The Food Industry In Rural America

Your basic needs for survival are water, food and shelter. These are the most important things for you to stay alive, and yet more and more people of the younger generation are shying away from providing these basic needs. Food is essential to growth and development along with survival, so the idea that people would give up on making food is a crazy one. In this country, we have a rising population, with “one birth every eight seconds” (United States Census Bureau). This rise in population also means that the demand for food is always increasing. When you have a demand for something you have to match the supplies with the demand. So why is the younger generation not getting into farming if it plays such a pivotal role in human survival? This

Our generation is moving to big cities and forgetting about rural America and the important role it plays to keep us alive. People need food and the only way to have the food is to farm it. Agriculture is so important to everyday living; from the food, you eat to the spices you put on your food to make it taste better, all which is done by farmers. There are some scary numbers out there that show how much our population is growing. That is great besides the fact that when there is an increase in people, the food supply has to increase as well. It is a fact that farming is on the decline and that people don’t want to get into farming anymore. As of right now we have 323,305,761 people living in the United States (United States Census Bureau), this number has risen exponentially from even 2000 where we had 281,421,906 people in total (United States Census Bureau). This exponential growth doesn’t show any signs of stopping either. Recently I attended a lecture given by a man named Warren Beeler, Director of Agriculture Policy at the Kentucky Department of Agriculture, in his lecture he stated that “ the population is predicted to be 7.6 billion

Although great on the agricultural production side of things, this new technology is making it so that farms don’t require as many workers as they used to in the past. The farming side of things is now looking for people with a college degree to help run a more efficient farm that doesn’t require as much help because there is a lack of interest from the general public on farming. This has been an ongoing issue in the United States since the Industrial Revolution, not only in agriculture but in manufacturing as well. The Industrial Revolution in America started in 1820 and ended in 1870, during this time Americans were losing their manufacturing jobs to machines who could do the same work in less time, cheaper, and more efficiently. This is sort of what has happened in the agricultural field. My focus of study at Western Kentucky University is Agriculture with a focus in Animal Science, with that being said, from what I have seen farming is a very manually labor intensive field and we have lots of technology that used to be done by hand that is now done by machinery. For example, people used to harvest their crops by hand. You would gather up as many people as you could and take a scythe to your field. This job was very time-consuming, labor intensive and you needed many people to help you harvest your field. All of this stopped with the invention of the mechanical combine. What took many people days to