Three out of every four acres of Japanese farm lands were devoted to actual crop production, whereas only one out of every four acres of all farm land in the areas was planted in crops."

I might just be stupid but I've read this sentence like 5 times and it still doesn't make any sense to me. So 75% of the land was used to grow crops and 25% of the land was also used to grow crops?

lol, agreed on both points. i have been doing career and personal gymnastics for decades to contort my material situation and geographic location to realize some amount of personal subsistence ag activity with safe land tenure. it would be completely unrealistic for anyone to replicate my path. it will never generate more than it will have cost me, cumulatively, but its like a calling and a will to material/ecological reilience.

us political economy is completely at odds with allowing workers access to the resources necessary for even partial subsistence. i believe European elites and colonial administrators learned long ago that subsistence agriculture, besides being "wasted"/unrealized value for the ruling class, is also a potent means of labor resistance. in settler projects, it was the carrot to attract settlers and the brass ring of southern emancipation. but the frontier is now closed, more or less, so the economic screws are tightened to drive all but the most exploitative off the land best suited for plantation agriculture or fortress conservation & country resorts.

there are still weirdos out there being weird in the little fragments, coloring outside the lines. and we definitely could use more passenger trains out here lol. in case i want to take a trip into town and see like a fancy show or a fancier doctor with a store-bought haircut.

This used to be life where I am before the 90s. Everyone had one or more friends or relatives still farming and you were pretty much set on produce through that. In my family we got everything from milk to strawberries basically free from relatives.

My grandparents had a cellar full of taters, onions, root veggies, jams and juice that fed a family of six for the winter. Most people also had a huge freezer for all the perishable stuff you'd get as well. Everyone made preserves. This was a time when all the urban soviet block type housing units still had a cooled cellar level where every apartment had their own cold storage to put the produce in. The housing still exists, but most have repurposed the cold cellars. It makes me so sad as we do allotment gardening and I'd like to grow my own taters, but there's no way to store them in an apartment anymore.

The eroding of things like this has definitely made the working class more exploitable and precarious.