Family farms still provide 90 percent of U.S. agricultural output, and these include giant conventional farms as well as very small farms where the primary farmworker has a primary source of income aside from working the land. But the actual number of farmers and ranchers has been falling since the Industrial Revolution got under way in the early 19th century.

Percentage of American Labor Force in Agriculture

1800
83 percent

1810
84 percent

1820
79 percent

1830
71 percent

1840
63 percent

1850
55 percent

1860
53 percent

1870
50 percent

2012
< 2 percent

My friend, Janice, grew up in the 1960s on a farm in the Connecticut River Valley. Her delightful stories of farm life present a microcosm of the historical path traced by The Food Disruptors series: food production in its rich, gnarly intricacies responding to changing market needs.

At the turn of the last century, Janice's immigrant grandparents, each alone, when they were only 15 and 16, found their ways from Poland through Ellis Island to farmland in Western Massachusetts. They worked for others, saved relentlessly, and finally could afford to purchase their own land.

Notably, the town of Hadley, near where they settled, had boomed as the major supplier of broomcorn to meet the growing nation's demand for brooms. This crop severely depleted the soil. The immigrants, bringing with them ag knowledge from hundreds of years of farming culture, knew how to rotate crops, plant nitrogen-rich cover crops, and modify operations to recharge the soil, while periodic flooding from the river re-infused the alluvial meadows with nutrients. By the time Janice came along, the farm and its surrounding wild lands were fertile and bursting with diversity.

With her grandparents, parents, and four siblings, Janice's family experience centered on growing cash crops -- at first, tobacco -- and food to feed themselves as well as eking an income out of surplus food they sold at a roadside stand. From the time she was a very little girl, Janice had her hands in the soil and on the plants -- preparing the land for sowing, weeding, harvesting, cleaning, and selling the produce. Rudimentary processing involved prepping vegetables for the local grocery produce counters, preserving food for the winter months, boiling down maple sap into syrup, and putting up root crops in the cold-storage bin in the floor of the barn.

It seems surprising that the urbane, successful woman who brings us these stories once road the back of her grandfather's plow horse while he dug his hand-guided plow into the furrows that would bed his crops. This surprise underlies The Food Disruptors podcast: we ARE close to the sources of our food in time. And today with large-scale food industrialization and the globalization of markets, we need to remind ourselves just where our food really does come from and how it got to our plates. The past is not so very far away in our food system; acknowledging the realities of farming may help us salvage the future of our food system.