On the day after Thanksgiving of 2017, the Washington Post ran a front-page story on the “growing number of young Americans … leaving desk jobs to farm.” It profiled Liz Whitehurst, a liberal-arts graduate in her early 30s who left the nonprofit sector for a farm where she grows “certified peppers, cabbages, tomatoes, and salad greens from baby kale to arugula.” The Post argued she is part of a “movement” of young growers committed to sustainable practices, organic foods, and local markets. Kathleen Merrigan, director of the Sustainability Collaborative at George Washington University and the face of progressive food reform at the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) under the last administration, told the Post that farmers like Whitehurst signal a “sea change in American agriculture.”

Editor’s note: We got a tremendous number of reader responses to this op-ed. You have questions. Our writers want to answer them. So on Wednesday, March 28 at 4 PM, we’re hosting our first live #farmchat on Twitter. Ask us your burning questions about young farmers and the future of farming right here , and our writers will respond in real time.

If Whitehurst were representative, then Merrigan would be right. But the Post’s article, like many similar articles on minority, female, and young farmers over the past several years—including one late last December from CNBC about Kimbal Musk’s shipping container-based Brooklyn accelerator that is teaching millennials how to farm—rely on misleading interpretations of survey data and optimistic narratives that do not reflect reality.

The average young farmer is less like Whitehurst and more like Chris Soules, the former contestant from ABC’s long running reality-TV show, The Bachelor, whose family’s Iowa farmland is worth around $35 million (Soules made news for another reason last year, after he was involved in a fatal crash that killed a rural northeast Iowa farmer.)

Soules has received almost $700,000 in farm subsidies from the government since he started farming in 2001. His case is typical: policymakers send the vast majority of agricultural subsidies to large-scale farmers, almost all of whom are white men. As long as agricultural policy favors wealthy, large-scale producers like Soules, then full-time farming will remain the preserve of a fortunate few.

ABC

But unlike Whitehurst and other young people committed to sustainable practices, Soules operates an industrial farm in Iowa where he mass produces commodity crops and raises hogs in a concentrated animal feeding operation (CAFO). Soules is also part of a generation of farmers that skews slightly more white and male than any older one now farming. The most recent Census of Agriculture, a nationally representative survey conducted by USDA in 2012, reports that farmers under age 35 (as Soules was at the time) are 94 percent non-Hispanic white and 90 percent male, while each older group is less white and male than the youngest cohort of farmers. Farmers over the age of 75 are the least white by a slim margin, even though that so-called “Silent Generation” is only 22 percent nonwhite. By contrast, milliennials as a whole are almost 44 percent nonwhite, which makes the whiteness of millennial farmers all the more striking.

Nathan Rosenberg

Not only are farmers in Soules’ generation very white and very male, they also appear to be more likely to practice conventional, industrialized agriculture than older farmers. According to another data set from the 2012 Census of Agriculture, farmers under age 35, though they have not had much time to acquire land and capital, are just as likely as farmers over age 35 to operate mid- and large-scale farms. They also appear to rely on commodity crops to a much greater extent than older farmers. The most common commodity crops, which include corn, soy, wheat and oilseeds, account for 40 percent of total sales for young farmers—7 percentage points higher than the share for farmers 35 and older (These totals also include sales of dry beans and peas, although they account for less than one percent of sales.) While some of these producers may be using sustainable practices, only about 1 percent of all young farmers operate organic farms.

Nathan Rosenberg

Part of the reason the Post’s assertions on these matters are so at odds with the data is that the survey it relies on for many of its claims is, in the sponsoring organization’s own words, “not randomly selected nor statistically modeled to represent all young farmers.” The National Young Farmers Coalition (NYFC), a progressive organization, distributed the survey online and to coalition members and young farmers connected with 94 other organizations that work with or represent farmers. With few exceptions, the participating organizations work to build local or sustainable food systems. As a result, the survey was heavily skewed toward the “highly educated, ex-urban, first-time farmers” the Post purports to show are the future of farming. Just as we would expect a survey of College Republicans to report favorable views of Donald Trump among young people, so, too, would we expect a survey of farmers in local and sustainable food networks to report high rates of sustainable and local production among young farmers.

The data bear this out. The coalition’s survey found that 38 percent of young farmers, defined as farmers under age 40, sell flowers, compared to the agricultural census—a nationally representative survey—which found that only 3 percent sold “nursery, floriculture, or greenhouse crops.” Similarly, the coalition found that 72 percent of young farmers sold vegetables, while the census found only 5 percent.