Personally, I would love to get all my food from small farms. Actually I would prefer to grow my own crops and hunt for my meat. I wish everyone could. But that is simply not possible today. There are far too many people. This ain’t 1950 anymore. In fact the population has doubled since 1950. I don’t think small “mom and pop” farms can keep up with the demand for food. I wish this weren’t the case but it is. The McDonaldization of everything is a direct result of overpopulation, in my opinion. We need to find active methods of population reduction before we can deal with the food industry. And nuking Africa is not an option.
I think Tyler Do’Urden got it completely right. You can have lots of people which requires industrial scale farming, or just a few people and everyone eats organic food.
This is why my thinking is that organic food is bad for the environment–if everyone on this planet wanted to (and could afford to) eat only organic vegetables, free range beef, etc. We’d have to use the entire land surface of the planet to provide enough food, and so those last bits of the Amazon, etc. would be cut down a little sooner than otherwise.