> In your study you may need to consider a couple of things.
> 1. Are you refering to "smart" farmers as those who are educated city farmers?
> 2. Do you consider a "born and raised" farmer to not fall into the catagory of "smart" farmer?
>
> We are no longer in an era where young men drop out of school to work the family farm. The farmers of today, small and medium, are at a minimum high school graduates, most having participated in the> In our experience, the "smart" farmers you refer to are the college educated people that go on to run large ag related business. Very few of these "smart" farmers go home to run the family farm. Bei> Most of the people that we have contact with are not the "newly" educated farmer. In our area of the cou> George and Janet McCoy
> Warsaw, OH
>
Whoa, doggy! You two are rushin' to some very strong conclusions!
"Smart farmer" was just a quick, tongue-in-cheek phrase to stick in
the "subject" box of the e-mail. So please, back off a bit from the
offensive. As I said in my original letter, the surveys show that the
*bulk* of organic farmers have more formal education than the *bulk*
of conventional farmers. (Nothing more, nothing less is inferred.)
My only question was, what is the subject area of those educations.
My hunch was that although better educated (ehem, FORMALLY educated),
organic farmers were not (FORMALLY) educated in ag-related fields.
And to you and to anyone else who wants to tell me the obvious that
basic education levels are higher in general these days: thank
you, I realize that. The interesting thing to see (from the OFRF
surveys) is that so many organic farmers have completed their
bachelors and in many instances, even their master's. (Traditionally
that's a lot of time in school to be a farmer, especially if it's not
even agriculture that you're studying.) It would be lovely to think
that ag schools were exposing wannabe farmers to the organic (or at
least "sustainable") path and helping them to pursue this path if
they so choose. I doubted this was the case, but I wanted to ask.
Also, I thought there might be organic farmers out there who were
rebelling against whatever traditional-ag ag training they might have
had, and in that respect, their ag-related education would have had
an influence (albite negative) on them.
So, let me, for the record, change the subject of this inquiry to
"FORMALLY EDUCATED FARMERS AND WHAT SUBJECT
AREA THAT EDUCATION HAPPENED TO BE IN," and we can
just forget that I ever characterized ANYBODY as smart.
Geez, cover me with honey and stick me to an anthill!
By the way, thank you to those of you who understood very well what I
was asking and gave me your intersting stories. So far, it would
seem that organic farms are being run by all manner of liberal
arts-types and I can only suppose that the graduates of ag school are
farming conventionally.
Anita Graf
313-F Conner Hall
Dept. of Agricultural and Applied Economics
University of Georgia
Athens, GA 30602-7509
(706) 542-1915 phone
(706) 542-0739 fax
agraf@agecon.uga.edu
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