Someday in the future lefty Utopia
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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.
So, this might come as a surprise to you, but I also grew up on farmland and raised crops and animals. I'm not speaking from a point of ignorance, but rather experience--and I am beginning to think, that despite the profound depths of condescension you seem to be capable of, they aren't quite deep enough and that you are wildly overestimating the capability of the average schmoe. Firstly because the people signing up for homesteading courses and self-educating themselves are in fact a tiny minority of the population, despite their sum total being large enough to appear to be a huge movement in and of itself. And Secondly because being a farmer means your interactions with the rest of the population are subject to a rather severe bias. I would know--I was also one.
So point your patronizing dismissal somewhere else and think about the types of people that make up the bulk of the city-dwelling population: The vast hordes of starbucks consumers and popculture addicts, and not the tiny tiny percentage who are aware of the need for raising their own food and are capable of teaching themselves how.
ass.