I don’t think so - didn’t agriculture become centralized/industrialized as city populations grew? Certainly before the population booms of the last century. We’ve never tried to feed current urban populations from small local farms.
Logic. Let’s say it takes 1/2 an acre of farmland to feed a person (conservative estimate based on some googling), we’d need 4.25 million acres to feed the population of NYC. NYC itself is about 200,000 acres, some of that water, and (I’m guessing) virtually none of that being farmland. So, we’d need the equivalent of about 23 NYCs of farmland local to NYC to produce the food for NYC. There are also a lot of high population density areas around NYC that can’t easily be converted to small farms, and will increase the need for local small farms. So, unless “local” for NYC extends into the midwest, it just doesn’t work.
That’s a correlation rather than causation. City populations have always been increasing (cough cough… don’t look at Detroit). During the past 60 years, corporate farms slowly replaced and bought out local farms. The aggregate production levels have kept pace with growth and at times has even outpaced it but that is simply a function of increased mechanization on the farm rather than some magical power of increased productivity as a result of consolidation by corporations.
Our farms are not and have not been in the cities for a long time now. Way longer than industrialization in fact. Farms exist in the rural areas surrounding our cities. That is true today as it was 100 years ago well before corporate farming came to be.
There are 7.2 million acres of farmland in the state of New York. Ignoring the fact that NYC borders other states and omitting those farms, and knowing that the population of NYC is 8.5 million, we can see that the state of NY has enough farmland to feed NYC as well as an additional 5.9 million people.
25% of New York state is currently farmland. The total acreage of farmland in NY state has been increasing by 3000 acres per year. That’s plenty of room for small farms. Additionally, you may be interested to know that not that long ago, farmer was the most common trade. That means if we move back to the local model, you are going to see a lot of people move from the city to the farm and unemployment will drop accordingly.
I didn’t farm them, I tried to get solid data on their methane emissions. There are some good papers, but it’s a hell of a work to get a higher N in the field, and thus… Well…
But I actually did try to “farm” them in the sense that I helped some zoologists to establish lab colonies of Macrotermes species. Tricky, I can tell you this.
They are pretty interesting, though, and one part of the answer how humans could deal with the problem of cellulose recalcitrance.
