> The thing is that farmers nowadays are required to have huge surface to survive. Yes and no. From a country to the neighbouring countries, the average farm s

> The thing is that farmers nowadays are required to have huge surface to survive. Yes and no. From a country to the neighbouring countries, the average farm surface vary greatly; from an area to the next area in the same country, variations are high too; in a same municipality, we have farms which are 5 times larger than others (20 times or more if you take market gardeners into account); and yet they all sort of manage. There is also the natural tendency of every farmer for expansion; once he's done with his stuff, he always would like to buy one of the neighbour's field, and now they are not afraid of buying/renting/using land that is tens of miles away (their fuel is subsidised too), which increases the phenomenon. There is also the race with constant investment (and with constant debt) in order to capture subsidies and avoid taxes. There are plenty of weird incentives, sometimes pulling in the same direction, sometimes towards opposite directions. But you can choose to play differently, more or less like it was done until the eighties, with lower investment, lower expenses. Subsidies are now directed to smaller units (above some threshold), so if your investment is low, it can compensate the relative lack of scale economy. Scaling requires lots of expenses too. But that's the way most choose: what can we tell them? "Well, good luck with that rat race?" Actually, if we look at statistics, the smallest farms do not really disappear, it is mostly the mid-sized farms which disappear by fusing and shifting to large ones. > I think non farmers don't understand why they have to bear the nuisance from food production when the food can be brought from outside, and cheaper. Maybe it is common a point of view in America, but it really isn't here. (I am not saying I agree or disagree with it, but it is something which is very rarely heard here.) > What they loose sight of, is that being able to feed your country is a huge advantage when shit hits the fan. Well, as far as the country France is concerned, we used to produce as much or more before all those changes... Cattle production has been going down for 25 years. It is well known that beef peaked around 1990, but other productions decreased too: pork peaked around 2000, sheep peaked already as early as 1980, more surprisingly even poultry peaked around 2000. Surface (as a whole) is going down, while yield per surface has (expectedly) reached a ceiling after the crazy increases for 5 decades after WW2. The agricultural balance which was the pride of the country has been collapsing for a decade or more, with a massive raise of importations, and is probably negative now if it is not saved any more by wine and booze...