Gen Z farmers could help the US tackle growing challenges

livemint.com:

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