Mike Bronkema spent years raising young hens for egg farms before he shifted to raising lambs and growing heirloom beans in the sandy soils of his 130-acre farm near the Lake Michigan shoreline.

Michigan lost 6.6% of its farmland acreage, about 670,000 acres, between 2002 and 2022. Over those two decades, the total farmland in the state went from 10.14 million acres to 9.47 million. Some ...