And if you have to hire many many people to help you on your farm, your farm is too big.

"Get big or get out", the motto of the late '60s and early '70s, is precisely why we find ourselves in the current predicament. Food should never have been, nor should it ever be, a global commodity. Move to the food!.

One of the problems with your premise is that, for the most part, we don't grow food. We grow fuel, and corn syrup. And all those things that get processed down into eventually what becomes a twinkie.

We've stopped listening to the farm because we've lost touch with just exactly what it means to be a sustainable, functioning farm. Once we stop giving people fish, or seeds and some cow manure, and instead teach them how to fish, or how to hoe, tend and compost, the world will begin to feed itself.

For god's sake, read Wendell Berry and Michael Pollan. Or, better yet, listen to them.

This was a very disingenuous article. Yes, it made me angry. We don't know anymore where our food comes from, but because you won't support small farms because the bigger ones pay better and the smaller ones don't pay at all because they don't need you and Manuel, we must continue to be ignorant? Great. That makes sense.

Actually, I'm a big reader of Wendell Berry and Michael Pollan. I belong to a CSA when I am in New York. I grow herbs in my windowsill. I cook daily. I'm not sure what else you need from me in terms of my lifestyle credentials. I think that if we are going to actually make meaningful changes to the agricultural system in a way that helps folks along the whole chain--workers and consumers alike--we need to have an honest discussion about things like wages and working conditions and the importance of inspections and regulations. And if the U.S. is going to stop growing just corn for syrup and fuel, and move towards vegetables and things that can feed us, we ought to be doing some critical thinking about what that means for workers. (Unless you don't think that matters, that is.) The fact that we never talk about this stuff honestly--or dismiss it with a "we'll figure it out later"--is precisely the reason that sustainable ag gets dismissed as elitist, which in turn makes it feel incredibly irrelevant to most folks outside a very specific socioeconomic bracket.

My apologies if I came off sounding holier-than-thou. Not even close to my intention.

My concern with your article isn't with the notion that big farms are better for farm workers in particular, migrant or not. It's with the notion that you pretty much therefore conclude that it follows, then, that big farms are better in general. That to me isn't right thinking.

It's not that we should probably, oh, I don't know, try to have a discussion about whether or not we should be growing fruits and vegetables or if we should be growing Cocoa Puffs. It's that we're coming upon an age, not to sound too conspiratorial, where we're not going to have a choice as to whether we change, fundamentally, how we feed ourselves.

So, yes. I'll say it: When it comes to food production, we need to roll the clock back 40 or 50 years.

Dare we humble ourselves and look at what Brazil is/has been doing, and emulate them? (Though even that intuitive way of farming -- cover crops, grass fed livestock, rotation -- is starting to lose traction on account of its alleged, though misperceived, lack of efficiency.)