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[Clansgian AT wmconnect.com]

> Perfectly possible and is being done.  Just takes work!  Just have to give 
> up dairy, beef and pork.  Switch to chicken and rabbit as the meat source.

Yes. Exactly.

The argument against most of the world producing MOST of its own food and 
goods goes along the lines of your argument, Gene.  But the posit bears 
closer 
scrutiny.

How much space does it take to supply MOST of a family's food (fuel, fiber)?? 
 I live on twenty acres, but I have less than half an acre under cultivation 
in the form of gardens, grain plots, and orchards.   That provides those 
products for six, some to extended family (maybe 20 people), some to sell 
(surplus), and lots to go toward maintaining the animals.  Also there are 
about 11 
acres total in pasture and hay fields, this provides milk, meat, hides, eggs, 
and 
power (draft animals).

Do we divide my half acre into the total arable land?  Do we divide my 11 
acres into the total of grazing land and the rest into forrest land to see 
how 
much there is available per person.  No.  Because when you look up my farm on 
an 
agricultural map, you find that the amount of agricultural land in this end 
of the county (and for a 100 miles east) is zero.  It is classified as 
marginal 
forrest and so does not deduct from the pool of land at all.

Why?  Because huge motorized farm equipment is useless here.  One of my most 
productive hay plots is Freya's Field.  It is a triangle about 600 feet long 
and 60 feet wide at the widest jambed between the paved road and the first 
creek.  The topsoil is about 4" thick and under that are head sized alluvial 
stones, that is, unsuited for anything by hay.  Yet the sandy matrix around 
those 
stones wicks up water and the place, with a little manure and a little lime, 
grows several thick cuttings of hay per season.  It's the work of two 
mornings 
for two people with scythes to cut it and another afternoon to gather the dry 
hay and put it into stacks.

Yet in your formula it doesn't exist.  Chickens here roam the forrest slope 
so steep it would give a billy goat a nose bleed and rabbits are fed from 
dock 
and clover and lambs quarter growing by the road ditches and forrest edges.  
The Jersy cow browses scrub pine and the attack donkey is partial to the 
lichens and moss that grow by the creek banks and cold side of the hill.  In 
the 
reckoning of total farmland divided by total population, they nor their 
domain 
exist.

More than 80% of our household (heating and cooking) fuel comes from dead 
trees and deadfall limbs.  We've never cut a live tree.  And yet as far as a 
fuel 
source, our forrest plot is classified as having the potential to yield none.

And the crux of the this question rests on the mistaken notion that 
agribusiness is more efficient than horticulture.  It decidedly is not in 
terms of the 
food and fiber and fuel produced from the given space and resources.

So three things need added to the formula:

1) How much space is really needed?  As Lynda has pointed out, if you forego 
the beef and pork and eat chicken and rabbit, 90% of your diet can come from 
a 
very small place.

2) Most of the land that could be cultivated like this is not counted as 
potential farm land at all.

3) Horticultural cultivation is vastly more efficient than machine based 
agribusiness in terms of resources needed for a given amount of produce.   
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