Different generations face farming challenges

Al Wulfekuhle was 21 years old when he bought his first farm in the early 1980s.

“We took our two-week-old daughter to the land closing,” he says. “Two years later, the farm was worth half of what we paid for it. I think that’s why I turned to raising hogs. I couldn’t buy land.”

Wulfekuhle’s plight was shared by thousands of other young farmers as soaring interest rates and falling land values pushed those producers off the farm and into another line of work.

Forty years later, those farmers comprise the youngest segment of the Baby Boomer generation — Americans born from 1946 to 1964.

Those farmers have retired or are thinking about it as the tail end of that generation nears the age of 62.