Definitely voluntary. Need to get more young people interested in it and provide the education with teaching farms.
I follow a bunch of market gardeners on youtube and they can grow a lot of food and about the only input is a whole lot of compost. There's a guy in Kentucky that grows lettuce year round. In summer he has to use certain varieties and plan for afternoon shade, use shade cloth too. Mulch helps keep the soil cool. Using high tunnels aka unheated greenhouse, there are a lot of things he can grow year round and everything else has it's season extended by two months on either end. I think he can grow tomatoes 8 or 9 months out of 12.
He does no-till and uses no chemical fertilizers and does almost no pest control and he's organic so what little he does isn't with chemicals. His soil is so healthy from using a lot of compost and never tilling that the plants are healthy enough to where the bugs don't mess with them. Bugs and disease like unhealthy plants. He also plants trap crops, does companion planting and if need be, row cover for protection.
This is part of his farm
Regional and seasonal for many things and ship stuff like citrus, bananas, avocados etc that can only be grown in certain areas. Makes no sense to ship tomatoes and peppers hundreds or thousands of miles year round but that's what's happening, much of it from Central/South America.
Meat is a big one. Need more than four companies, two of them foreign owned, processing meat. I can buy locally raised and processed meats 20 miles away and their prices are in line with grocery store prices. It's a Missouri Dept of AG inspected facility. Much tastier beef than the store and a little more tender too and I know the cattle weren't loaded with antibiotics like the feed lots do.
They probably make a lot more money than all the cattle farmers here that sell at the auction where the cattle then head for the feed lot. Those guys are getting $2/lb at most. The Save-A-Lot grocery store near me has a lot of beef from Brazil. I drive by many hundreds of head of beef cattle on the way to that store. How much sense does that make? A state like Missouri shouldn't need beef shipped in from another state, let alone another country.
It was something else, driving by hundreds of head of cattle to the grocery store and seeing the beef section bare in Spring 2020. I had plenty of meat in the freezer though. Massie's had a bill for years called the PRIME Act to address the issue.