Agriculture is the reason we're all here. It is what brought settlers to this area long before people called this place Miner County. Since that time, our economy has grown and diversified, but agriculture still plays a powerful role in defining the way we live.

Anyone involved in farming will say that it's changed a tremendous amount in the last 20 or 30 years, and they wouldn't just be talking about technological advances. The climate of agriculture has changed. It's a different business, and it involves a different makeup of people than it has in the past.

When looking at the statistics on farming over the last few decades, two things become apparent very quickly: there are fewer farms, and those farms have gotten bigger.

A growing percentage of farms are in the bracket comprising the largest farms, those of 1,000 acres or more. More than 28 percent of farms in Miner County in 1997 consisted of more than 1,000 acres, compared to 22.1 percent just ten years earlier. The 180 to 499 acre bracket, which has historically contained the greatest percentage of farms, has seen a significant loss in numbers.

The average farm size grew from 672 to 760 acres between 1987 and 1997, and during that same time period, the number of farms in the county fell from 488 to 369.

At first glance, the fact that those two things are happening simultaneously seems to make a great deal of sense. Farmers buy up the land in other farms, therefore increasing their acreage while reducing the number of independent farms. But that's only part of it.

Farms are growing in size, but not at a rate that compensates for the loss in the number of individual farms. That leads to the conclusion that less of our land is being farmed. In fact, the total number of acres classified as farmland in Miner County declined about 14.5 percent between 1987 and 1997. Those lost acres are no longer being used for agricultural production.

Just how many acres are involved in that 14.5 percent? Well, the number of acres in agricultural production fell from 327,880 to 280,289. That means astonishing 47,591 fewer acres were farmed in 1997 than in 1987.

Also, the figure that shows we have 369 farms in Miner County is misleading. In order to be considered a farmer, a person must either make, or just have the potential to make, $1,000 a year in agricultural sales. That means a lot of people who are counted among those 369 have nowhere near the ability to support themselves off their farming ventures. The actual number of viable farms is much lower.

So those are the numbers. Farms are getting bigger and fewer. Less of our land is in production. But what does that really mean for us?

Maybe we should look rather at the things it doesn't mean. We need to discover the realities of the situation instead of drawing alarmist conclusions from these numbers.

It doesn't mean farming is a dying industry. It's not going to disappear. People will farm the land of Miner County well into the future. What's changing, and will continue to change, is the nature of the farming business.

The numbers don't mean that farming will no longer be family businesses. There are fewer families involved in farming, certainly, but the family farm is the core of our agricultural system, and it's not likely that farms owned and operated by families will ever be completely replaced by other types of industry farming.

With those things in mind, the future of agriculture does not look so bleak. There will be fewer family farms, but the livelihood of many people will still depend on working the land. No matter how automated farming becomes, and no matter how the land is distributed, people will always be needed to make everything work and work together. What farming means to each of us will depend upon our individual situations in relation to the larger trends affecting agriculture.

In the end, how we look at agriculture in the future will depend on how we deal with change. But regardless of personal interpretation of circumstances, one thing is certain. Agriculture will be different in the years to come, but it will always be important to us.

Miner Notes was a weekly column written by Matt Laible for MCCR to promote understanding about the place we call home. All statistics and charts come from Dr. Daryl Hobbs at the University of Missouri. If you have questions or comments, please contact MCCR by calling 772-5153 or writing to P.O. Box 307 in Howard.