Consumers want the opportunity to buy foods produced in a sustainable way. They present a value-added marketing opportunity for farmers to capture a price premium on food produced to meet that demand. Programs to buy such protection provide an income opportunity for farmers while improving farm prices by reducing production. Farm workers want decent pay and safe working conditions. Requiring that makes it harder for the large farms that rely on hired labor to undercut family sized farms.
Family farming needs new allies if it is to have a future.
The number of family farmers and their political influence are falling. For example, when cuts were recently required in farm program spending, the commodity groups representing program crops opposed measures efforts to close loopholes in the limitation imposed on payments to big farms. They instead supported cuts that fell disproportionately on moderate-sized family farms. That group developed proposals to make federal policy more supportive of sustainable agriculture and family farming, and pressed for those proposals in the 1990 Farm bill. That effort resulted in some modest improvements in federal policy.