Long ago, a young farmer and haberdasher from Missouri followed an unlikely path to the vice presidency.

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Mr Singh was not a professional runner when he was young but a farmer in Punjab, India.

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And farmers are ageing (the average British farmer is now well into his 50s), with few young people keen to enter a hard, uncertain business.

ECONOMIST: Industrial dairy farming

Reno informs us that, as a young girl, she loved the celebrated land-speed-record holder, Flip Farmer.

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We get some hints of that tenderness in conversations between Kent and his farmer father, played by Kevin Costner, as they struggle to keep the young superhero's powers hidden.

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Philip Lawson, a Suffolk farmer now in his late eighties, returned to the place where, as a young flight lieutenant on a secret mission, he had spied out a potential airstrip and encouraged the local people to scythe the fields and remove the rocks.

ECONOMIST: Wartime derring-do on a bleak black mountain

As the young man (played by Emile Hirsch) travels about, he attracts the interest of a South Dakota wheat farmer (Vince Vaughn, playing it straight), an aging hippie (Catherine Keener), and a retired Army man living on the edge of the California desert (Hal Holbrook), all of whom ask him to put down his backpack and stay.

NEWYORKER: Into the Wild