[refurb]

I think you lose a lot of granularity when you just measure a farm by size.

A 20,000 acre “farm” that only grazes a few thousand head of cattle because it’s practically desert could be much less productive than a 100 acre farm in the most fertile region of the world.

So it wouldn’t surprise me that the smaller farms feed an outsized proportion of the population.

[3pt14159]

I know a guy that set up a food operation in a sea container in Toronto. It was a whole ecosystem of food producing organisms. Fish in the water, herbs like dill, tomatoes, all sorts of stuff. He'd sell it at 4x grocer prices to pricy restaurants near-by. His reasoning in putting it in a sea container was that he could always find a spare place to park it / electrify it with all his friends in the construction industry.

Made enough to live in Kensington Market, which is a hipster / hippy part of Toronto.

[wolfram74]

I grew up in Iowa, so my fascination with hydroponics is partly from the technical intrigue, but also an egalitarian philosophy.

A locales food security with conventional agriculture is heavily dependent on the quality of their soil, while with hydroponics and derivatives it's more a function of their engineering prowess (and available infrastructure).

[EdwardDiego]

Exactly, there's some rather large farms in the NZ high country, and they tend to measure stocking rates for their more marginal land as "hectares per head" - much like measuring an M1 tank's fuel consumption in "gallons per mile".