The missing link in your article should be about small-scale processing for communities (in America). The free market competitive investment architecture destroyed the support mechanisms that “money in farmers’ pockets” could be spent on. Most of the farmers I’ve worked with have the same problems (besides useful, affordable labor force): no small-scale machinery, no small-scale processing, burdensome regulations on food safety that are designed for factories shipping food outside local use, and incredibly stupid zoning and planning based on the automobile, mass production (cheap food=cheap people) and city growth instead of people empowered to be useful to their places.

The food programs that work in Africa and other third world countries (microloans, farmer education, etc) work because they don’t have as much government getting in the way of processing operations, they have people so poor and hungry that they’ll work at anything to stay alive, and they don’t have huge debts for land that lock their production and contract choices to the bank’s payment schedules.

We keep hearing about how farmers are subsidized, but there’s no talk at all about subsidizing the support level (hardware stores, startup small equipment makers, on-farm processing of food and delegation of health and safety to local communities instead of an FDA which wants nothing to do with agriculture and a USDA that wants nothing to do with health.