My parents farmed their whole life and had part time town jobs primarily for health insurance.

>With the mega farms came efficiency, and if you're trying to be an inefficient small farmer, you're going to have a bad time competing.

Essentially over time you had to work more land or raise more livestock in exchange for a steady quality of life.

The cost of food people ate did not at all scale down with the profit the folks working the land. The cost of inputs went up, yields went up, prices went down, and entities higher up in the supply chain took an ever increasingly large amount of the pie.

At the same time farmland became an attractive investment vehicle to store value so prices shot up so that it will take 30-40 years to pay for the land you bought by working it, before considering interest. (which is much much worse than many other investments)

You don't want this because smaller farmers can pay more attention to their products and create food with higher quality and more variety than corporate farming with industrial methods.

As for my going back to the farm eventually, honestly just the concept of making my career producing the inputs for ethanol, feed for confinement animals, and industrial food products (soybean oil, corn syrup, etc.) doesn't seem to be of particularly high value.