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.
I can see, then, China’s yen for imperialism. It’s rational. They need open land, and they’re too crowded to farm China itself any further.
The dairy farms I worked back then were under siege from the EPA. One of them was selling of its stock and parceling out land into horse ranches for rich people, because they couldn’t take the open hostility of the government for dairy farmers in Florida.
But in Namibia, you have malaria, tzitzi flies, irate locals and predators, unknown diseases, etc. Oh, well. It’s their funeral. Let the sun never set on their empire for a while.