On the way home from an appointment, I drove past a sign at the side of the road: "Your farmers feed you, too."

The sign sparked a deep-thought rabbit hole that I haven't been able to fully leave behind since. If someone tells me that everyone is affected, my brain wants to find the exception. My first thought was the recluse who grows their own food but I kept wondering how true that statement is for most people.

Many of us are now fed by highly-processed foods in boxes. Most of the ingredients are not grown anywhere near you. So, do your local farmers actually feed you, too?

If your oranges are from Spain, your tomatoes from the Netherlands, your mangoes from Brazil, what part of your plate is filled by the local farmers who try to get your attention with the sign?

If your local farmers grow soy beans, corn, and grains for animal feed that gets shipped abroad, what part of our plates are they filling?

In our modern, globalized food system, there is a deep disconnect between the local farmers and the local consumers. While the farmer's market and market boxes, community-paid agriculture, and similar concepts exist, they are not how the majority of humans met their caloric needs, let alone their nutritional needs.

Do my local farmers actually feed me? Not the ones who put up the signs, not the ones trying to make me sympathize with industrial agriculture. We get our ingredients from three local-ish farms: a chicken farm where we pick up eggs and meat, a beef farm where we pick up milk and dairy products, as well as meat, and a produce farm where we pick up our veggies, fruit, and greens when we can't grow them ourselves. Industrial agriculture luckily has little to do with my meals.

And yet, whenever new rules are on the horizon to make agriculture less impact to the planet, the lobbies and players behind industrial agriculture start protesting, put up signs, try to remind us that our food depends on them. But who do they actually feed?

There was a farm close to where we lived before where I could pick up straw left over from the previous year to use as mulch for the garden. Two elderly men ran the show there, and I got talking with them. One of them was the father of the large-scale farmer who owned the farm across the street. Almost zero percent of his produce stays where it is grown. Almost all of it goes to the harbor. And almost all of it wasn't grown for human consumption.

Another thing stood out during that conversation. The farmer told me his son had lost the connection to the land. "He never gets out of the tractor anymore. All buttons and screens," he explained, clearly mourning a way of life he himself has still lived and loved.

When even the farmers have lost their connection to the land, who is stewarding the very soil that feeds us all?