It takes a garden to feed a village

This post originally appeared on my blog in the summer of 2011, just after I'd finished my Month of Local Eating (more on that later), and it also appeared on Homegrown.org.

A while back, The Outlaw Farmer asked: Is it possible to feed the world on locally, sustainably grown vegetables without the use of insecticides and chemical fertilizers? Could the earth produce enough “organic” plants to feed 6.92 billion people?

For almost all of human existence, family farms fed the world as a matter of...