The real farming in the US isn’t done by good ol’ boys in overalls anymore. They are industrialized enterprises with highly qualified management teams on top of the operations, and, well, in my experience anyway, illegals doing the grunt work. That’s what I saw in the Florida panhandle dairy farms, anyway, back when I worked on a couple of them.
Basically Collective Farms, run more efficiently than the Soviet ones.
Depends on the sector. Family farms are going away, but are still significant. The industrial farms are more profitable, but even so it’s a tough dollar without a great ROI.
Big issue is the cost of land. Let’s say I want to buy a ranch. On arid land in Wyoming, I can get a small ranch, about 1200-1300 acres for about $1.7 mil. Or roughly $1,300 per acre. In Namibia I can get a 23,000 acre ranch for a little more than $1.3 mil. Or roughly $60 an acre. That’s a whole lot less capital being invested per acre to produce say cattle or sheep.