[bluGill]

Your system means that when your local garden fails your family starves to death. With the large farm we have insurance so that when (WHEN not IF) there is a crop failure we just buy something from a farm far away. Distance is important here: crop failures tend to be because of a situation that affects your entire village so you can't fall back on a local safety net, you need a large one with a distribution network. The distribution network in turns requires a lot of people not working the farm but instead distributing things around. To make this work you need large farms with surplus.

In short your ideals sound good, but they just don't work out. Too many people are needed off the farm to pull it off, but you put them on their little farms.

[svieira]

Correction - the local system means that when the local system fails _for years on end_ then the remote part of society needs to step in to support those who are starving locally. But this is true, no matter how high you push things. If something kills all the okra (see Interstellar) then we'll have to fall back on spinach _as a society_ if we have one mega-farm. If everything on the planet dies off then we'll have to flee the solar system, or get support from neighbors in the local galactic cluster.

[bluGill]

I don't know what Intersetellar is (obviously a book/movie but I don't care to look it up).

What is the local vs remote system? When you have small farms local is you, and remote your neighbors who you walk to. When you have large enough farms you can generate enough surplus that the world cares - and they are generating enough that they can afford to play nice. Small farmers in general don't generate enough surplus that they can feed each other across the distance of a continent.

Support from a galactic cluster is nice in SciFi, but in reality space is too big. It is questionable if Earth/Venus could support each other, as our orbits are often too misaligned to do anything in time. (the fast trip to mars involves Venus so things are even worse). Going between stars - forget it, by the time we find out about a problem they are dead or have survived.

[ahelwer]

Does not follow. I'm not talking about subsistence farming. Nothing stops you from buying food from small farms further away that didn't experience crop failure.

[bluGill]

Your small farm doesn't have enough surplus in the good years to pay for the transport cost to get food from farther away.