> This is the wrong metric It's not intended to be a metric, just a matter of fact. Industrial agriculture has never really taken off in any meaningful way bec

> This is the wrong metric It's not intended to be a metric, just a matter of fact. Industrial agriculture has never really taken off in any meaningful way because it is too hard to educate workers about agriculture. Anyone who already has that education does so most likely because they have been involved in a family farm, and thus are likely to be still involved in that family farm. Very few people leave the family farm to work for an industrial operation. It is true that some family farms have been able to leverage technology to grow quite large and supply a significant portion of all the food produced, but they are still family farms. A family farm isn't determined by its scale. > No, it's because farmhands don't have access to capital to buy land and equipment. In my first couple of years of farming, I rented or hired out everything I needed. It is false to claim that you need to own capital to farm. In the long term I would agree it is prudent to start investing in those things, hopefully from the proceeds of your earlier years farming, but you most definitely don't have to begin farming as a BTO. You can get started with a surprisingly small investment. What would have absolutely destroyed my farm business would have been not having some farmers readily available to share their experience with me and to help guide my operation. I agree that most people don't have access to that. For that reason, most people will never realistically be able to start farming, even with all the money in the world. I mean, of course anyone can live up to the "How do you make a million dollars farming? Start with two million." trope, but I wouldn't call that realistically starting farming. > Anyway the farmhands aren't the ones calling the shots on how the land is managed Absolutely. They are going to be the actual steward of the land, though. An industrial farmer isn't going to be the one doing the work. When was the last time you saw a worker listen to shots called? I've worked in a lot of industries in my life and I've never seen workers listen to the shots called. They do whatever the want. They don't care if they destroy your equipment or land. What's it to them? They'll just go get a different job if you don't like what they decided to do. Thanks to advancements in automation, more and more work can be given to computers who will listen to the farmer, leaving the worker to just sit there and make a phone call to an expert if the computer fails. This is making the industrial farm idea more realistic, but we've only covered a very narrow swath of farming activities with such automation to this point.