Tyler Vacha grew up on a farm in Nebraska, and he learned a lot of valuable lessons there. In a recent essay for the Center for Rural Affairs, Tyler wondered if the important lessons he picked up would be foreign to children of the twenty-first century.
Tyler wrote that he’s recently become aware that he’d taken his experiences on the farm for granted. How, he wondered, will he teach his kids to be responsible without asking them to feed and water livestock?
The number of Americans who have grown up on the farm are already a minority “that gets smaller every day.” He went on to wonder, “with the continued consolidation and corporatization of the ag industry, the lack of land access for young farmers and ranchers, and the price tags associated with getting started, how many future generations do we have left that will be populated by people who grew up learning the lessons taught on a farm?”