A quote from Chris Jones, an Iowa environmental engineer (doing a demographic analysis of Iowa farmers,
Of these white folks, 80% are male and the average age is almost as old as I am: 58.9 years
He's fighting Iowa CAFO's polluting water, with facts and complaints. A good cause, but I picked out this factoid to comment on.
I remember in Infoshare Sherman County, Kansas was one of the trial counties for providing on-line access for farmers to some of the data USDA agencies had for them. Mike Sherman, then the CED, had some data on the average age of his farmers--somewhere in the 50's IIRC. A problem then, a small part of the problem, was the older farmers generally weren't into computers, so what we were trying to do had no appeal.
But to my title--I suspect if we had data going back to the Revolution on the age distribution of farmers we'd find they were consistently older than most working Americans. Why? Because since the Revolution the proportion of US workers engaged in agriculture has been declining, sometimes fast, sometimes slowly. That means some farm children left the farm for the city, while their parents stayed on the farm, thereby skewing the age distribution.
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