I garden all the time, it won’t feed any single nation on earth except maybe Principality of Sealand. You’re either being disingenuous or not understood the conversation taking place.

I'm sure your personal experience gardening for yourself is valid, but it would be disingenuous to take it as valid for a larger scale commercial operation that wants to feed people on more than a 1:1 basis.

I've had this discussion dozens if not hundreds of times over the years and the one thing that always stands out is that the claims of "X won't feed Y" never come with substantive data and always have to side-step the original premise. At best they come with personal anecdotes that tend to be amusingly irrelevant.

In fact the logic of my basic premise - that small farms can and do feed people efficiently - is rather simple and well-supported by the data. For posterity let me work through a representative scenario.

I'll use the example of the smallest small farm I know to kind of show the boundaries of the problem. It's a real farm near me - out of respect I won't give it's real name but let's call it Fox Farm. You can find examples like this all over.

This farm is just under 2.5 acres, but that includes the house, a barn and a greenhouse so probably 2 acres in production. It's well positioned near a town of about 5,000, has good soil, is right on a busy road and has easy access to lots of manure from several cattle operations within a mile or two. Fox Farm's owner has been farming for about 12 years and has really mastered hand-scale operations - his only "large" equipment is a walk-behind tractor with a rotary plow. He runs the whole thing with just him and his wife.

Fox Farm sells direct via their small farm stand and at up to three farmer's markets. The last time we spoke about it they were earning a decent living - their "take home" was around $55k after all expenses. At that time total revenue was a bit over $100k annually. You may say, oh that's not much but (a) their revenue and margins get better every year; (b) they are quite happy with this and are able to raise a family and save for the future; (c) that's not a production problem it's a selling problem due to the town size and the fact that most markets operate only part of the year.

How many people do they feed? They have about 150 regular customers, but we can do some quick math: You could use the $100k figure and divide it by the annual grocery budget per person to get a representative figure - so $100000 / $3865 (California average) yields just under 25 individuals. That's of course if they got 100% of their food from this one farm.

So in rough terms you could say that a single 2 acre farm can entirely feed 25 people and provide a decent living to the farmer as well. Now I can tell you from my experience on 15 acres that as you scale a bit more you gain (and lose) some efficiencies but probably it's about 10-15% more per acre every time you double in size but that gain diminishes a lot past about 20 acres for a bunch of management reasons but mainly because of your ability to actually sell it all. Selling produce is way way harder than growing it.

I know for a fact that small farms work because I have not only my personal experience but the experience of several farms around me. If you don't believe me go see for yourself. Seek out the nearest three farms under 100 acres in your area and ask them. I feel I have to point this out even though it should be obvious: your garden is not very productive relative to something run by a professional farmer. Not only will we get way bigger yields for any one crop but at this scale we'll get multiple crops out of the same patch of dirt in a season using carefully planned rotations. As just one example, I will plant peas (nitrogen fixers!) using T-posts and a simple trellis. When the peas are done the tomatoes go in and use the same post-and-weave trellising. This is partly why you should never think of small farms in terms of acreage but rather in terms of revenue.