That's capitalism, though - If I can feed three families off my five acres and you can feed one, that means I free up two families to do something other than farming. From a collectivist standpoint, you're holding back society - your idyll is subsistence farming while mine creates a merchant and/or artisan class. The whole "manifest destiny" thing was about claiming land so that the natives or foreign invaders couldn't; it wasn't until trade goods traveled back to the homelands that society advanced to the frontier. There's about an acre of arable land per person in the United States. That's going down to 0.6 in the next 30 years. We need about 1.2 acres per person using modern agriculture. One of my favorite books from backintheday? Fundamentally, farming hasn't been a 1:1 adventure in these United States since 1900.