Discovery

The USDA’s Economic Research Service released the latest series of state fact sheets today, based on the 2007 Census of Agriculture. As the son and grandson of  farmers, I’m always curious about the state of ag in our state, particularly for small farms. A few items caught my attention as I browsed Washington State’s stats.

The first surprise was the shrinking size of farms. Conventional wisdom tells me that farms are consolidating and growing larger, but the average farm size went from 426 acres in 2002 to 381 acres in 2007. The percent of very small farms (1-99 acres) grew, while the percentage of farms with 500 or more acres decreased.

The average age of farmers continues to climb. In 2007, farmers averaged 57 years old, up from 55 in 2002 and 53 in 1997.

Another fact jumped out: only 45.9 percent list farming as their primary occupation, down from 58.5 percent in 2002. 

A significant change was the number of women listed as principal farm operators. That number jumped from 5,632 in 2002 to 8,090 in 2007.

There are a lot of other stats to look at on the fact sheet. What do the numbers mean? Do they accurately reflect the state of agriculture in Washington? Are there longer term trends that are shifting, from farm size to ownership to gender to ongoing rural poverty?

Links

Washington State Fact Sheet (USDA/Economic Research Service)

USDA/Economic Research Service home page

As Julie and Julia debuts in theaters around the country this weekend, there’s a role in the film viewers may not immediately notice but without which the movie might be completely different. It’s Noel Riley Fitch’s biography of Julia Child titled Appetite for Life. Riley Fitch’s book, while never outright mentioned in the film, was a resource for writer Julie Powell for her blog about cooking her way through Julia Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking and her book Julie and Julia 365 days, 524 recipes, 1 tiny apartment kitchen. Powell drew on several sources including Appetite for Life as she was imagining the scenes between Julia and her husband Paul for her book. Powell’s blog and book became the basis for Nora Ephron’s movie, which stars Amy Adams as Julie and Meryl Streep as Julia Child.

Riley Fitch, who had earned her PhD in American Studies from WSU in 1969 was already an accomplished biographer when she met Child at an American Institute of Food and Wine conference in 1990. Child, a voracious reader who loved material about Americans in Paris, had already read a few of Riley Fitch’s books.

How did you convince Julia Child to let you be her biographer?

She had said, “I say no to everybody who asks me that. I’m a very busy woman and I don’t have time to tell you about my life.” I said “Well, I’ve never written about a person who is still living, so I don’t really need all your time. I know how to research a person’s life without having met them or talked to them.”

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