Page 320 - Proceeding The 2nd International Seminar of Science and Technology : Accelerating Sustainable Innovation Towards Society 5.0

nd
he 2 International Seminar of Science and Technology
“Accelerating Sustainable innovation towards Society 5.0”
ISST 2022 FST UT 2022
Universitas Terbuka

those related to land, irrigation, seeds, fertilizers, agricultural
machinery, field extension workers (farmer resources), labor, until the
problems of agricultural trade system that never ends. On the labor
side, farmers in Indonesia are still dominated by the older generation
with an average age of over 50 years. Based on census data in 2010,
the average age of farmers in Indonesia is 52 years. Furthermore, in
2013, the results of the Agricultural Census also showed that the
majority of farmers in Indonesia are groups of people aged 45–54
years. This is further strengthened by the results of a survey by the
Indonesian Institute of Sciences (LIPI) which shows that almost none
of the children of farmers want to become farmers.
Only about 8% of youth in Indonesia aged 20-39 years are interested
in becoming farmers. The rest, mostly tend to choose to work in the
industrial sector. This means that the number of farmers who change
occupations outside the agricultural sector is greater than the number
of young people who are willing to engage in agricultural business.
The decline in the interest of the younger generation in the agricultural
sector is an alarm for the government to immediately find a solution to
this problem. The decrease in the number of farmers will have
implications for the decrease in the availability of domestic products
and the erosion of employment opportunities. The reason is that
agriculture is a sector that contributes to providing 40% of jobs. In
addition, the government's target to make Indonesia the world's food
barn by 2045 will be difficult to realize if the problem of farmer
regeneration continues. In terms of land area, it was recorded that
there were 87.63% or 22.9 million farming households with land
ownership of less than 2 hectares. Around 5 million farmers are
reported to have land area of less than 0.5 hectares. Based on these
conditions, farmers cannot maximize production on their land and then
becomes one of the triggers that affect the level of farmers' welfare.
BPS data (2018) shows its analysis that the conversion of paddy fields
reaches 200,000 ha per year. In addition, the data also shows that the
area of agricultural land in 2018 was only 7.1 million hectares, where

290 ISST 2022 – FST Universitas Terbuka, Indonesia
International Seminar of Science and Technology “Accelerating Sustainable
Towards Society 5.0