Getting People Out of the Cities

This post is in response to Kade’s post: Feed the World.

A current 1,000 acre mega-farm was likely at one time 25 or more natural-scale farms.

OK. Lets take 1000 acres of farmland and bring the city people back.

• 25 farms per 1000 acres
• Assume one LARGE family per farm = 2 parents and 8 kids for a total of 10. (Totally arbitrary number.)

That would bring 250 people out of the city to occupy 1000 acres.

Lets see how it would look if we made a city become farmers again …

From Infogalactic, “more than 400,000 New Yorkers reside in NYCHA’s 328 public housing developments across the City’s five boroughs.”

That means, to empty out just the public housing of a single US city, we would need to occupy 1.6 million acres of land assuming 10 people per family unit. Just the people in NYC public housing, would require a space about the size of Delaware (1.59 million acres) to house and begin to feed themselves.

NYC total population is 8.5 million. If we were going to move New York City into the country to grow their own food, we would need approx 34 million acres of land. The whole of New York State is approximately 34 million acres. If we move the city of NY into the country of the state of NY (assuming every square inch was farmable,) where would we put the rest?

Another Calculation

I live on just slightly over 1 acre of land. I believe that if I spent the time and money that I could feed my family of 4 from this one acre. Lets do some math for the city folk.

1000 acres of farmland could potentially hold 1000 families of 4. That’s 4000 people per 1000 acres of land.

If we moved just the public housing developments of NYC into farmland (400K,) they would take up 100,000 acres of land. If we moved the whole population of NYC (8.5 million) to the country, they would take up 2.1 million acres of land … a space larger than Delaware (1.5 million acres) but smaller than Connecticut (3.5 million acres.) Again … just one city in the state of New York.

The total population of New York State is about 19.7 million people. We have found farmland for 8.5 million of them (more space than the state of Delaware) … where are we going to put the other 10 million?

I don’t believe we can feed the world without modern industrial scale farming methods. Even if we all were forced to feed ourselves from our own little piece of land … there is not enough farmable land in the world to support 7.5 billion people.

EDIT. As I thought more about this, I also realized that for western society to go back to animal/manual labour, there would have to have been a catastrophic event that eliminated the use of mechanical farming. This sort of event would also have a devastating effect on the population, if not initially, then over time as people died off from lack of mechanical assistance. In this scenario, there would likely be a lot fewer people and a lot of available land for food production, making the idea more plausible.

What think you?

Check out Kade’s Blog for more thought provoking info.