The Disappearing Landscape of Family Farms

It wasn’t that long ago that one of every three people in this country were farmers. But over the last century small farming has been almost entirely replaced by agri-business, land development and better paying jobs in practically every other industry. Farmer, activist, and educator Charlie Thompson grew up in southwest Virginia amid a disappearing landscape of family farms…

His seventh book, GOING OVER HOME, A Search for Rural Justice in an Unsettled Land digs deeper into the bucolic myth of small scale farming in America, through the lens of his own family’s experiences.  “Even though we’ve had the right language,” that speaks of supporting farmers, “ starting with Thomas Jefferson and his contemporaries’ own words, we really have made it next to impossible for the small grower to really compete with those that are the large growers.”

Thompson comes from a long line of family farmers.  As a child, he loved visiting his grandparents’ farm in Franklin County and loved everything about farming. In delving deeper as an adult, he learned about the darker side of farming. “And as I started to look back, I realized that even in the very beginning of our country when plantations that used enslaved people, were growing much of the crops for export, there had never been a level playing field. There’s never been a time in our past, in the good old days of agriculture, when, when everyone was making a good living. People in rural areas have been innovative and entrepreneurial and figured out ways to survive. But I realized in the farm crisis of the 1980s that all that was coming to a head at that point had really been 150 years in the making.”

Today’s trade embargoes are only the latest blow, says Thompson. For years, government assistance for farming has been heavily weighted toward large corporate entities with their economies of scale. “If they are more efficient, why do they need government aid?  If we take that away,” he argues, “and give special attention to young people, who are trying to raise food on a local level and provide it to consumers that they know and can be in a community with, I think that we’re really going to open up a tremendous entrepreneurial wave.”