Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, October 10, 1993 TAG: 9310100020
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A-9 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: The Washington Post
DATELINE: WASHINGTON LENGTH: Medium
If sweeping changes can be captured in seemingly trivial benchmarks, the decision to end the annual farm report is one: Farm residents now constitute just 1.9 percent of the national population, compared to 40 percent at the turn of the century. And more and more farmers are living away from their farms, rendering a survey of farm residents an increasingly poor measure of the characteristics of agricultural life.
"It's another indication that we are dominated by our big metropolitan settlements," said Donald C. Dahmann, a Census Bureau geographer and co-author of the last farm report, released Friday.
He described the nation's historical movement away from a society defined by agriculture: At the first decennial census, in 1790, all but 5 percent of the population lived in rural areas and virtually all of those lived on farms.
In 1890, when the superintendent of the U.S. Census declared the tidal wave of frontier settlement had ended, nearly 40 percent of the American population occupied farms.
As recently as 1950, the farm population totaled 23 million, slightly more than 15 percent of the population. The federal government by then had formalized what had been an informal postal survey of farm families in hopes of quantifying their age, race, income and educational backgrounds.
Friday, the final farm report set the farm population at 4.6 million - down from 6 million in 1980, when farm residents constituted 2.8 percent of the population. Nearly a third of farm managers and 86 percent of farm workers live away from the farm and commute to the fields, the report said.
by CNB