Gen Z farmers could help the US tackle growing challenges

The farmers who grew the food being eaten today are probably at the end of their careers. The average age of America’s 3.4 million farmers is now shy of 58.

A scant 9% are younger than 35, but that percentage has begun to grow: The latest Census of Agriculture found that in recent years, the number of US farmers younger than 35 increased by 11%. More surprising still, “Gen Z farmer" is now trending with more than 30 million views on TikTok, and “Gen Z farming" has 17 billion views.

There’s a huge chasm between a social media trend and a committed workforce: Participation among young farmers isn’t growing nearly as fast as the ageing will bow out. The agriculture industry, policymakers and investors have a lot of work to do to draw and retain recruits.

The good news is they can make a strong case to inspire young participants. Many newcomers to farming will never actually get their hands in the dirt because the sector is undergoing a transformation: 21st century agriculture is becoming more demographically diverse and multidisciplinary, with as much focus on next-level technologies as there is on tilling the soil.

Even as young farmers adopt traditional methods like regenerative farming, they’re also turning towards a future in which satellite data is changing where and how food is grown; drones are sowing and spraying fields while robots tend and harvest them; genetic modification is yielding new varieties of climate-resilient crops; cultivated meat labs are growing healthy proteins from animal cells; vertical farms in urban centres are producing fruits and vegetables with radical speed and efficiency; ‘agrivoltaic’ farms are fusing energy and food production. A growing number of first-generation farmers have begun to