Earlier quoted context omitted.
Farmlands and suburbs are completely different things, especially in the context of urban development. Industrial zones are also a completely different category entirely. Living in Germany, most German cities do not have anything that is comparable to a U.S. "suburb". Building codes demand a quite high density, even for single family homes for new developments and older developments have the tendency to get denser as…
And Germany is tiny compared to the US. A farm in Germany is how far of a drive from the nearest city? In the US you could drive 10 hours from a farm to get to the nearest large city. Suburbs and tiny cities are what farms need to survive.
Yes, farms need market access. But that market does not have to be a sprawling suburb, it can be a decently dense town or city. Also, market access is relative depending on product. Farmers concentrating on crops like wheat and corn don't care about the distance to cities, as their product is traded globally. For fresh produce, distance is a real concern, but on the other hand you don't need a lot of land to fulfill the need of even large cities. You could conceivably provide most fresh produce from inside city limits if urban planning would see this as necessary. Production/acre for something like tomatoes is really huge, depending on the methods used.