Pennsylvania has been working hard on encouraging young people to farm, and these efforts are slowly showing results, writes Marcia Brown for Politico.

In the Keystone State, members of the new generation are trading in their desk jobs for farm life at higher rates than the rest of the nation.

State lawmakers have long prioritized agriculture. Since 1988, the state has safeguarded over 600,000 acres of farmland from commercial development and implemented a tax credit for new farmers.

Additionally, in 2019, state lawmakers wrote the first state-level farm bill in the nation, with a focus on workforce development, boosting conservation, and generational succession.

And while the state Legislature is currently politically divided,  agricultural policy has not suffered from this lack of compromise.

“It’s actually a really lovely bastion of bipartisanship,” said State Rep. Emily Kinkead, who serves on the House Agriculture and Rural Affairs Committee. “There’s not really a lot of controversy.”

As a result, the share of farmers under the age of 35 in Pennsylvania (over 12 percent) is higher than the national one (under 9 percent). It is also the highest in the state since at least 2017, when it was nearly 14 percent.

Read more about how Pennsylvania is encouraging young people to turn to farming in Politico.

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