Farms have consolidated - 300 acres used to be a big farm. Now you have to have 10,000 and a workforce of 100 people to farm profitably. So the numbers have reduced.
The road I live on had 13 farms when I was a kid. My brother was the last. Now he works in town and rents the land to a corporation.
Sad point you bring up. Agriculture has morphed into agribusiness which consists of large corporations with no personal connection to the land growing Monsanto clones fertilized by ancient guano deposits and ammonium nitrate synthesized from methane. Strange new world we now live in.
Subsidizing farmers so heavily that even our socialist welfare pales in comparison. Here 50% of farms make 80% of produce. The rest just keep the land from accommodating wildlife.
Although idyllic farmland communities are a thing of the past (if they ever were) the primary intended reference wasn't to sociology or even to business model. A question arises as to what will be the long term impact on general health of a lifelong consumption of cloned plant material raised on a steady diet of junk food consisting of mined potash and reconfigured natural gas. Not to mention the vulnerability of that homogeneous plant stock to a single new pathogen.
Amusing way to put it. Not really the case, as plants are not 'made' of the elements they consume biologically, and plant stocks are designed to be resistant to pathogens better than the 'wild' varieties.
Really? But these plants are not being grown for aesthetics but as a food source. Nutrition value (read vitamin, mineral content, et al) of contemporary produce is considerably less than it was 50 years ago. If interested see a sample low-tech Scientific American article on the subject.
And for the sociology: what percentage of the population are responsible enough to take the now necessary dietary supplements to maintain a healthy, productive physiology?
Amazing. GMO tech is probably the only methodology with any hope of combating the impact of that single new killer pathogen when it arises. Your grandfather must know about fungal pathogen Ug99 devastating the world wheat crop and that only about 10 percent of other wheat varieties are resistant. Question is: why isn't a mixed variety regimen a general rule? Given that it takes a long time to introduce pathogen-resistant genes into a single plant variety, dependence on single or a mostly clone stock (a general rule based on economics) could prove fatal at some point.
Although, a real problem with the current GMO tech is the diminished nutritional value of the foodstock produced relative to historic produce. But that, of course, is due in part to depleted soil.
The road I live on had 13 farms when I was a kid. My brother was the last. Now he works in town and rents the land to a corporation.