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You’re parroting the talking points. Maybe you’re doing these things, I don’t know.

What I do know is I grew up on a dairy farm in Weld County in Colorado. The family was being hemmed in by our neighbors selling out for homes and grandpa and dad could not afford to outbid developers for more land even if they wanted to grow. So my father made the decision to go straight to the consumer with raw milk. We did fine for a while but drip by drip extra rules (in Colorado you they change the rules so you couldn’t just buy direct from a dairy, you have to buy a cow share and be on paper an owner), more inspections and finally the property taxes did them in. When mom passed he offered to transfer the farm us kids. I was still in college but neither of brothers were in a position to run it full time either. So we had no choice but to cash out. Dad had taken loans on the equipment and there was a mortgage on a strip of land he bought in the 90s.

We’ll be fine, we still have enough land to run our own livestock and converted one of the barns into a greenhouse. It’s now even more of an island, although we were already the only true farm left in Windsor. The house is still there but not occupied currently. Maybe one of us will move back in.

This mythical “know your farmer” isn’t reality for most people. There’s a few boutique options, either farm direct or at markets. But it’s such a tiny fraction of food production.

If you believe the USDA then here’s some numbers. There’s roughly 2,029,200 farms in the USA total. Of those 1,034,892 gross $10,000 or less annually. Our farm business was higher than this, so this number represents farms that are personal farms or hobbies and such. As far as I know the land we have left would count, it’s still zoned agriculture anyway. These farms surely are not for primary income and generally do not factor into national supply in volume.

The next step is $10,000 to $350,000. The vast majority of family farms in the way you think of them fall here. There are 785,300 of them in the USA. Total annual production into the national supply is 21.3% of the supply. A lot of the cash crops are grow here, veggies, fruits, nuts, etc. A few ranchers would fall here but it’s doubtful a primary livestock operation would just based on the expense and feed requirements. Maybe small livestock operations that rely on BLM grazing do.

That means the remaining 209,700 farms produce 78.7% of your food. This is the industrial agriculture. To further explain, the USDA calls 166,394 of these “family” farms and they probably are owned by a family corporation, but the family very likely doesn’t do much actual farming. They may run some small part of the operation but they own a lot of land they lease out. By volume these are corn, wheat, soybeans and decent sized ranch operations.

So that means, when you boil it down, 42,613 farms in the country produce most of the food. In total these plus 36,526 of the family farms (in total 79,139 farms out of 2,029,200) manage to gross $1 million or more.

So my point is that for a variety of reasons, mostly economic squeezing for a couple of generations, they’ve managed to consolidate the food production in the USA into the hands of a small number of people. Trying to buck the trend probably stressed my mom to death, we’ll never know. What you dazzling urbanites are asking is farmers to do the work for you, to be your insurance policy. They can’t do it and in larger numbers are deciding they don’t need the headache.

I grew up on a dairy farm in Weld County, Colorado. My grandpa bought the farm and ran it with my dad. Being one of the last farms near Windsor we were getting hemmed in so by the 2000s even if they wanted to grow they could not afford to outbid developers any longer. They moved to a raw milk, direct to consumer, which ended up not being financially viable. It’s difficult to sell direct to consumer in Colorado at any scale, especially raw milk which we hoped would widen margins (it doesn’t).

If you want numbers, how about the USDA? They say there’s 2,029,200 farms in the USA. They say 1,034,892 gross $10,000 or less annually. These are hobby or personal farms, if they sell anything it’s at a small table at a farmer’s market. Maybe. They don’t even show up statistically in food production.

The next category is $10,000 to $350,000. This encompasses 785,300 farms. Most family farms fall here, ours did. The USDA figures about 21.3% of national food prouction comes from them, at a total of 1,820,192 farms. The bulk of these are higher profit like vegetables, fruits, nuts.

That means 209,700 farms provide 78.7% of the food in this country. Of them 166,394 are still classed as family farms, although this is mostly family farm corporations where the business is as much managing land leases and contractors doing the work. So to call them family farms is not what most people have in mind. That means 42,613 entities are not family controlled. If you further refine this you have 79,139 of these farms grossing $1 million or more. They are the bulk of food production.

The family finally had no choice, we sold about 3/4 of the land to a developer. We still have the house, most of the buildings and enough land for our own livestock. But I think we’re like a lot of farmers at this point. The urbanites don’t understand the pressure to keep a farm going when the system is rigged against you. The mythical direct to farmer is going to feed a tiny number of people.

My point is the production of food in this country is consolidated to the point that it isn’t hard to see how it’s easy to control. Farmers are cashing out, they’ll still farm but it’ll be for family and friends. We’re still a business on paper but we’re done with farmer’s markets for the time being.

Forgot to mention, the same USDA says the average farm is 443 acres and total acreage under production is 899,500,000 acres. Putting this in different numbers, it’s 1,405,468 square miles. The totality of the USA is 2,954,841 square miles. The land under farming does not include leases by the BLM for grazing.

I’d also make the point that if there’s 330 million people in this country and 785,000 fully functioning farms that’s 420 people per farm. That’s not a picture of “know your farmer” ratio. We had 300 cow shares and served about 200 to 250 of them each week on 160 acres and we had routine feed purchasing. Managing milk pickup and the store was a full time job for mom and it was only open 4 days, which was a major reason we couldn’t keep it going when she passed. Neither of my brothers could do it, they had jobs and families. I was still in school so either drop out or close the store. And the reality is the actual number of farms like you’re thinking are probably half of that. There’s a lot of factory farms that grow commodities or feed stock for industrial livestock. They’re not going to be interested or equipped for direct sales. But they do control the majority of the land (and a lot of it is in the Midwest, so isn’t suited for a variety of crops, it’s large corn/wheat/beans and livestock operations). So figure about 500,000 farms and perhaps 25% of the land are going to be meet the requirements for this storybook system.