Honestly, non-snarkily, I really like the idea of living off the land and farming in such a way so as to meet (most of ) a person/family's nutritional needs - kickin' it old school. The idea has always had a lot of appeal to me. My brother and I used to dream-talk about going in together on that sort of communal farm endeavor. Philosophically speaking, I've always found it a fair shame that our society basically prohibits a person from picking up, finding a patch of land, putting down roots (literally) and living off the land for long-term sustenance. Unless you inherit some property and have a few buckets of cash saved away, there's just no way you can maintain a farm-based life without some kind of scheme to generate profit. Property tax and what not. Generally speaking I'm a fan of taxes, don't get me wrong. I know the difference between ideals and reality though, so I know I find a lot of appeal in these ideas...but the life would be p tough. That's why I really do think the ideal way to farming/self-sustenance does require at least a small band of physically capable, committed adults for successful execution. As for seven sections of corn - yeah. We ain't talkin industrial farming here. Industrial farming of cash crops funded by gov't subsidies is no kind of farming I'm interested in at all. I guess thank god for Michael Pollan and everyone else who helped get us here, right? Full article got behind a paywall for me like wamp, but hey thar's my opinions.
This was me. After years of visiting my uncle's pastorally picturesque blueberry farm, I thought I'd see what it was all about. I worked 8am-7pm 6 days a week for four months on a certified organically grown farm in rural North Carolina. The work was hard and beautifully rewarding because of it. I learned more in those months about farming than I ever learned from tending a garden with my parents/grandparents growing up - and we had big gardens when I was young. The folks I lived with were self-sufficient, handy, knowledgeable, and intensely agrarian - i.e. dinner conversation revolved around the hidden superfood-nutritional benefits of sweet potato greens. It's a nice and simple life. I hope you get the opportunity to live it.Honestly, non-snarkily, I really like the idea of living off the land
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.