The goal isn't to have one person produce all that for themselves, or about back-breaking labor.

Permaculture encourages community, not hyper-individualism. It's about working with nature rather than against it, and directing the benefits of it to everyone.

I think some of these folks who are on several acres, and who have poultry, cattle, pigs, and extensive gardens, will likely not starve.

But life will be hard, once the fuel and electricity run out, even the ones who are totally off grid with solar and storage batteries. Just basic stuff like screws, pumps, pipes, tools, not to mention medical care, pharmaceuticals etc.

Not starve if left to their own devices. But if they're anywhere even close to a city or town, or a group of other people who don't have those things, they better be prepared to defend it.

In fairness, some permaculture people talk about this, for example, food forests which can produce an impressive amount of food which a city dweller would not recognise or know how to cook even if they did. If you have a large enough food forest then you could be providing some kind of subsistence living long after someone came for your cows, sheep and pigs.

Honestly the person who knows how to farm, raise crops, and process their harvest and meat would probably be better off not defending their herd in that scenario.

The groups of people coming from a city to pillage a farm clearly have no idea what they're doing long term and in all likelihood wouldn't survive much longer. Killing and processing am animal isn't a skill most people have. They could easily ruin the meat and would almost certainly waste most of it. And what comes next, unless they know how to hunt as well?

All that said, I hope we never see anything close to this ever play out. No matter what the specific scenario that breaks down society for more than a few days, a lot of people would die along the way and who knows what would come next.

Yes, I hope so too. After a collapse of civilization, likely only highly organized and well armed groups will survive. Families on 10 acres will be killed and their farms stripped of food & tools.

The whole scenario does seem unlikely though.

Agreed it seems unlikely. In the meantime, I really can't worry too much about any specific scenario and outcome. Any major systemic failure leads to uncertainty and what comes next is anyone's guess. Instability is hard to predict, best thing to do is just keep a level head and take it one step at a time.

>After a collapse of civilization

Collapse is a process, not an event. Collapse is happening all around us, yet we're not all turning into gangs of marauders. When catastrophes happen in poor countries, they don't turn into roving gangs of marauders either. People tend to work together, actually.

>likely only highly organized and well armed groups will survive

[extremely USAmerican voice]

Doing genealogy, my ancestors were surprisingly good at that sort of thing. Then they learned to read and studied farming practices and stuff and got much better at it.

Of course it depends on the size of your backyard, and how long, and critically on trade networks/community.

My grandmother was a subsistence farmer in rural Poland. Their family had a sizable plot of land, farm animals etc. Still, without supplementing income with odd jobs, they'd starve. They were hungry a lot of the time anyway.