Just in 2010, the EPA slammed family budgets with such cascading mandates as increased ethanol content in gasoline, which makes fuel less efficient, corrodes engines, and by diverting farmland, forces up corn prices too.

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Since U.S. farmland is scarce and expensive, each additional acre of corn used to produce ethanol is one less that is available for other crops such as soybeans and wheat, which have seen price increases of more than 240% over the past five years.

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According to Zhores Medvedev, a Russian scientist, these mini-farms and private plots account for half Russian meat production and a third of dairy products, though they occupy less than 5% of all farmland.

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