>not generally family affairs You're absolutely right in that most of the food we eat in the US is grown on a relatively small number of huge commercial farms,

>not generally family affairs You're absolutely right in that most of the food we eat in the US is grown on a relatively small number of huge commercial farms, but interestingly enough about 80% of the ~2 million farms in the US are classified as small, which means they earn less than $350k annual revenue. That's 1.8 million small farms in the US, by comparison there are ~200,000 farms total in the UK. It's just a numbers game, there are vastly more farms in the US than the UK. Keep in mind, many of these small farms are __very__ small, half of them generate less than $10k annual revenue and 80% earn less than $100k. At that scale they can't compete on price, so they usually focus on the quality of what they grow, and for that to work you have to market your crop which means farmers markerts, facebook, youtube and any other way they can think of to get their product out there. Also at the $10k or less annual revenue level (about 1 million farms), often the the farm is only nominally a business and in practice it's closer to a hobby or lifestyle. I live in a semi-rural area that's close to a high-income metro and there's always been a constant stream of people retiring from city life to go live in the "country" and farm, in most cases they have savings or other income and only sell their produce to offset some of the cost of production or just because they are proud of their produce.