A CSA with 200 customers != 'feed 200 people'. Yes with intensive agriculture methods you can grow enough to harvest 150 or 200 boxes of vegetables a week during most part of the year; that's still only - what? 10, 20% at most of the calorie intake of those people? And most of those calories are carbs, too - there's going to be very little protein and fat in those boxes. And not year round, either. Again, yes you can grow lots of potatoes (potatoes are better than e.g. corn for this purpose because they keep better than corn with only slightly lower caloric yield per area unit. Yes you can process corn e.g. into flour but that then has to be calculated into the total energy input, and it requires much more preparation afterwards to turn it back into edible food; again with high energy inputs) for a few years (need to rotate crops, especially nightshade family crops) to close the gap over the winter season; but fill your boxes with potatoes and a pumpkin here or there for 3 months once and watch your subscriptions plummet next spring.
People don't generally believe me when I say this, but I've made this point often: for self-sufficiency and/or small scale farming like the GP is proposing, you need a hectare (2 acres) to feed a family year-round. The reason people don't want to believe this is because it shows that it's impossible to do this sort of farming at scale, because there simply isn't enough land to feed everybody this way. So we need industrial scale farming today to produce the food people want in the quantities we need it.
I say this as someone with a 1 hectare experimental alternative agriculture plot; it's not that I don't want better, more sustainable agriculture systems. It's just that the 'solutions' being proposed are wildly insufficient, and I'm not talking double digit percentages, but orders of magnitude. How do we fix it - I don't know. But I do (by now) recognize snake oil and sophistry when I see it.
People don't generally believe me when I say this, but I've made this point often: for self-sufficiency and/or small scale farming like the GP is proposing, you need a hectare (2 acres) to feed a family year-round. The reason people don't want to believe this is because it shows that it's impossible to do this sort of farming at scale, because there simply isn't enough land to feed everybody this way. So we need industrial scale farming today to produce the food people want in the quantities we need it.
I say this as someone with a 1 hectare experimental alternative agriculture plot; it's not that I don't want better, more sustainable agriculture systems. It's just that the 'solutions' being proposed are wildly insufficient, and I'm not talking double digit percentages, but orders of magnitude. How do we fix it - I don't know. But I do (by now) recognize snake oil and sophistry when I see it.