I wonder how many people like that really exist.
Oh, quite a few.
Actually they probably do, at least if things are defined loosely enough; although they're obviously also a small (and always declining) section of agriculture in mercenary terms. The Californian agriculture industry (emphasis on the latter word) isn't really all that typical of wider patterns in North American agriculture (although it's an important part of the pattern).
Elimination of genuine farms (as opposed to factories that produce agricultural products) has (and insofar as it's happend has had) a serious impact on food quality. There are cultural and community issues which ought to speak for themselves and there are also often environmental and animal welfare concerns.
It would be better to eliminate industrialised agriculture.
Food prices are very, very low at the moment and have been for years (here's an easy way of making yourself feel really, really sick. Visit a discount food retailer of some sort, go to the meat section, look at the cheapest stuff. Note first the prices, then consider how that sh
ite came to be produced.
Then consider the fact that it's the poorest and weakest sections of the population that are eating that stuff). What's hurting, quite literally as it happens, poor people in America (everywhere in the "west" actually, but it's especially bad in America. Off the scale in some respects) is the poor quality of the food that they eat. Much of this is due to the laughable standard of regulation, but the dominance of industrialised agriculture is a big factor as well (and of course the latter is one big reason for the former...).
Yeah, ending subsidies to industrial agriculture would certainly be a good thing.
