I'd like to think of this whole worldwide push to make the small farmer an anachronism. My recollection of this first example is colored by Cold War education but Soviet Russia offered the first massive example of recently freed serfs having just been given their own land were instead then pushed onto collective farms. Resistance was massive with massive retribution. Whatever socialist benefits the farmers were to glean the nation as a whole had a long path of suffering even if Stalin hadn't come along. The victory of the state enabled the disastrous installation of Lamarckian evolution theories on the uniform system. Russian soil and climate is harsh enough on crops without a crazy fix by an ignoramus on top. In "Animal Farm" the capitalist tyrant, the "Farmer" finally comes back to praise the system of new slavery. Of course in my time it was never pointed out how capitalism and socialism would come to share abuses of humankind on the methodological level and the elites of course share the same profits.
Anyway, we have had stories of many countries where subsistence farming is undercut for unsustainable, even insane global trade practices. Then, connected to that or not, of countries using these same principles lumping together farms into corporate "collective farms" where of course, fewer farmers are needed as wage serfs and no COOP model of course. The COOP model survives as a populist survivor, but the entire world food system, wasted, stressed, gamed by dependence on scientific methods against nature, is regressively in the hands of a few. Those few have their overall control of farming based on power and profit remote and above any connection to the land or the basic necessities of life that farming represents. One corporation, Monsanto is on one hand reducing seed variety and availablity while introducing their own quickly manufactured GMO food.
Now, for all the seeming absence of global warming from these basic capitalist goals and socialism enslaved to rich elites(mere continuation of human history and farming) the "it's good for you" also has a tinge of preparation for global food crisis when nations will try to stretch their food supply with ruthless control over the little guy farmer once and for all.
Peak Agriculture might become one of those "alarmist" theories that we will see enacted out first regionally, then globally- the only result being the shrinking of the Malthus population level to a strife torn, possibly sustainable" new map.
I read a lot of the Gear books on Native Americans, the various forms of society apocalypse being a big focus of those thousands of years of tribal history. Population grows as food is available. When a bad patch comes, human ingenuity and human power games, divisions ante up. The nomad thing for various reasons becomes a last resort. Then a crisis point hits when the stretching and the strife fail in a cold snap/draught. By this point the stressed meat sources have been hunted out and there is nothing but seeds or fighting over your neighbor's food supply(which destroys huge chunks of that supply AND people- a useless math). The Five Nations had to have a near Armageddon to come together or dissolve as a people. Others were unable to shake off a tyranny that continued all the way to the complete end of their civilization where survivors fled to better areas.
Nomadism of the few is harsh enough a solution and deadly to many but mega civilizations built on power and rivalry rather than cooperation in themselves fall harder. In our day we are globally stressed. Harder to find the sweet spots much less move to them in if the stretched, brilliant modern farming system snaps.
You might think that big farms even more tightly managed are a big answer to global warming or that they are merely a symptom of capitalist vultures feeding off weak victims, in fact the last of their own food supply. TPP is an overt vulture power play not cooperation. Time is running out and upping the pain for even arriving at cooperation models. The nearly secondary(and almost as secret) goal of actually improving the food supply is TiPPed to the vultures and a doomed system. If it works it will exponentially be more at the whims of nature and sheer luck than any individual farmer working his single plot of land. But the the people who control it for insanely surreal "profit" are remote from the consequences until the bitter end- or until beaten into change.
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