Farmer’s Day

What the day is

Farmer's Day is listed here on March 8. Several countries hold their own version on different dates, so the date varies by where you are.

Origin and background

The defining economic feature of farming is that farmers are price takers. A commodity crop is interchangeable with the same crop from any other farm, so an individual producer has no pricing power and accepts whatever the market sets, while input costs, land, fuel, feed, fertilizer and machinery, are set by suppliers with considerably more. Everyone else in the chain, the processor, the distributor, the retailer, can price their contribution. The farmer cannot.

The consequence shows up in how a food budget divides. In the United States the farm share of what consumers spend on food has been estimated at somewhere around fifteen cents in the dollar, with the rest going to processing, packaging, transport, retail and marketing. For heavily processed products it is far lower.

The workforce is also aging. The average age of an American farmer is around fifty-eight and has been rising for decades, and the capital required to start, principally land, makes entry very difficult for anyone not inheriting it. Consolidation follows, with a shrinking number of larger operations.

One further thing belongs in an honest account. Farming carries well-documented occupational stress, with isolation, financial exposure, weather risk and long hours combining badly, and several countries record elevated suicide rates among agricultural workers. Dedicated helplines and charities exist in most farming regions, and they are worth knowing about before they are needed.

Around one to two percent of the population in wealthy countries now produces the food for the rest.

How to take part

• Buy direct where you can, at a market or a farm shop, which changes who captures the margin.
• Ask what a fair price actually is rather than hunting the cheapest.
• Look up the farm share of the price of something you bought this week.
• Support a farming charity or helpline, which are chronically underfunded.
• Thank a farmer you know, and ask how the year has actually gone.