b'To a neighbor, a customer or a community member, this farm can be valued very differently as a repository of innate value, a bastion of deceleration, a defender of biodiversity, a model of stewardship, a sequesterer of carbon, a promoter of nutrition and health. During an era when commodity farmers have been getting big or getting out, Madisons example of success at a small scale is all the more significant. Which is not to say that his success was easily won, or that every small farmer with relatively easy access to urban and suburban markets (as Madison has, being located between Sacramento and San Francisco) has an easy go of it, or that Americans for Healthy Agriculture (AHA) can just call for a million Mike Madisons to pop up across the land. Globalization and industrialization continue to drive the consoli-dation of farmland in multi-thousand-acre grain farms, dairy farms and livestock operations, shaping much of Americas 900 million agricultural acres. These farms are firmly entrenched in a system of corporate supply chains, industrial production schemes and federal subsidies, all of which were put in place before the impact of soil erosion, climate change, biodiversity, aquifer depletion and chemical pollution were fully understood. Theres a strong reason to be deeply concerned when instead of having 10 midsized dairy farms producing income whose owners spend it in town, you replace that with a large farm owned by a set of investors whose profits go running off to New York and Chicago, says Peter Carstensen, a professor of law emeritus at the University of Wisconsin law school. 1818 https://time.com/5736789/small-american-farmers-debt-crisis-extinction/142'