>If people reading this wanted to pursue a meaningful solution via data, my advise is to look at the scaling of the farm-to-consumer market, and how to enable larger distributed networks of small independent farms to sell to customers.
Yes, I am implying farmers markets. There is not currently an effective way for these small farms to network their production in aggregate to sell at a level commensurate to an industrial farm. This is the reason big ag can sell for cheaper.
If farmers markets could achieve cost-parity with big grocery (by competing at-scale) then distributed small-scale farming could contribute to solving many issues in climate, environment, nutrition, etc
To make this work there would need to be a big social push towards eating in line with the seasons again (which was obviously the norm for 99.99% of the history of humanity). I think this might be a hard sell, people are now very used to being able to buy whatever they want whenever they want, e.g. strawberries in january
Seasonal eating of farm-fresh foods would certainly make free public healthcare a more reasonable proposal in the US. It would surely cut into the bottom line of the pharma industry
are you implying a farmer's market? they exist.