Having said that, we can’t do away with small farms and family farms. The only way to save it is with automation and labour cost saving tech so it provides enough to be considered a career like any other.
I see it as forming co-ops and co-op hubs. Jellicles Farm is creating Hundred-Acre-Hubs and then co-ops of clusters hubs. I want to focus on small acreage automation. Small robots/cobots swarming in small acreages managed by individual farmers. Labour is 40-60% of cost. And it’s becoming increasingly unreliable and unavailable and expensive for small farmers. Automation is the only way. It will satisfy local food security and niche crops. Commodities will still be grown in large commercial corporate farms as they should be..
I was just noting that there was a human toll that happened for all this farm land to be rolled up by the conglomerates. Not implying that it was the wrong decision on the larger geo-political scale.
I would like to see the return of small farms if someone can make it viable, I would not trade the life I lived as a child for anything, but as I said above, I will never again scratch a living out of dirt, unless it is absolutely necessary for my and my families survival.
We are covered for grains, commodities and essentials. But we can maintain off grid homesteads and grow niche and high value crops on small acreages.
Look at all the vineyards we have now, marijuana grows, lavender fields and an embarrassment of riches when it comes to gourmet consumption.
Farming is magical. We convert sunlight and water through alchemy and plant genetics. There is absolutely nothing that compares.
I grew up on a small citrus farm, I saw NAFTA and the migrant worker bills ravage the small farmers first hand. The way it was done was unfair and amounted to a transfer of wealth to these entities but with that being said, I know why they did it. They need economies of scale, as well as the ability to offset risk, the easiest way to do that is to conglomerate the land together so that if there is a loss of production in one area output can be raised in another. This is hard to do with a co-op of independent farmers.
Starving people are dangerous to stability it really is as simple as that, and that is why you see these entities involved in farmlands.