Ohio farmers celebrating success, but forecast troubling future

COLUMBUS, Ohio ( WCMH ) — Ohio’s tourism slogan, “The Heart of It All,” could also apply to its role in American agriculture.

Farming is big business in Ohio. The Ohio Department of Agriculture says farming has a $148 billion impact on the state each year.  Ohio ranks first in the nation in swiss cheese production, second in egg production and ranks in the top 10 in numerous other categories.

“Agriculture is everybody’s business. It’s a way of life.” said Brian Baldridge, the Director of the Ohio Department of Agriculture.

Adam Sharp of the Ohio Farm Bureau said the face of farming is changing dramatically.

“Typically, people have an impression of agriculture, right? And it’s a hayseed, right? It’s coveralls… very antiquated compared to what the real industry is.” Sharp said.

More than 13.5 million acres of Ohio land are farms — nearly 76,000 total farms. 87% of those farms remain family owned. Ohio has followed a national trend with a decline in farms — a 2% decline since 2017. But in Ohio, farms are busy hiring new employees to deal with the expanding, and somewhat complicated machinery being used in the industry.

“It’s a lot of work. There’s a lot of different specialty jobs. There’s a lot of technical jobs more and more.” Sharp said.  “Ohio is a good example of this, where we have such a diversification of agriculture.”

The Ohio State University Department of Food, Agriculture and Biological Engineering works with farmers across the state as they develop and showcase new technologies in farming. Self-driving tractors and drones are now commonplace in some farms. Scott Shearer leads the department at OSU.

“As we look to the future we’re going to see much wider adoption of A.I. and it driving more of the decision-making processes farmers have traditionally done.” Shearer said.

The various forms of farming and food production were on display this past month at the Ohio State Fair. It’s a weeks-long festival to celebrate the industry, but experts from various forms of farming tell NBC4 they’re anxious about the future.  With stagnant or sinking prices for crops and production costs soaring with inflation, farmers are losing ground.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture reports farm and ranch income will fall by about $43 billion this year as costs outpace revenues. Another key issue in Ohio is residential and commercial development, especially with the news of massive companies such as Intel and Google expanding in the state.

“Residential growth, whether it’s building that factory or building that large building that creates jobs, which is really exciting for Ohio… But we know that there’s acres coming out of production. We’ve over the last two decades, we’ve lost almost a million acres out of production.” Baldridge said.

“All the things that go into producing food, they’re looking at all this… every one of those line items to have to make decisions, to try to make sure they can continue to produce a crop and hopefully get a little bit of profit for it, or at least at least for it to pay for itself.” Sharp said.  “We’re definitely in a little bit more of a crunch now than we have been for a while.”

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