>Probably that with sufficient land you can sustain yourself regardless of what happens with the outside world. Sustenance farming as a baseline of human need.

>Probably that with sufficient land you can sustain yourself regardless of what happens with the outside world. Sustenance farming as a baseline of human need. Producing enough in the growing season to sustain yourself through the off season is... no small amount of work. You need a reasonably large amount of capital in the form of tools and knowledge to have a reasonable shot at doing so with only your labor. And unless you have a lot of capital in the form of advanced machines, it would be a huge amount of labor. But that's not the real problem; the real problem is how chancy farming is. Too much rain? no food this year. Not enough rain? no food this year. I mean, there are a lot of things technology can do (like, say, tile drainage and irrigation) that make the growing conditions wider, those things can require significant capital and/or labor, and even then, you can have too much or too little rain. Even if you do everything right, if you are depending on growing your own food, there's a reasonable chance of not getting significant calories for a year or two just 'cause the weather was bad. Most of our farm subsidies go to crop insurance; the government essentially sees to it that our farmers are made whole if it rains too much or too little, which makes farming a lot more certain, and helps ensure our overproduction of food. (note, I totally support my tax dollars being used for this; If there's anything the world should overproduce, it's food.)