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I'm sorry you took offense, but I am not talking out my ass here. I've lived both, and I know from what I speak. My family farm isn't but 200 miles north of Lexington, on excellent farm land, with natural water. It's been in the family since 1871, and we've worked that land since 1867. It is, was and always has been organic, for economic reasons. I had the choice of farm life or urban life and I tried both before I realized that farming is not for me. I had the option to take over the farm, and there's a part of me that wanted to... but it's not a life I can live. There's the physical exhaustion, the mental exhaustion and the ecological exhaustion - and I can't take any of them. There are personal reasons, too, but the big three are the ones above.
You may consider my experiences stereotypes, but this is the world that my family and I have lived in and will continue to live in until the end of the known world. I don't consider our lives stereotypical because they're our lives. And I'm sorry, but I can't consider Berea a typical town - it's not. Between the college and the industries that serve the college, it's exceptional right there. As for the sprawl towns (I'm thinking of the bedroom communities around Indy and probably Lexington and every other city of any size)... they may be typical, but they can't be self-sustaining. They have none of the required resources and far too many economic liabilities to support themselves. (I don't live in a sprawl town, but there are some in the area.) Still, if I don't manage to make you run away from the idea below, you really want to check out the literature and case studies on The Farm, and you might want to make a trip over to get some ideas. (Though they don't farm much anymore - I believe their income is mostly from publishing and consulting services... ) (From here on out, the you I will use is not personal; I just don't feel like using "one" tonight because I've had enough of pretension today. So please don't take it that I mean you personally - I just mean the general you.)
Okay, Physical Exhaustion as reason not to farm:
I'm just going to assume a subsistence organization that relies only minimally on imported calories and trades labor for services that the organization can't provide - not surplus, and not single cropping. 50-100 people, from babies to grampies with enough specialized knowledge to actually manage the farm, rather than seat-of-the-pantsing it.
It takes at minimum 4000 square feet of highly intensive crop production area to feed one person an 1800 calorie per day vegetarian diet (standard figure used by economists and anthropologists for subsistence economies; about 10 people per acre for 3 years - after that, depletion starts setting in and yields fall), and for every additional 100 calories or 100 grams of meat, you have to increase that that production area by at least 50 feet, and up to 300 feet of area for beef.
That type of intensive farming requires about six hours of heavy labor per person per day on average (obviously, winters require somewhat less work, but summers require far more.) (Again, standard numbers.) The average person consumes 2 bushels of wheat per year, just to use a single crop, and not counting animal feed use. So you're looking at at least 10 acres of wheat alone (using 1920 wheat production numbers, since chemical fertilizers and machinery are not necessarily available, and 1920 is about the last year of the subsistence farmer) to make enough bread to feed everyone. (Wheat is a frustrating crop, too.) Machinery or animal muscle help lower the man-hours, but animals require 6 to 10 acres of grazing land per animal and 1 man-hour per animal per day of maintenance. Pasture land land cannot be farmed, but still requires water and space resources.
If you want to use tractors that use your own biodiesel to power the machinery, you're looking at between 50-150 gallons of biodiesel per acre of an oily plant (rape, soy, goosefoot, etc) and the additional man-hours to maintain that land, press the seed, make the biodiesel, and maintain the machines. Tractors get about 7 MPG (though it's not figured that way.). My family farm uses about 80,000 gallons of diesel every year, and we have 3500 acres. We do not make our own biodiesel. We can't both make a living and make our own biodiesel.
Remember, all of those numbers are assuming peak soil fertility and excellent renewal rates, with minimal erosion and adequate rainfall per year. If you have to fertilize, if you live in a dry climate, if you have to irrigate, yields go down. My family farm is very productive, but a couple of bad years could ruin that. The Dust Bowl really started with three drought years in a row.
Six hours a day, huh... that doesn't sound so bad... until you start adding up the numbers. For every 10 year old that is going through a growth spurt, add 6 hours. For every pregnant woman, old person, nursing infant, or member of the overhead, add six hours. It's physically exhausting work, and if you're looking at a disaster situation, you can't be assured of machines or animals. In a really bad disaster situation, showing off your wealth by plowing with horses and growing lots of crops could be a recipe for invasion or enslavement.
And this is a place you can't use the old saw about a single farmer feeds 100 people - that's factory farming, and a lot like saying a single person puts shoes on 10 people a day, because a Nike factory employs 1000 people and they produce 10,000 pairs of shoes a day. But a real shoemaker cannot make 20 shoes in a day, not even clogs. Same with a subsistence farm. The tomato patch can't be treated like the strawberry patch, and neither of them can be treated like the wheat fields... and if the zucchini decide to take over the wheat... The economic availability of the labor and resources are just too different. For subsistence, you have to use different numbers, and they are essentially the numbers from the latter part of the 19th and early part of the 20th centuries.
Then there's the mental exhaustion: My livelihood does not depend on whether the farm does well, but I still worry about the weather, wince at the price of diesel, and sacrifice tofu to the soybean goddess so that the price of beans stays high. I can't imagine how our farm manager does it and still stays cheerful. (And thank the soybean goddess that J. is congenitally cheerful...) I do not have the temperament to be a good farmer, and it does require a very specific temperament. Farmers can't be easily discouraged, must be able to work long hours without a real hope of recompense, must be prepared to deal with any disaster nature can throw and STILL manage to get up the next morning and do it all over again. No vacations for farmers; there's always something that needs to be taken care of. Farmers have to have faith that the land will take care of them, and hope that it can - and have seemingly limitless wells of both. Anybody who tries to farm and doesn't love it will be very unhappy - and in a group setting, that is more destructive than a drought would be.
And in a setting like you're talking about... there are going to be arguments and disagreements and power struggles and dominance issues because those are what people do. It's in our genes, and it's not something we can weed out without taking most of us out in a big fiery blast. There are the arguments about who has to do what - because no one likes shoveling pig shit, and chickens are nasty, mean cannibals that deserve every deep fry they get and die just to spite you. Someone's got to wring their necks, spread the shit, and keep everything from killing each other when they get broody or cocky. I have problems dealing with traffic, one of the pettiest power games around - living with 40 of my closest friends, all of whom are determined not to deal with the pigs? It would be Jonestown.
And even assuming that all goes well and everybody can live with the pig shit rotation and there aren't affairs going on behind backs and no one's having a power-trip.... there's still the worry about the weather and the yield and if there will be enough to feed everyone through the winter. There's the constant worry about whether the group can afford a set of braces for the kid with the bad overbite and the glasses for the woman who is going blind. There's always something that is getting used up or broken or wearing out that can't be rebuilt, renewed or repaired on site. When money's short, you're constantly thinking about who can hire out to work, or what can be sold, or if the bank will give you one more loan... And in that type of mental situation, it's really, really, really hard to think about social demographics or medieval history or Victorian culture. Every day is about survival. I know my limits - I can't do that. And even if YOU can manage to summon the mental energy after a day on the tractor or staring at the south end of a horse... the bets that someone else within a few miles can summon the same amount of mental energy and be interested in the same subjects.... sparse populations have problems with diversity.... And believe me, after living in some share-houses, daily meetings on rules and community needs do not make for sparkling conversation.
Finally: Ecological exhaustion. It happens. Aquifers get depleted, nutrients levels in the soil fall, waste can't recycle as fast as the useful parts are consumed. Orchards have a 30 year useful life, then they have to be replaced, but if the replacement land is under other cultivation, that can't be done. Everybody's got to have a roof and some private space, and those take up land. I'll live on the 6th floor of a walk-up and garden down the street, so I'm not taking up space that can be used for real production. Where I live, my water gets recycled a couple of times on the way down to irrigate fields (and recycles again and again after that). When people live in the 'burbs, it takes up land that can be used for other production. But multi-family housing packs a lot more punch into an acre. My impact on the earth as a whole is smaller when I can bus, walk or bike to and from work, live in a small foot-print, still eat locally and also use locally produced goods. Smaller communities can't necessarily produce everything they need, and are still forced to import some goods and services, but usually at a higher environmental and economic cost than a larger community - if nothing else, transportation to a community away from the standard shipping lanes uses more fuel.
So, if I haven't scared you off of the idea of subsistence farming yet.... *grin*
I spent nearly every summer while growing up on the farm. I married the son of a dairy farmer who also spent his time on the farm. I'm still a trustee for the family trust that manages the farm. I've spent months at a time on the farm about ten times since I turned sixteen; I'm thirty. It's a working farm and I am the overhead: I get to know lots of USDA regs, organic standards and maintain our certifications. The reason I'm the regulation-head (besides the fact that no one else in the family wants it the job) is because I'm the one who cannot farm. Physical reasons aside (and there are some), I'm better with paperwork than with a combine. (Though I will make sure that the combine gets serviced and that the warranty is honored...)
Here's what has turned me away from ag and to horticulture and urban ag. My family farm is not entirely rural. It's about 2 miles from the closest town, which is very small (one stoplight, a pizza shop, a hardware store, a small grocery, a doctor's office, a funeral home, a nursing home, a furniture-carpet-fabric-dry goods store, several churches, no Starbucks, no McDonald's, 2 gas stations), and 15 miles from the closest town of any size. It's 70 miles from the closest city. If it's after 6 pm, it's 15 miles to the closest roll of TP, gallon of milk or pharmacy. It takes EMS 14 minutes to get to the farm. In that amount of time, the barn will burn down, the heart attack will be fatal, or the child will bleed to death. (1972, 1988, and 1955, respectively.) When our neighbors had to dial 911 to get the police out when they heard a burglar, the 911 operator was on the phone with them when the burglar shot them. That was 11 minutes into the 911 call.
And I hate to drive. But in that area, you can't walk, because there are no sidewalks, and people drive the farm roads at about 80 mph. For the same reason, bikes and horses are out. (The horror stories about Amish buggies being smashed by idiots in half-ton trucks....) I don't feel comfortable in a place where, if I need to escape a bad situation, I can't unless I have the keys to a car, gas in the tank, and the roads are clear. Unfortunately, farms like ours are places where people get hurt, and where crime tends to happen. Meth manufacturers steal farm chemicals, break into houses, and in a couple cases in the area of our farm, people have been murdered and no one was close enough to help. I know these things happen in cities, too, but I've got a better chance of getting to my neighbor's house when some crackhead invades my house during a blizzard looking for pawnable electronics than I do of escaping the farm when the roads are iced and a meth-mouth who is enraged because we don't have any ammonium nitrate decides to come looking for blood or money.
Those are my reasons. They're the situations I've seen, and they're what I used to make the choice I made. Someone else who had the same situations I did may choose differently; my cousins did, and I am eternally grateful that they did and do want to do the land management and let me deal with the paperwork. I'm would never say that they're unintelligent - they're very capable of dealing with moral and logical complexity and do so quite well. But they will be the first to admit that the last thing they want to do when they come in from the fields at night is crack a big old book and translate some medieval Latin. And their friends don't want to do it, either. And you know what? That's okay.
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