More Young People Running Small Farms?

One of the fault lines in the green/food movement is shown here.  Ideally they'd like to see more young farmers and small farmers.  They'd also like conservation. But, as quoted from Farm Policy:

“He [Sen. Baucus MT] says there needs to be a balance in the conservation reserve program lands saying, ‘CRP [Conservation Reserve Program] tends to have an adverse effect on some of the smaller towns, on implement dealers for example. Sometimes farmers just go south and have land in CRP and take the income. We’re actually starting to reduce CRP in a way to help younger people get in to agriculture.’”

That's been there since the beginning, or at least the 1930's.  If you take land out of agricultural production, whether for conservation purposes because it's below-average land and subject to erosion, etc., or because you want to reduce production in order to increase prices, you can endanger the people who depend on farmers to make a living and by increasing the value of the remaining farm land you make it harder for people to begin farming.

The old saw goes: there's no such thing as a free lunch, meaning there's always tradeoffs.