Interesting take.

As a fellow aspiring small farmer, I think that 19 people mark sounds a lot better than 155. Or maybe 10 people. Two families. That can be done on a neighborhood scale in someone's yard. Cut out the mass monocropping, eliminating the petroleum inputs for both equipment and soil amendments. Someone on an apartment balcony could grow herbs and spices for their community pretty easily. Someone else in another apartment could have a flock of quail for eggs and meat for a family or two. It's far superior to grow your own and buy food from your friends, ask me how I know.

We don't need fewer people feeding more people, we need more people feeding people. It boggles my mind how we let our food production get so far removed from our communities. It's not okay. It's no wonder we're all fat and dying of the sniffles; we don't know anything about the food we eat except that it's not good for us!

That said, I love the staggered peach/pecan model. That's pretty wise actually, planning for the future and incorporating the two tastiest tree crops ever. No doubt their aim is to grow pecans, but peaches make a relatively fast crop to bankroll a project, usually producing in three years where pecans may be a decade before their first harvest. I wonder how long it'll take before the juglone from the pecan trees becomes a problem for the peaches. Probably not fast enough to make a difference in that model.

Thanks for that article, I reblogged it and shared it with a few friends off chain.