At a fundamental level, because we all need to eat. My wife and I can cut each others' hair (though we may be less than pleased with the results), but I can't grow enough food for us.
I think I understand the sentiment, but I don't agree with it. I am not grateful to small farmers, at least, not especially. I suppose I'm glad that everyone is playing their part, but I feel this way about anyone contributing to our society. They sell nothing that I cannot get just as good and cheaper from large and industrial farms.
I work on something that I would argue many people "need" in their life. But I don't expect anyone to be grateful to me. Of course they shouldn't. I'm doing my work for my own benefit, mostly. I think very little about the end users whose lives are made slightly easier by my work. I am certainly not doing my work out of a sense of altruism toward their well-being. I suspect that most farmers are the same. The production is too far removed from the consumption. This is not therapy, massage, teaching, or housekeeping. This is business.
To the extent small farmers do think of me, I hope they realize that I would rather pay a dollar less for the same eggs, even if it means they don't get to keep working their ideal job. It's a little sad, but I have bills, and childcare, and rent to pay. Those things are no less important than the expenses of a farmer.
But you might want to re-think your position, because you can also be on the receiving end. That big egg grower? He may feed the chickens exotic chemicals if it means they lay more frequently, in order to produce your one-dollar-cheaper eggs. Those same chemicals may reach any females in your household, either through the eggs or the groundwater, and may do interesting things to their monthly cycles. And so on with other chemicals and other kinds of farmers. It might be worth a buck to support smaller farmers, presuming that they see their customers as human beings who can't be fed that stuff.
That being said, it seems your idea is a counterfactual. If it isn't, I'd love to know, but I don't see any evidence after brief searching that there are health benefits to eggs from small farms.
We are not a microserice entity where each part _only_ needs to know their bit. Each person is expected to get by themselves which means that we need to care about how things are done.
It's why we try hard to educate our kids to know how things work, but as was said, production is separated from consumption, which to me is a big hurdle.
> Food is a major mechanism by which people are exposed to pollutants. Diet is thought to account for up to 90% of a person's PCB and DDT body burden.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Endocrine_disruptor#Routes_of_...
To me, it’s worth the extra dollar for the eggs if it supports a more sustainable model of farming. Food production is at the heart of our society, yet we’ve become distanced from it.
The cheap clothes, the cheap food — they’re not actually cheap. We’ve just ignored the cost of the externalities. The polluted waterways, full of nitrogen from industrial farms; the antibiotics; the rising co2 levels from damaged pasture that no longer sequesters carbon, and the trucks and airplanes that ship out-of-season produce across the world...