The future of rural America belongs to those who have the vision and courage to claim it. The conventional wisdom is that farmers must either get bigger or get out of farming. The conventional wisdom is wrong. True, there is no future in continuing to produce basic agricultural commodities - corn, hogs, soybeans, cattle, etc. But, there is a future in producing the food and fiber products that people really want by methods that both can be sustained by nature and will be sustained by society.
People have different tastes and preferences.
We are not all alike, as mass marketers would have us believe. Nature is inherently diverse - even though industrial production methods demand homogeneity or sameness. These incompatibilities are primary sources of the non-sustainability of industrial systems. Sustainable systems must conform to marketing and ecological niches inherent in nature - including human nature. Small farms are real farms.