Your response is correct in the context of later 20th century farming when mechanization and subsidies allowed less labor to be involved, allowed food to become

Your response is correct in the context of later 20th century farming when mechanization and subsidies allowed less labor to be involved, allowed food to become a commodity product, and vastly reduced market prices. Of course it's pretty well recognized that all of that is not a sustainable model and will need to work differently. I'm not recommending that we re-establish the farms that your great-grandfather worked on. There are higher-tech ways to produce. (Hydroponic greenhouse vegetable producers are a good example - they require more labor than planting fields with a tractor, but it's not the back-breaking labor of manually tending fields.) As for the financial prospects - if more people need food and less of it is available, prices will rise. From what I understand, this has played out in Cuba...people who grow and sell food outside the planned economy live quite well. The make-work bias is really only applicable if we're holding up two equivalent systems and I'm arguing for the more labor-intensive one because it is more labor-intensive. I guess mentioning the extra labor was kind of superflous because what I was proposing is that high-yield microfarming might play a roll in feeding more people in the future. More labor demand would just be a byproduct...