In the 1800s each farmer grew enough food each year to feed three to five people. By 1995, each farmer was feeding 128 people per year. And the trend has continued to accelerate. One by one, farmers have retired or given up farming. Outside investors or neighbors have bought out those vacated farms.
Homesteads now sit abandoned.
Farmers of the larger tracts are faced with tearing down these old houses and plowing across their yards. Occasionally the homestead's windbreak is left, testament to the family that once lived on this acreage and now remains as a ridge of shade inside an expanse of corn or soybeans. Aldo Leopold, writing in the 1920s - 1940s, was perhaps one of the first voices calling for a different approach to agriculture. Examine each question in terms of what is ethically and esthetically right, as well as what is economically expedient. A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability and beauty of the biotic community.