Generations of family farms have been selling out over the course of my life due to the bad economics. Dairy farms consolidate, and fields are worth more for building houses on than for growing corn or soy or wheat.

It used to be at least one of the kids would take over the farm, but now as parents age out, there's simply too many better opportunities with less hard effort out there and fewer are interested in staying in the business.

I think there's a good argument that farming has always been difficult and the ideal of the quaint family farm was really not very pleasant in reality much of the time. A local university ran some numbers a while back and noted that the early farmstead plots in the US were not large enough to support a farm for long, even at that time.