The truth is that when this nation chose to eliminate four million farmers (with their families, hired help, buildings, and boundaries) on the advice of the colleges of agriculture, the agricultural bureaucracy, and the agribusiness corporations, it committed a sort of cultural genocide.
I at least like this line. But look, this is fundamentally just settlers being devoured themselves. For a few hundred years the enormous frontier of newly-annexed land made possible the existence of small farms. Now consolidation happens and land is priced at non-settler rates. There are only off ramps and no on ramps to holding a small farm, as people get old and sell to whatever big ag company is offering the most because their kids or grandkids don’t want to live rural.
The solution is land reform, a term utterly alien to the US. The idea that land ownership could be reshaped according to democratic priorities instead of who has the most money is desirable but I do not know how to get there. I do however suspect that a large coalition of aggrieved white farm owners does not lie along that path.
The US killed even liberals in Latin America over mild land reform