A small single family, organic farm in the U.S. typically has two adults and two children.
The single most significant variable in acreage needed to to self sustain (food only)
is the water available (cows per acre or acres per cow).
However people are not cows and there is no single / simple answer.
Agricultural life experience is significantly different from urban life experience.
From early childhood on...
1. Access to MUCH smaller numbers and diversity of people in an agricultural life
style.
2. Frequent and direct / intimate experience of life's cycles.
building and maintaining the soil, seed planting, crop maintenance, harvest, food storage,
animal care, animal husbandry, birth, death / killing, eating.
..... ..... .....
Urban gardening is popular in the U.S. a trend that comes and go's.
A 3.5 meter by 9 meter plot is a good place to start. Many prefer community gardening
(many small individual plots next to one another). Learning / success is accelerated in this way.
I participated in a community garden last summer (volunteered a few days).
Also at my own home, we keep a small vegetable garden (5 x 6 meter) also 1 small potato patch
and a small tree nursery project. I grow alo vera and yerba mansa (anemopsis), indoors in the winter, outdoors in summer. I keep / maintain a vegetable waste / composting going also.
regards
floor