In Seattle, over breakfast, Chris Feise, director of the Center for Sustaining Agriculture, picks up the thread. We didn't choose to get there, he says, referring to the current market system that is increasingly consolidated, squeezing smaller producers out of the system. "Things got larger," he says. "As they got larger, we overproduced." At a certain point, overproduction requires export.

"The export model only serves certain folks. But the real contradiction is, is it really serving the wheat growers, even if they're farming 30,000 acres? No, without [federal price supports], they'd be busted. So who's it serving? ADM and Cargill. They're making money.

"What a goofy thing! Why should we pursue this model that's basically undermining our community?"

Even in the early days of our country, things weren't quite as pure and agrarian as we like to think, writes WSU anthropologist John Bodley in his Power of Scale. Anti-federalists Thomas Jefferson and James Madison feared not only a powerful central government no better than the British monarchy, but that a large government would be undemocratic. They wanted the United States to remain a nation of small independent farmers. However, writes Bodley, "Just as with the signers of the Declaration of Independence, urban interests and large wealth holders were clearly overrepresented among the delegates [to the Constitutional Convention]. There were sixteen large planters, but only two small farmers. Delegates were predominately large property owners, merchants, and professionals."

By the early part of the 20th century, borne by the momentum of mechanization and the internal combustion engine, industrial agriculture had firmly entrenched itself. The Agricultural Adjustment Act of 1933, writes Bodley, set up the first farm subsidy programs and "was heavily influenced by commercial interests that favored large farms over small.

"By 1987, the hundred largest corporate farms produced more than 10 percent of all farm products. Concentration characterized the United States's entire food system. By 1997 there were only 1.9 million farms, far below the peak of 6.8 million in 1935, and the largest 70,000, the top 3.6 percent, produced nearly 60 percent of total agricultural sales. The smallest 963,000 farms (50 percent), produced only 1.5 percent of sales."

At the Harrah Café, I am enjoying some of the best stuffed peppers I've ever had. (Click here for the recipe.) Of course, they're Inaba peppers. Inaba grows beautiful peppers. As I eat, farmers come and go, and I wonder if this really means anything to those urban folks at the Lake City farmers market. If Harrah just disappeared, would anyone notice?

A giant crop sprayer sits parked across the street. Some of the guys in the café farm thousands of acres. But they still consider themselves "small" compared to the giant corporate farms of California's Central Valley. And regardless of their place on the economic scale, these guys are the Harrah community. Is this part of the vision those farmers market shoppers want?

 And what does it matter? Isn't economics economics? Are we after all just swept along with a historical tide, unable to make and choose what we want and need?

No, says Feise, along with many others who believe passionately that rural community is vital to American culture, and that its continuance is possible.

"Washington agriculture needs to be in the business of taking a fresh look," he says. "We need to keep looking for different ways of operating within the paradigm. Maybe we need to create a new paradigm.

"It's not going to be the same old family farm that Jefferson envisioned. It will be a different kind of thing. But is it possible to design rural societies in ways that are viable and healthy and don't have these (economic) leaks?

"I think it is." He thinks a moment. "I mean in theory it's possible."

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“By taking people off the land, you're... hurting the towns, the schools, the community institutions, the churches and social organizations.”