While Kentucky's agricultural production is growing, its number of farms is shrinking.

Those are two key facts from the just released 2022 Agricultural Census.

Kentucky Edition asked the experts, What are the challenges Kentucky farms face?

There is nothing terribly surprising.

You know, we we had some inclination that sales were going to continue to increase in the state.

Even if you considered inflation, we know expenses were going to continue to increase.

We knew that farm sizes on average were going to be larger.

We knew that the number of farms were going to go down.

So there was nothing terribly surprising about what came out.

It was just it had been so long since we've seen data that it was just useful to have something to work.

With, as we have seen that we've had a decline in the numbers of farmers and farmland, that we have had an increase in productivity.

And so moving up 40% to $8 billion in economic impact for agriculture in the state of Kentucky.

I think we also have another positive that we saw that the increase in the age average age of farmer was not as high as what was expected.

And we've got several programs here at the department that I think we're partly to help with that.

Our new beginning loan for our new and new and beginning farmer loan program.

We've had a lot of participation in that over the last four years, and that's getting a lot of younger farmers back on the farm to invest back into the operation.

We've got the next generation farmer program through the AG Development Fund as well.

And the youth agriculture and centers of the program that we that we administer administer here at the department.

It's just kind of a a structural shift in agriculture that we have moved from kind of the medium sized family farm, and we're moving more into larger commercial either family or non-family enterprises.

And so it just sort of changes the shift of what we think of in farming with all the effort to, you know, to try to get new farmers in in the sector.

It doesn't appear to be that we're making significant headway, and that causes a lot of concerns for the future as these farmers decide that, you know, it's time for them to retire and they may not have folks within the family to take over that.

That creates a lot of concern.

You know, right now, the most profitable thing that you can do on the farm is sell it.

And we've got to change that.

And we we have the opportunity to really create a new narrative around this with agriculture is economic development.

And we've got to protect prime farmland.

We've got to get workforce back in and we've got to be able to get our young people back into farming and make it possible for our older farmers to be able to keep farming.