About 35 years ago, Jack Hudson of Dafter, Michigan, decided he wanted to farm. He chose to grow birdsfoot trefoil and raised as much as 1,000 acres at one point.

At the 2015 California World Ag Expo, there was a “house” built out of every variety of straw grown in Oregon’s Willamette Valley. A sign boasted, “The house that straw built.”

“I am 34 years old and, as any young farmer does, I try very hard to be successful,” says Matt Opp from Eureka, South Dakota.

“We identified three factors that make it difficult for young people to get started in grass-based farming. They take on too much risk, they don’t have enough management capabilities – especially when running a business – and they don’t have enough equity,” says Altfrid Krusenbaum, a dairy farmer from Elkhorn, Wisconsin.

In 1983, Clayton Geralds and his family started into the forage industry with 100 acres of alfalfa. This increased to 450 acres of alfalfa and 150 acres of alfalfa-grass mix four years ago.

Randy Neibaur of Driggs, Idaho, started growing 50 acres of alfalfa as a rotation crop three years ago.

In 2007, the National Agricultural Statistics Service (NASS) found that in the U.S. the average age of a farm’s principal operator was 57.

During the 1980s recession, hay prices in Idaho were $30 a ton and “you couldn’t even sell it,” says Richard Larsen, a producer in Dubois, Idaho, “and it cost $50 to grow it. You either had to get in it or get out.”