Among the titans of commodity cash crops lies a small vegetable farm, the Table Top Farm, run by a two young families who have an optimistic vision in a tough world of big agriculture.  The partnership between the Corbin and Gran families resulted in the creation of the farm in 2010 with the goal to offer fresh produce to customers through the CSA program as well as direct and wholesale transactions.  The farm is growing year by year as they are expanding their customer base and investing in new equipment and facilities.  The joint farming families, one of which live in a rented house on the farm site, do not own the land they are farming, but instead rent it and pay a yearly fee to continue their operation.  At this point in time, TableTop Farm does not have the funds needed to purchase the land but hopes to someday have the opportunity to do so.  I had the chance to view the farm’s five-year business plan in which the families laid out the direction they plan to take the farm and their projections for how they believe the business will operate financially.  One aspect of the plan that stood out to me was Table Top’s projected percentages of income from their CSA program compared to income from direct sales.  It showed that in 2011 the company planned to earn seventy-five percent of its income from the CSA program and the remaining twenty-five percent from the direct sales category, which includes the farmers market and wholesale income.  By 2015, they projected that these percentages would switch, representing a huge increase in direct sales side of their business.  This will require the company to make valuable connections to local restaurants or grocery stores by which they would sell larger quantities of their products.  As Daniel Imhoff notes in his book, Food Fight, farms such as this receive about two percent of Farm Bill subsidies, whereas the meat and dairy industries receive sixty-three percent of subsidies.  The 2008 Farm Bill did commit one billion towards support efforts for specialty farms, which would include vegetable, fruit, nuts, and legumes growers, but the disproportionate subsidy pie remains.  The acknowledgment of our nation’s obesity problem has spurred the push for more affordable fruits and vegetables so it would not be surprising to see further funding for farms such as Table Top in the new Farm Bill.  If the government can provide better incentives for farmers to grow the healthy foods that our nation needs, instead of inedible cash crops that are required to first be processed or fed to animals for us to obtain nutritional value, we may be able to foster healthier diets for our nation.