The idea of a diaspora–the break up and scattering of a group of common people–tends to be levied on historic population upheavals: Irish after the potato famine, Jews after the Holocaust, the postbellum northern migration of U.S. blacks. But what makes the diaspora, this common people without a common home, is the values and tradition those who leave take with them.

Today we witness the twilight of an unrecognized diaspora, that of the farm kid. For more than a century, farm families have become fewer and smaller. Those who leave the farm don't instantly become pure creatures of the city or suburbia, however. They take with them the experience of the farm. For at least a generation, they hold a commonality that makes them unique in the larger world.

Of course it's technology that pushes the depopulation of the farm. It has since Mr. Deere built that first steel plow in 1837 and barbed wire diced up the range 30 years later. A few years ago, as we launched into a new century, farm magazines asked their readers what 20th Century inventions had been most valuable. Responses favored inventions such as power take-off, rubber tires, electricity, paved roads and farm chemicals–all things that increased productivity and reduced the need for labor.

Today, John Deere makes a 90-foot planter. Spray rigs travel at speed over crops designed to tolerate herbicides. Combines with massive grain tanks disgorge directly into tractor trailers that travel to a market for price rather than back to the farm for its self sufficiency.

Increasingly, the multitude of sturdy hands once required by our farms is replaced by the need for a singular but sharp mind for management. The very success of our intense focus to reduce labor ensures that a shortage of labor will only accelerate, with fewer returning to a farm too efficient and thin in margin to accommodate a new generation.

Yet today's technology still draws from agricultural youth. The blue jackets of FFA, the 4-Hers and MFA scholars, find places in agriculture without returning to the farm. It's their rural experience and interest to remain in agriculture that are such assets to our industry. Consider Matthew McClure's work in genetics on page 4 of this magazine.

In fact, firms of all stripes, agricultural or not, have long enjoyed–indeed gobbled up-this silent resource of the farm. There is a tacit nod to the confidence and work ethic gained tending to animals, a comfort in the competence ag youth gained maneuvering $150,000 equipment.

Still, consolidation is all encompassing and the lure of youth from the farm cannibalistic. Fewer farms mean fewer farm children. A demographic down spiral ensues.

Ensues up to a point, that is. The future isn't so grim. A new class of rural youth, like the ones we feature as MFA scholarship recipients in these pages, represents the diaspora's tail end. Farm numbers, while still shrinking, have leveled somewhat, and today's students of agriculture are shaped not by our alarm at statistics but by their view of agricultural reality. They look at the industry as a whole and find ways to fit in.

Today's farm demographic isn't a swan song for agriculture. A fading diaspora is only proof that our enduring perceptions are framed on a fragile canvas. The only thing we can know about the future of agriculture and its youth is that our notion of it can be no more accurate than our grandfathers'. The notion of the farm kid endures, however. And for as long as such youth exist, we can count on a spirited and confident tug toward the future. Steve Fairchild, editor

Steve Fairchild, editor