Dropping prices and the loss of foreign markets have devastated too many family farmers.
But the fact of the matter is, is that a lot of family farmers are still struggling.
WHITEHOUSE: President Obama��s Town Hall in Cannon Falls, Minnesota
Ordinary families, including family farmers, basically your incomes and your wages have flatlined over the last decade.
MST's members achieve their dream, they, like other family farmers, have to struggle to earn a living.
But food is an important component of it, and this is something that actually can benefit farmers, particularly family farmers.
Where family farmers used to take their piglets straight to market, they now raise them on behalf of the large warehouse farmers.
But yesterday I found out about corporate sponsorship at Farm Aid, an organization that supports family farmers and that Neil Young helped to found.
Farm Aid needs corporate sponsors to help underwrite the costs of its 2013 concert event, which will increase the resources available to support its work with family farmers.
And many times, in many places around this country, in rural communities, independent family farmers are the biggest bang for our buck in terms of creating jobs with independent businesses that depend on farmers.
WHITEHOUSE: President Obama Closes Forum on Jobs and Economic Growth
The organization accepts sponsorship dollars from food-related companies that pay family farmers a fair price, have ecological standards for farming practices, and make their commitment to sustainable and family farming known to their customers.
It has about five windmills on one property, 52 in this area -- 52 wind farms generating incredible amounts of energy and, by the way, helping family farmers with a little bit of extra income.
Last year a group of organic and family farmers sued Monsanto over similar issues, saying the pervasiveness of genetically modified crops elevates the risk of contamination of their crops with patented GMO traits, and raises the risk they will be sued by Monsanto for patent infringement.
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And whereas we have tended in the past to put a lot of money into the hands of corporate agribusiness out here in our rural communities, they have not proven to be the bang for the buck that independent family farmers have in terms of job creation that are good-paying and fair jobs in our communities.
WHITEHOUSE: President Obama Closes Forum on Jobs and Economic Growth
Alvin Hall was born into a family of farmers and fishermen in rural Florida.
Agung Rai was born to a family of farmers who can trace their history back to the 14th century.
At the Agroturismo Vinya d'en Palerm in Sant Miquel, the Palerm family - farmers of this land since 1898 - make their own wine in a vast plastic barrel just behind the main house.
"Our service was terrible - that was the assumption from the beginning, " says the Ivy Leaguer, whose ethnic Chinese family founded Thai Farmers (No. 96 in the 500) in 1945.
You want children and their parents to value the family farm lifestyle and farmers?
Tapping into old family connections, he convinced farmers to sell their land to him on credit.
Mr Bush won Arkansas last November, but the state's Democratic senator, Blanche Lincoln, who grew up in a farming family, is now rallying farmers against him.
The story of the city cow houses - run by young farmers who moved from their family farms in Yorkshire to Liverpool - is told in a new book, Urban Cowboys, by Cheshire author Duncan Scott.
On tiny plots, and often poor-quality soil, without modern equipment or farming methods, and sometimes beset by land disputes, many peasant farmers struggle to feed their family and grow just a little extra to sell in the village market.
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The family speaks about its responsibilities to the farmers, the requests for money or more work, the cost of the free medical care the hacienda provides, the training they offer, the factory jobs they are trying to create in a new industrial estate.
The farmers retained strong links with their family farms in Yorkshire, but many settled in the city.
So did Wang Shijun, a former village party secretary and son of farmers who still lived in the family cave.
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The countryside is becoming a place for the very old or the very young, and no one in the Tang family wants their children to grow up to be farmers.
They also play a key role in developing local and regional food systems that support the sustainability of family farms, revitalize communities and provide places for farmers and consumers to meet.
During deliberations, which capped a five-day trial in Sauk County Circuit Court, dozens of farmers, food-rights activists and Hershberger family members filled the courthouse, sharing raw milk from Mr. Hershberger's farm.
Alarm bells started to ring at the firm's headquarters when a Cadbury-financed study by the University of Sussex and the University of Accra found that the average production of a cocoa farmer had dropped to 40% of potential yield, and that the children of cocoa farmers did not want to work in the family business any more.
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