Word: farm
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Last summer, at the heart of the Atlantic hurricane season, the State Farm Insurance Company declared that it would stop selling insurance policies to the owners of homes and small businesses in Mississippi...
...berries and bring them to his mother, who baked "the best blueberry pie you ever ate," he recalls. Today, Miller, 66, a retired Clemson University plant pathologist, has found a way to return to a bit of that past: he owns a 9-acre (3.6 hectares) pick-your-own farm in rural South Carolina, which he named the Happy Berry. At least some of the local children who pick blueberries for their mothers today pick them from Miller's fields. This pleases him--as does the simple hard work the place requires. "I enjoy being outside," he says. "I enjoy...
Miller and his wife Ann (who still works for Clemson) are among the tens of thousands of recent retirees finding meaning and fun back on the farm. Their tiny operation also happens to generate half their annual income. But others are raising cattle or seeding small plots with no regard for revenue. These gentlemen--and gentlewomen--farmers are drawn to the country by a love of nature, affordable real estate and, in some cases, Internet connections that allow them to keep working as lawyers, writers and consultants...
...commercial operations are still gobbling up family farms and producing an increasing share of farm output. But in some cases, rather than demolishing yet another farmhouse and barn and turning that small portion of the land over to industrial cultivation, new owners will put those buildings and a few acres on the market untouched, and find ready buyers among the city slickers yearning to raise llamas or alpacas or grow grapes or lavender...
...trend is giving rise to a curious new customer at the local supply store. Dude farmers, says Carol Ekarius, author of Hobby Farm: Living Your Rural Dream for Pleasure and Profit, are "picking up bales of hay in their Jaguar." Amusing as that is, the results are not all good. Hobby farmers drive up land prices in hot areas. They also raise big-picture concerns about total farm output. Hobbyists get far less yield per acre than the lifetime pros, and in times of food shortage they would further crimp the supply, usda officials warn...