Someday in the future lefty Utopia
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Most of the food you eat in a year, shy the grains and grain derivatives, could be grown in your yard without touching the trees. If you live in South Florida or Hawaii, you could even grow your own tropical fruit.
Real life isn't a survival game where you have to hunt to find a single piece of fruit, it's a race to harvest what is coming in before it spoils.
The reason why our current industrial agriculture requires so much space is because big ag loves them corn and soy subsidies, and because industrial agriculture requires enough space too drive a million dollar John Deere through.
The reason current agriculture requires so much space is because you wildly underestimate how much space is needed to support a family for a year. A typical farmer in preindustrial areas would farm something like 2-4 acres in order to subsist. Not to generate a profit, not to support multiple families. That's just keeping himself and his family alive through to the next season with a very very small surplus left over for sale, barter and storage.
1 acre = 4000 m^2. So that farmer was farming between 8 and 16 THOUSAND m^2 and he did it all without chemicals--he tilled because tilling increased yields. he grew grains because they could be stored, he ate meat because it could be preserved. And all of this was backbreaking, horrible labour. All of this just to break even. Prior to the industrial revolution, the vast majority of the population lived rurally because they couldn't generate the food necessary to sustain large cities. People had to feed themselves off of large plots of land because large plots of land is what is necessary to grow enough food to feed a person for a whole year.
Little suburban veggie plots of a fun hobby, not a serious method of feeding a population.
Yes, modern small gardeners use medieval methods to farm, because there has been no advancement in technology, yield or sustainability.
Currently, using organic methods, you could raise all of the vegetables and grains for a family of 4 on an acre. Welcome to the 21st century.
Once again, I am a fucking farmer. You are literally trying to tell someone who has worked the ground from the time he first walked what agriculture is like. It's actually kinda hilarious.
Good for you. Almost everybody else isn't. And almost everybody else also doesn't have an acre to farm. So your hypothetical is completely worthless.
Your opinion is completely worthless, but you continue to offer it.
Now, if you had taken the time to look up any of this, you would have found books, videos, websites devoted to teaching people in the suburbs how to grow their own food. But instead, you want to prattle and pontificate.
Look, man. I don't doubt that you raise crops, and I know full well that strong yields can be achieved through contemporary botany but it's not scalable to the level of feeding a civilization--it takes too much skill and it requires the full efforts of the farmer. Our civilization is too specialized and diversified to be majority farmers anymore. Small crop farming is great, but selling it to normies isn't going to happen. It's just not. And even if it would--they wouldn't be any good at it and would take short cuts and we'd end up at agroindustry all over again. People like you would specialize and we'd just reinvent largescale monocrops all over again.
Plus a change in yields from 2-4 acres (depending on local fertility) to 1 acre is not such a good improvement considering that 1 acre for a family of 4 is not much different from 2-4 acres for a family of 10. Medieval farmers were actually very effective at what they did. They just didn't have refrigerators or canning. Tough shit for them.
This comment is so idiotic that I regret that you made it.
But, once again, from the top. No, small scale ag doesn't require the full attention of the farmer. Normies are in fact, buying into the idea, because homesteading conferences and classes are now booked solid and books on the subject are now selling to the point that older titles are coming back as reprints.
Because in this case, the normies are smarter than you are.
That's a bold proclamation. How much acreage do you think the average person has? And how many people are living, on average, on that acreage?
I assume the average suburbanite has access to 200 square feet. But, dunno, I am only a guy who's researched the issue, you seem to know so much fucking more than I do, right?