The general formula is

land × labor = yields

In the west, it was mostly large land and small labor (amount of people, not work per person) in the east, it was mostly large amount of labor and small amount of land. The formula is still in effect, we just enriched the land with synthetic fertilizers and replaced manual labour with mechanized labor in the form of tractors and harvesters and chemical labor in the form of pesticides.

About the only real intensive agriculture historically is rice paddies

Amazonian, Aztec/Maya and some northern American pre colonial people practiced intensive agriculture to support large cities. Crops included corn, beans, squash, cacao, hot peppers, manioc, pineapple, potato, sweet potato, and a lot more.

An acre of entirely corn is approximately 15 million calories, and a family of four needs minimum about 3 million calories a year, so I'd give about it about 6 months before you murder each other from every-meal-is-corn psychosis

The image is 950x940 px, and an acre is 209x208 feet, so overall scale about 4.5 pixels per foot. "Lawn" is 250x310px = 55x68 ft or 3800 square feet, although the actual lawn-looking space is larger and several parcels. The fruit tree orchard is about 40x60 feet, chickens 30x30. The big cow is 15 feet long, which seems kinda big. House, excluding garage, is 32x22, which seems like a small 1 bedroom apartment.

1 acre = 43,560 sq ft

If we assume the lawn is like 2/3rds of this plot then that's 14,520 sq ft of cropland, which is better than the estimate, but also a singular cow requires 1.5 to 2 Acres of Grazing Land. To have the cows, pretty much all of the crops would go directly to them.

Here’s the Mother Earth News article with more details

In terms of food production it’s absolutely viable. It’s not economically viable though because farming has extremely low margins that can only be made up at scale.

Also, most modern machinery isn’t useful on a small scale, though there are some exceptions. So small scale farming will be quite labor intensive. So the OP here is kinda right that most people don’t want to put that much labor into it.

This is why I think small-scale robotics is going to be important to future small-scale farming, but we haven’t quite gotten there yet.

Thank you for that video - it gave me a few interesting articles and a new book for my reading list 😁

And one of the points in that video is there's a huge difference in the carbon footprints of different types of urban agriculture - actual urban farms make efficient use of resources, whereas home gardens and community gardens don't.

And even then, those urban farms are not "self sufficient" the way prepper fantasies like this meme promise - they rely on external inputs like fertilizer and building material and irrigation.

Which is, yeah. I love competently designed urban farms. I love competently designed home gardens. The image in my post is neither.

The image in my post is selling a rugged individualist, manifest destiny, pioneers breaking sod in the prairie image of homesteading - the lone smallholder supporting himself and his family solely through the production of his land - which has rarely been true and, when it was, really sucked for the people stuck doing it.

Small scale farming is viable. Rugged individualism is crap.

I think you're absolutely right. I suspect people, in general, don't really have much grasp of ag. There's mega industrial, and they understand that. There's backyard/community, and they get that, but livestock? That's probably outside the exp of probably 70% of industrialized nation people.

I know this is what the solarpunk space is for, but it really is frustrating to have to separate prepper weirdos from actual self sufficiency discussions.

At least for me the frustration is that it isn’t always easy to explain why a certain image or idea gives you bad vibes. The modern petty fiefdom obsession with lawns and land and wasted urban density is very very icky to me, but these illustrations, some of the other posts on here, they do speak to a certain fantasy that I myself have.

It might help that where I am, a lot of rural housing is smaller 4-5 floor apartment buildings where each floor is typically occupied by one sibling and their nuclear family. So a homestead for me, conceptually, wouldn’t be my prepper enclave with 3,000 each of guns, cans, toilet paper packs, and flashlights, it would be a family area with a whole lot of fresh vegetables, fruits, herbs, composting, a few chickens, and pleasant places to sit around.

And it’s not a fantasy for me at all, because I have pieces of that, so I know how it works. Chickens, solar panels, herbs. A bit more than that in my family home, where my relatives live (I just visit).

Cattle is a bit far fetched for me, lol. Chickens will eat most organic waste and give you eggs, they’re great and convenient. Cattle are a whole other thing.

This is the missing middle I hear people online (especially from the US/Australia/Canada) complaining about. This makes so much more sense to me than borderline nonsensical suburbia.