BENGAL — It's harvest time and, while rain has been a challenge lately, Hoosier farmers are clearing the land.
It's a familiar sight in Indiana: farm workers in the fields gathering the year's bounty. But farmers face challenges which pre-date the pandemic.
Kyle Barlow, a farmer in Bengal in Shelby County, said one of his biggest challenges is finding workers.
"Our labor shortage began a few years even before before COVID just to the sheer nature of not a lot of people want to do this job. It's dirty at times, it's physical," Barlow said.
Barlow grows 500 acres of corn and 500 acres of soybeans. His goal is to finish harvesting by Thanksgiving.
He's a fourth-generation farmer, who is following in the footsteps of his great-grandfather, grandfather and father.
I hopped on his combine with my iPhone. It was a smooth ride with quite a view on all sides, especially to my left where the harvested corn was off-loaded into the grain cart. The cart holds 60,000 pounds of corn, which will be used to make modified corn starch and fuel.
"I look at the land as a living, breathing thing. An ecosystem," Barlow said.
Based on the latest figures, Indiana is the 10th largest farming state in the country with 56,000 farms, a majority of which are family-owned or operated.
The average age of an Indiana farmer is 55 years old. That isn't old, but it has pushed the industry and groups like 4-H to develop scholarships and other education incentives to invest in the next generation of farming.
"We need to educate our young people and get them interested in the farm so they want to do this," Barlow said. "Somebody's going to have to do this. I promise you that, or we're all going to be hungry."
