this post was submitted on 16 Jul 2025
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The key is, subsistence farming is not small scale. It's why subsistence farming is often described as extensive farming as opposed to modern intensive farming. Natural yields suck and very very quickly degrade land. About the only real intensive agriculture historically is rice paddies where you'd have large amounts of labor planting and tending individual rice plants for a very large yield by area and to a much lesser extent but still significant terraced potato farms. Everything else used tons of land.
The general formula is
In the west, it was mostly large land and small labor (amount of people, not work per person) in the east, it was mostly large amount of labor and small amount of land. The formula is still in effect, we just enriched the land with synthetic fertilizers and replaced manual labour with mechanized labor in the form of tractors and harvesters and chemical labor in the form of pesticides.
Amazonian, Aztec/Maya and some northern American pre colonial people practiced intensive agriculture to support large cities. Crops included corn, beans, squash, cacao, hot peppers, manioc, pineapple, potato, sweet potato, and a lot more.