If you sell a commodity and your competitors are far more efficient, you will lose in the end. Change the commodity from wheat to mining silver and nobody has their heartstrings pulled for you.
Ultimately people aren’t siding with family farms for economics or fairness reasons - they are doing it to support the losing underdog or anti-modernism nostalgia.
Farms also shape rural communities, literally and figuratively.
>Ultimately people aren’t siding with family farms for economics or fairness reasons
What would you call Community supported Agriculture? (https://www.kneehighfarm.com/what-is-csa)the farm to table movement? Farmers markets?
Meaning it's a perishable good, it's a different market. It's good to have a lot of small farms to not have monopolies and as a stopgap to massive crop failures/blight or just bad management.
Like corn: the existence of extra corn (currently making ethanol) to turn into food in case of emergency/war, so it's subsidized.
Meaning no one has a personal reason to care about the plight of a silver mine
Similarly I don’t care if it is a 5 acre family farm or a 100k acre corporation that supplies the corn I eat.
Efficiency creates fragile systems.