I'm sure you can, but it doesn't scale. The only way we eat is industrialised agriculture.
You will be fighting your neighbours for that cow and wasting most of it.
Similarly with "backyard plots" and that other great modern stupidity, the vertical indoor garden. Like anybody will be lazily reaching over to pick a tomato from their indoor vertical garden instead of the monstrous greenhouses that most tomatoes come from these days.
If I take the local example - the city was built where it is due to the local conditions being good, including great, volcanic soil.
Then the city grew and houses were built all over the good soil, pushing agriculture further out. The last market garden in the area became a housing subdivision about 5 years ago.
Their Guyra tomato farm is an enormous undertaking that produces all year round. I'm sure in WWII Britain it was easy to double vegetable production because while the UK is covered in farms, they are relatively tiny and unproductive and only survive through subsidies.
> In WWII home gardens roughly doubled fresh vegetable production.
This is obviously not true in any meaningful sense. I assume this is based on "fresh" restricting the numbers to a meaninglessly small fraction of total production. It doesn't even make sense within an order of magnitude.
In the US it was 18 million victory gardens out of a population of 140 million people. They really did represent a lot of land and a lot of labor.
In absolute numbers they allowed a 50% increase in total vegetable production over farms alone in the US. Fresh in this context referred to the amount of canning going on. So they made a very significant difference to diets of people domestically.
“The US Department of Agriculture estimates that more than 20 million victory gardens were planted. Fruit and vegetables harvested in these home and community plots was estimated to be 9-10 million tons, an amount equal to all commercial production of fresh vegetables.” https://livinghistoryfarm.org/farminginthe40s/crops_02.html
That’s 3 pounds per person per week, or 1/3 of the total 12lb of vegetables per person consumed per week.
I agree with you that we rely on industrial agriculture and the amount of space someone needs to fully feed themselves is larger than most peoples available space, but I and others totally reach for the shit we grow before resorting to buying in a store, I don’t know why you think that can’t subsidize some need for shipping food
For basics like potatoes, carrots, onions etc. this is possibly doable but it isn't going to replace a families worth of food. For an individual or a couple, maybe. But certainly not all year. If you use the old-school Australian "quarter acre block" you might do a families vegetables for part of the year.
As a supplement, it's worthwhile. As a substitute it's non viable.
You will be fighting your neighbours for that cow and wasting most of it.
Similarly with "backyard plots" and that other great modern stupidity, the vertical indoor garden. Like anybody will be lazily reaching over to pick a tomato from their indoor vertical garden instead of the monstrous greenhouses that most tomatoes come from these days.