Canadian Politics Today

https://grist.org/article/ednote/

Farmers  (like Miners, Foresters, Fishers and such) are often evoked as the heart of a nation's workers.  But about 2% of people make their living primarily through farming now, as opposed to 40% a century ago according to this article.

This is a good read about what is happening in farming.  It also makes sense that China is threatening the US with Soy tariffs in retaliation as those people are in Iowa and Trumpland.

Our survival depends on 2% of the population. Something to consider.

Such is the risk in specialization, I suppose.  Your survival also depends on banking and online banking security.  Probably a handful of people in Canada.

Different kind of survival. No money, surely many will suffer but you can’t eat money. No food, everyone dies. Modern western society has no concept of what a famine actually means.

Seems to me we lived a long time without Google, but not so long w/o grub.

Only if there is food to be bought.

Breakdown of the economy would be an instant disaster is the point. 

I grew up on a small farm in Ontario and before I went to school I had an education about farming in that I learned that you fed hay into one end of cows, horses, goats, etc.,  and then you shoveled the **** out of the other end, kept it all winter long and in the spring spread it over the and by God the next thing you knew you had more hay to keep the cycle going. That cycle doesn't pay attention to any high fallutin' bullshit. Ignore it and we die.

Food is traded like other commodities but it is anything but just another commodity. There is no question that our planet would not be able to sustain 7 billion people without modern farming practices and there are lots of economic arguments to be made around big and single crop farming. Regardless, farming is about the cultivation and manipulation of life itself.  Along with a breathable atmosphere and drinkable water, food is necessary for our survival. Take just one of those three away and we die, so the comparison with coal and other commodities is not valid. Food production is also subject to the vagaries of weather, climate and disease which makes single crop production more risky.

Modern farming and the ability to ship out of season foods all over the world have made us oblivious to the real consequences of not having access to food. As recently as the 1840's a potato blight caused a million Irish to starve and another million to leave the country. That was in Europe, not sub Saharan Africa.

Forget any romantic pathos, family farms just put much more back into their local economies than industrial farming

Well, you have made a good case for family farming. 

Are there still areas in which family farms thrive ?  It seems to me that they do in niche areas only.

Quite a few in my neck of the woods, poultry, dairy and berries mostly but other crops too. Fruit and wineries in the Okanagan as well.