Yes, but I'd temper my sympathy with the knowledge that small farmers have mostly been pushed out by extremely large corporations. I have considerably less sympathy for them.
Most of the first tier and probably some of the second are rich-people tax-dodge "farms", I bet. The rest of the first category is hobby-farming—my family probably counted as among that group, at times, because my dad grew up on a farm and liked doing some farm-stuff on farm-zoned land as an adult, but it represented almost no actual income—he worked an ordinary job, the farming was a hobby with books that just happened to sometimes be slightly in the black.
[EDIT] Oh my god, wait, that's revenue, not profit? I take it back, the entire second tier is tax-dodges and hobby farms, too.
No one in the US is living on < 10k of farm REVENUE, and almost no one can live on < 100K of sales. They’d be lucky to clear 10-20% of that after costs, if that.
That’s not even hand to mouth/subsistence even in rural TN.
yeah, it's pretty sad, right? but that's what they do.
mostly it's subsistence farming - e.g. they raise enough food for themselves. and of course, every able bodied family member works for minimum wage somewhere, when they can. but that does NOT make it a hobby farm.
yes, in fact people in the US make the equivalent of less than 10K a year and still live.
That’s using the farm mostly to feed themselves, and then supplementing with a bit of income here and there for ‘hard currency’ - which is very different in my mind at least from supporting themselves with the farm (as a business). But I see your point.
That’s definitely subsistence farming, and common the world
over in some form.
What I'm getting from that is chart is... yes, farming is completely dominated by large companies. Something close to 90% of farms by number comprise as much as (but probably less than) 25% of the economic output. This is making a wild (but I would guess conservative) assumption of what ">1M" translates to.
If I'm reading that wrong, I would appreciate the correction.
You're right in terms of economic output, but that's not the only measure, particularly when it comes to politics; small farmers might not do much for the economy, but they still vote.
I'm supportive of doing something about how water is allocated, but a strategy that writes off the meaningful number of marginal farmers as economic noise is a strategy that results in tons of opposing ads with genuinely sympathetic characters.