How many people can land support?

[Mortblanc]

If you try to sustain large stock on an acre each the Royal Society is going to come for a visit. You'll have starving animals within two months. You can only do it on an acre if you supplement with high nutrition rations, the produce of the 20-40 acres the horse or cow needs for natural subsistence.

Post apocalypse conditions, or living a 19th century existence, it takes extensive land management to starve graciously on a small plot.

The U.S. was settled in tracts based on how much land was needed to sustain a family with a nonmechanized technology. In the eastern U.S. in conditions and climate much like the GB midlands that area was 160 acres. Two plots of 40 acres were for raising two cash crops with a third 40 acre plot left fallow to graze the cow and horses needed to work the farm. The fourth 40 acre tract was to be left a perpetual woodland to coppice firewood, situate the cottage, plant the veg garden and hold the barn and small stock. Almost every farm kept extensive poultry flocks, some sheep, and raised one hog for each member of the family as annual sustenance.

In our western states that broke down due to arid conditions. Most of the land west of the Mississippi gets less than 25cm of rain annually. That is why we burn on an annual basis in the western states. In some areas of the western U.S. it requires 40 acres to sustain one cow on graze fodder.

Probably the best examples of intensive cultivation in 19th century conditions goes to the Chinese and the Irish. But that level of organization places the Chinese in such close proximity to their stock that they are the source for most of the worlds communicable diseases.

And we know what happened to the Irish and the results of their famine. Trying to sustain themselves on plots the size of an allotment on a single crop during the early 1800s resulted in there being more Irish in Birmingham and Manchester than in Ireland. We have more Irish in the U.S. than the total population of Ireland today. 1/3 of the population died and 1/3 migrated.

You wait for a full year to harvest and starve while you wait, and one bad harvest and you are done. Two bad years insures everyone is done. In many languages the word we interpret as "Spring" actually means "starving time", waiting for something to grow.

The reality is that GB has not been self sufficient since the Tudors were in power. Your land area in its natural condition can support a finite number of people and you passed that number 500 years back and had been pushing it for a few hundred more. Even with the famous "90% die off" you would still be looking for imports of food to make up the gaps.

Dial up the BBC history series called WW2 Farm. It gives some idea of the futility. Even cultivating every square inch of land available during WW2 GB still had to import 50% of their food. All large stock was killed off down to the pigs. You had to get permission to raise a hog! Almost all of the traditional heritage breeds of hogs went extinct in the course of a few weeks.

The land simply could not sustain both livestock and people. Even keeping a dog was frowned on as wasting food.

The grandads did not talk about that part much after the war, just about the beautiful allotments and rush to produce huge amounts of food. Neither did they speak of the continuation of the restrictive farm controls after the war under the Labor government, along with the continuation of rationing into the mid 1950s and the intense import restrictions on consumer goods to insure room on the boats for shipping food.

Then there is the dream that one will simply walk out into the countryside and "claim their spot of vacant land". Good luck with that!