.> Michael Pollan said the issue goes beyond one individual. “Farmers inheriting their land has long been commonplace in American agriculture. Does it advantage white farmers? Absolutely, but that injustice didn’t begin with Joel Salatin; it began with Indian removal and other historical crimes against people of color that forced them off their land,” he said. “This is something the food movement, and American agriculture more generally, needs to acknowledge and come to terms with.” ...

.> America’s oldest farmers—Indigenous people—generally regarded the soil as a commons and worked it cooperatively. Many Indigenous nations, along with a number of religious and ethnic communities, continue the practice to this day. But the notion of the private farm, be it a pair of greenhouses or tens of thousands of acres, is what came to dominate American farming, and it’s taken particular hold among the farm-to-table cohort...

.> Bewitched by the lone-wolf agrarian myth, Newman argues, new farmers “trade the benefits of agrarian collectivism—living wages, retirement, a sane workload, profitability, survivability, and the capacity to make a game-changing impact in the marketplace,” for rugged independence: “complete autonomy in decision-making, the ability to grow what/where/how we want, set our prices as we please, sell wherever we choose, and work ourselves into the ground.” He added: “In short, we’ve done the most modern-American thing possible: bartered away our quality of life for the freedom to be miserable.”...

.> For one, we need more real talk about the failed individual-family model of farming—especially for anyone without access to inherited land—and the search for new, more robust, and realistic alternatives.