Also that's a stupid metric: subsistence farming is wildly inefficient and cannot sustain the population of any country today.

Not knowing where your food comes from makes you unable to make an informed choice about what you consume. It is a tragedy.

Being a farmer doesn't mean you understand global food markets. Not knowing how to properly hill potatoes doesn't mean you can't understand global food markets.

Knowing how to run a micro farm doesn't help you know where your food comes from.

In addition to that, it's rather easy to learn how to feed a family, if your goal is not to be cost efficient or have a very balanced diet. I guess most people could learn rather quickly how to grow enough potatoes to feed several people. You won't reach the same yield as a professional farmer, but if you had to, you could probably survive without extensive training (if you have the seed to start with).

> if you have the seed to start with

Seed would not be the limiting factor. Land would.

I feel fortunate to live on a bit more than one acre of suburban land that would be relatively appropriate for farming. But if you plow up the entire lawn, cut down the trees, and discount the drain field, house, and driveway, and don't purchase feed for livestock, that's just not enough area to feed my family.

And most people in my area don't have an acre. Sure, some local farmers have hundreds or thousands of acres - but there are a lot more people who only have a second-story apartment or a small city lot.

It's a simple problem of economies of scale. If you have a tractor, it's much, much easier to go from 10 acres to 100 acres than it is to go from 0 acres to 1 acre.

Yeah, I couldn't figure out why I was supposed to be terrified by that. Yeah, man, civilization and specialization. Sounds like progress to me. What's the concern? A Lucifer's Hammer style apocalypse? Failure of society at large to adequately meddle in the affairs of farmers?

Maybe only a fraction of farm workers understand the entire process at their farm, i.e. some drive tractors, some stick milking machines to cow udders, some are itinerant workers following crop harvests, some fly crop dusters, and none of these groups would be able to run the entire farm on their own.

Even so, it seems a strange thing to worry about.