To add to that, most farms are basically industrial enterprises, these days. People are sentimental about farming because they have a completely wrong idea of how modern farming works.
The modern system of Big Food makes it more or less impossible for any other type of farming operation to exist. There are about 2 million farms in the US with an average size around 500 acres. For the most part, they are money-losing enterprises run by suffering families from which one of a tiny handful of food conglomerates is attempting to wring every possible abusive penny, with a good deal of success. John Oliver did a show about it, and Joel Salatin has written quite a few excellent books about the tragicomic experience of trying to run a non-industrialized farming operation in the modern United States and what an inevitably difficult clusterfuck it is on several different levels.
I’ll only speak for myself. I don’t think anything “romantic” about the medium-scale farming operations that in the modern day grow most of the food; I think that a lot of them probably fuck over the actual farmworkers, and I don’t imagine them as a little 10-acre farm operated by a happy rosy-cheeked couple.
At the same time, I do think that the people who run those operations deserve justice and protection against the behemoths who actually keep all the money and ruin the food supply, and that we should change the system so that small farming operations can exist in the modern day without having to become industrialized whether they want to or not. The food has to come from somewhere.
To add to that, most farms are basically industrial enterprises, these days. People are sentimental about farming because they have a completely wrong idea of how modern farming works.
The modern system of Big Food makes it more or less impossible for any other type of farming operation to exist. There are about 2 million farms in the US with an average size around 500 acres. For the most part, they are money-losing enterprises run by suffering families from which one of a tiny handful of food conglomerates is attempting to wring every possible abusive penny, with a good deal of success. John Oliver did a show about it, and Joel Salatin has written quite a few excellent books about the tragicomic experience of trying to run a non-industrialized farming operation in the modern United States and what an inevitably difficult clusterfuck it is on several different levels.
And yet people cling to this romantic notion of the family farm.
I’ll only speak for myself. I don’t think anything “romantic” about the medium-scale farming operations that in the modern day grow most of the food; I think that a lot of them probably fuck over the actual farmworkers, and I don’t imagine them as a little 10-acre farm operated by a happy rosy-cheeked couple.
At the same time, I do think that the people who run those operations deserve justice and protection against the behemoths who actually keep all the money and ruin the food supply, and that we should change the system so that small farming operations can exist in the modern day without having to become industrialized whether they want to or not. The food has to come from somewhere.
I uhhh… Those are the kind I’ve seen. The kind I’ve literally lived on… I grew up around Mercer/Auglaize county in Ohio.