students that see a future in agriculture; 77% of them don't even live on farms.


Surprising to a lot of city folk: agriculture makes up 17% of the nation's jobs. One of FFA's goals is to have 10,000 agricultural education programs in place nationwide by the year 2015.

It's not just the FFA, either. An article in World Magazine comments on increasing interest in "locavores" (people committed to eating locally). The number of farmer's markets around the country is growing, as well as food co-ops and CSAs.

There's also a large trend towards young people starting farms, most of them with little or no agricultural background. Perhaps we as a country are finding a better way to provide, a way that sustains the earth and provides us with a liveable income.

2 comments:

Sasha said...

Found a blogger template you might like - http://www.geckoandfly.com/2008/04/16/the-erudite-template/

Sasha said...

Okay...
1) click "Download the XML code" - save and extract (it's a zip)
2) go to www.blogger.com/home
3) click "template"
4) i think there is a "edit html" button next...

from there, you can look at this site http://help.blogger.com/bin/answer.py?answer=46870&topic=12488

That should help you.

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