I don’t know if the farmer anaolgy works. The majority of farming operations in the U.S.A are owned by corporations and use harmful farming practices. That trend needs to be reversed back to when local family farmers provided the majority of the food in their region.
Why is this being downvoted? Perhaps on its face it seems to be anti-technology and regressive, but there's plenty of data to suggest that the industrial efficiencies of modern farms have massive negative externalities in terms of depleted soil health in the form of the narrowing of both macrobiome and microbiome, depleted nutrient content in our plants, depleted health and nutrition of our animals, leading up to depleted health to those at the top of the food chain: humans.
it's being downvoted because it's not a relevant reply to the original comment, and has potential to provide a flamewar on a topic entirely different than the original article.
If you're willing to spend 40x+ more on labor per acre, you can vastly increase yields and entirely eliminate pesticides/non-organic fertilizer usage - potentially 20x+ yields in same area (depending on crop). But it takes a lot of expensive skilled labor to meet or exceed agroindustrial yields.
I think the biggest problem with our agricultural industry is commoditization of vegetables. We need 'celebrity/hipster' vegetable strains/growers that command significantly higher prices. If you grow vegetables that are twice as nutritious as found in the grocery store, you'd have a hard time finding a market at twice the price. Nutritional density of our vegetables has dropped something like 10% in the last 30 years as a result of agroindustrial farming methods.
Megacities are certainly problematic for the 'local' part. A city like Chicago that's more-or-less surrounded by farmland could be more plausible. Microgreens with imported seeds could be an interesting option: locally grown, fresh, short growing cycle of ~14 days, one warehouse full of growlights and you could provide greens for thousands year round.
Perennial grain research, such as Salish Blue 'Wheat', is also pretty exciting - would greatly simplify grain farming if the plant lived many years.
