Family Farms Versus Industrial Agriculture: Who Wins?

Most people have no idea where their food comes from or what may be lurking within it.

By John Klar, Author of The Small Republic

The MAHA movement has drawn attention to a dire, decades-old crisis hanging over Americans’ unsuspecting heads: the disappearance of small, family farms. Once the backbone of the nation’s food supply, most small farms have been steadily consolidated, or run out of business by corporate monopolies partnered with federal government agencies (aka “regulatory capture”). Food quality has diminished as consumers have become addicted (literally) to unhealthy processed food substitutes. Is the support of small farms just wistful naivete, or a path for the future?

I’ve been farming for the last 25 years. My family has farmed here on this Vermont mountaintop for over two centuries – my great-great-great-great-grandfather is buried a short walk from where my grass-fed cows dine daily. In 1929, there were about 27,000 Vermont dairy farms: now there are fewer than 600.

Yes, times change, but not always for the better. As society (especially today’s younger generations) become more aware of the central importance of gut and soil microbes for human health, the industrial agricultural system praised as the “Green Revolution” is coming under overdue scrutiny. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and the movement he has championed have awakened a grassroots reckoning that will endure beyond the current Trump administration.

My personal mentor and teacher over the past two decades has been Kentucky writer Wendell Berry, who has warned Americans since the 1950s about the long-term environmental costs of industrial farming practices. What he has taught for six decades is increasingly evident in each new scientific study of the gut and soil microbiomes.

As Wendell has written:

“The care of the Earth is our most ancient and most worthy, and after all our most pleasing responsibility. To cherish what remains of it and to foster its renewal is our only hope.”

Turns out, we humans are intimately connected with beneficial bacteria and other microbes in that stuff we call “dirt.” The chemicals we spray on the land to feed crops and kill weeds sickens that essential microbial life-source. There are some 50 billion microbes in a teaspoon of healthy soil; an estimated eight tons of living organisms populate the top 4 inches of every acre of robust soil. Indigenous tribes exhibit flourishing gut microbiomes teeming with diversity; urban American residents exhibit some of the sickliest of gut microbiomes, caused by “dietary urbanization.” The consequences of chronic disease surround us, and the #1 cause is cheap factory food devoid of essential nutrients, but full of laboratory-concocted artificial flavorings and colorings, and even chemicals designed to block our natural satiety signals to the brain (the “brain-gut connection”).

No wonder we are so sickly. Children and women are especially vulnerable to these toxins and deficiencies. Yet, for about a century, our industrial response to this industrial trauma to soil, animals, and humans has been to fashion industrial remedies called “medicines.” Business interests profit by tricking humans to keep eating when they are full; they profit again when they sell drugs to “fix” the illness that is thereby caused. High blood pressure, stroke, heart disease, and other widespread illnesses are devastating our healthcare system and economy, as well as human happiness. The pharmaceutical industry makes a LOT of money from disease: Wegovy and Ozempic work by turning that satiety trigger back on and signaling to the body to stop eating; insulin counters the diabetes caused by high sugar intake.

Again, Wendell Berry summed it up adroitly decades ago:

“People are fed by the food industry, which pays no attention to health, and are treated by the health industry, which pays no attention to food.”

Most people have no idea where their food comes from or what may be lurking within it. Modern society has severed the historic economic and cultural ties between “consumers” (itself a reductionist, industrialized term) and farmers. Multinational corporations, enabled by university research, favorable tax and regulatory structures, and various subsidies, have inserted themselves into that chasm. Now they want to create faux meats in factories: the patented corporate control of all food resources is imminent. AI will be the final electronic-currency, social-credit-monitored connection.

MAHA has challenged that dystopian vision by reminding both the health and food industries that they are ultimately dependent on We the People (aka “consumers” and taxpayers), not on regulatory agencies, or on the food propaganda employed to beguile us. Trix are not for kids. Frosted Flakes are not “Gr-e-a-a-a-t!”

Plant-based meat substitutes are highly processed from chemically-laden GMO monoculture crops. The invisible organisms in the soil and our guts are waging war against the invisible chemicals insinuated into our soup (and everything else!).

The perceived battle between conventional (industrial) farming and local family farms is itself a distraction. This binary keeps both sides vilifying one another. In truth, most of the healthy table foods Americans eat are grown by mid-sized farms. Furthermore, large farms can employ regenerative farming practices, and small farms can pollute with pesticides. And Wal-Mart and JBS Foods are “family-owned,” so even that label can prove obfuscatory.

The core issue is the life-giving connection between the microbes in soil and plants and animals (whether human or livestock). Global NGOs and the world’s largest food and Pharma companies meet to scheme a unified food supply system, which they will utterly dominate at the expense of soil and human health. America imports more processed foods (many from China) every year. A healthier future for Americans begins with healthy food as a preventive, and this requires nurtured farms and healthy soil.

America needs a new generation to take the reins from its aging farmers. Gen Z and Millennials are already leading the way in their food choices. They want foods untainted by glyphosate and other pesticides. They want meat from well-treated animals, free of hormones and antibiotics. They understand the connection between healthy food, environmentalism, and properly stewarded soils.

Small and mid-sized farms using regenerative practices can meet this need and, in the process, revitalize struggling rural communities and provide income for young entrepreneurs displaced by AI. Local production reduces the distances foods are shipped, cutting vehicle emissions while strengthening supply chains and food security.

My great-great-great-great-grandfather raised his own food in a challenging Vermont climate. The MAHA movement seeks to reclaim food sovereignty and the intergenerational transfer of the skills, knowledge, and heirloom seeds required to sustain it. That mission begins here in this Bully Pulpit, where people learn more every day about what is wrong with our modern food production, processing, and distribution system, so that they can embrace how to do it right in the future!

John Klar is an attorney, writer, and farmer who works for MAHA Action. John is a staff writer for Liberty Nation News and a regular contributor to the MAHA Report. His Substack is Small Farm Republic. He is the author of The Coming Food Crisis: How Corporations, Activists, and Climate Alarmists Are Waging War on Farmers and Small Farm Republic: Why Conservatives Must Embrace Local Agriculture, Reject Climate Alarmism, and Lead an Environmental Revival.