Sustainable farming is a terrible business as long as giant unsustainable factory farms are a thing. If you want to make money farming, you need to either go the vertical integration or agro-tourism route.
Not trying to refute what you are saying because I honestly don't know, but this seems to contradict the original article. Of course sustainable/organic farming is going to struggle to compete in the normal international commodities market, but in the article it mentioned that organic grain could be sold directly for 2-3x the base commodity price. Seems like that kind of progressive price scale might make it not such a "terrible business".
The problem there is that farmers must do a lot of marketing to achieve that 2-3x multiple of commodity prices, so even if you're nominally more profitable, the additional time investment isn't really worth it, compared with taking your crops to a co-packager to get a 10-20x mark up.
I've got several friends and there are a host of others who disagree and whose works completely disprove your point. A search should easily turn up plenty of results so I'm not taking time to look up sources on this one.
