mango-habanero-autism-deactivat:
\nAmerica Loves the Idea of Family Farms. That\u2019s Unfortunate.
Family farms are central to our nation\u2019s identity. Most Americans, even those who have never been on a farm, have strong feelings about the idea of family farms \u2014 so much that they\u2019re the one thing that all U.S. politicians agree on. Each election, candidates across the ideological spectrum roll out plans to save family farms \u2014 or give speeches about them, at least. From Little House on the Prairie to modern farmer\u2019s markets, family farms are also the core of most Americans\u2019 vision of what sustainable, just farming is supposed to look like.
But as someone who\u2019s worked in agriculture for 20 years and researched the history of farming, I think we need to understand something: Family farming\u2019s difficulties aren\u2019t a modern problem born of modern agribusiness. It\u2019s never worked very well. It\u2019s simply precarious, and it always has been. Idealizing family farms burdens real farmers with overwhelming guilt and blame when farms go under. It\u2019s crushing.
Farming has almost always existed on a larger social scale\u2014very extended families up to whole villages. We tend to think of medieval peasants as forebears of today\u2019s family farms, but they\u2019re not. Medieval villages worked much more like a single unit with little truly private infrastructure\u2014draft animals, plows, and even land were operated at the community level.
Family farming as we know it\u2014 nuclear families that own their land, pass it on to heirs, raise some or all of their food, and produce some cash crops\u2014is vanishingly rare in human history.
It\u2019s easy to see how Anglo-Americans could mistake it for normal. Our cultural heritage is one of the few places where this fluke of a farming practice has made multiple appearances. Family farming was a key part of the political economy in ancient Rome, late medieval England, and colonial America. But we keep forgetting something very important about those golden ages of family farming. They all happened after, and only after, horrific depopulation events.
Yeah the homesteading requirement to live on your land (as a device to keep these lands from concentrating in the hands of absentee landlords or speculators) left American farmers in homesteading regions far more dispersed and lonely than traditional village-centered or manorial farming, especially out west in the Great Plains where farmsteads required greater acreage to be viable
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