[ratsforhorses]

I completely agree, I think the problem with "agricultural" land is that due to WW2 (in western Europe) we jumped too quickly in the 50's from a largely rural society to mechanised farming to pick up the slack from all that surplus war production and lack of (killed off) manpower. The wealthy have used the captive cheap labour force to fill it's offices, factories and rental tenements... Governments have made bigger farms a priority and as in NZ they have become the playthings of hedge funds and corporations (where ironically a Maori once told me something that still sticks with me as profoundly one of the best ways to manage land, telling me "in our living space people have their houses but it's communally owned land, ie " your house, our land") To certain extent our society is focusing on using farming largely for "junk" food, ie wheat and other grains for bread and bakery, corn for glucose syrop, rapeseed for oil used in biofuel, palm oil, sugar beet... and of course, meat and diary... (i heard something like 60% of straw is burned in Germany...) rather than focusing on letting people produce fruit and vegetables in small-scale holdings... Here in Romania a lot of people still live in the countryside (40%?) government is sidelining people selling on the street or in markets and the westernized , yuppified youth is being sucked into the glamour and anonymity of huge supermarkets full of too much stuff but so convenient...