There's a bit of a myth about how farming should be, or was, but it really just had some booms here and there and then busts rather than any real golden age that lasted very long.
As for boom and bust - agriculture is like investing. You may not make much in a year, and you may lose money in two or three, but over the course of your lifetime, you accumulate wealth (land) and prosper. The issue, at least in my area, is that property is just prohibitively expensive. I am by no means in a hot area of the country, but the price of an acre of land has almost tripled in the last 15 years.
Also - that so much of our food is produced by so few individuals is an incredibly recent development, like less than 40 years recent development.
I'm not really sure what all that adds up to, but I'm sure it's something.
There's a dangerous mentality which comes across farmers frequently. The neighbor is getting out of farming for whatever reason and putting their land up for sale. Land is typically held for decades, and having any of your neighbors selling their land may never happen again in your lifetime.
So farmers end up paying ridiculous amounts of money for land which will give them a very small positive, or often a negative, return on investment.
And good luck if you want to get into farming. The capital expenditure is ridiculous, even just for 40 acres of land. Medium quality farmland was running $6,800/acre in 2017. [1] $272,000 get you 40 acres without buildings, equipment, animals, seeds, a well, etc. It's so easy to hit $500k even if you went with used equipment. If you tried this, you'd probably want to build your own brand and get people willing to pay a significant premium for your product rather than trying to grow commodity products.
[1] http://dreamdirt.com/blog/iowa-farm-land-land-values-up-2-in...
The huge companies get involved and take the price for 40 acres from a relatively sensible $120,000 (what I purchased at 10 years ago) to $750,000+.
If you can't work at a scale that is so much larger than anything a family farm can, then you're priced out immediately. And if the farming mega-corps are not interested, it's because the ground isn't fit for row-cropping and the mega-corp nationwide hunting trek outfitting companies will double your bid without blinking.
It's a sad state of affairs, really. The only people who have enough money to play the game are either corporations or are in their 90's and bought the ground when it was $30/acre.
I don't think it's sad, more efficient users of resources are bidding them up which is exactly what they should be doing. The idea of a small farmer is great and has a lot of American nostalgia, but in general a giant company that produces much more food on the same land is way better for the country as a whole. It gets messy with subsidies, but the idea of more efficient players replacing small timers is how we keep upping productivity year after year and get richer as a country.
A handful of corporations are gaining massive influence over our political and legal systems. The "small farmer" is precisely what our country was founded on and was considered our strength. It allowed us to be something closer to a true democracy as opposed to the functional oligarchy we're running at this point. You're not an independent citizen if you have to depend on an employer to keep you fed, sheltered, and healthy.
It's only more efficient if you consider "generation of theoretical GDP" the ultimate badge of efficiency. If it's sitting in some banker's pocket, extra productivity doesn't really benefit anyone.
It is more than nostalgia. It's a strength. What we're seeing in SO many areas is just a race to the bottom.
For most people in most of history, agriculture was subsistence. A bad year means you go hungry and possibly die. Far from being a stable source of food, in countries such as China, there was pretty much always some region that was undergoing food scarcity (famine) at any given point in time.
The thing is this won't cause one acre of farmland to go unused it just means other farmers will have larger farms.
The type and amount of data they have is startling. The issue is there are so many variables that are uncontrollable, or unpredictable in the time frame of a year or an entire growing season. These include weather and climate, and political climate across the world.
When a small-time farmer from my neck of the woods can sell directly to China, he has to worry about our politics and theirs, as well as the weather here, there, and at all stops between.
So, in other words, it's easier to predict what will be worth more, but no more easy to predict what will grow or what will sell well in 2 years or so. Add in soil conditions and requirements and costs, and you have a complicated picture.