There are still a few family farms where I live, but they wouldn't feed the state, much less the country...we're fairly well taken care of, though. What's happening to these is when the patriarch dies, they get divvied up and sold in little plots at auction by the greedy kids who moved to the city, to retirees who want the nice country life, so that's diminishing some.
Which reminds me of "
The Good Earth, by Pearl S. Buck" - one of the greatest novels I have ever read.
My thought isn't necessarily how to get everyone seeing the need for these NOW - any more than you can convince most people that fiat money=debt only, let alone seeing precious metals as anything more than "an investment" - like any other.
Nobody "cares" about such things, to the point where you actually have their attention, usually until it's too late, and they're scrambling for a piece of door for the love interest to float on as the hero gets pushed down, quite romantically, into the dark icy depths.
My thought is more on how to formulate and engineer this at the seed level, as a matter of emergency planning that is thought out well in advance.
Think of it like the movie Apollo 13. No rescue is possible - their survival depends exclusively on limited materials which are already available to them in orbit. Thus, the question, as a thought experiment well in advance, is how ordinary resources can be quickly and efficiently converted into something that will multiply and feed people in the shortest time possible. This MUST be thought out well in advance, because real hunger and no hope for getting food is a ticking bomb that clouds judgment and reasoning. A model must not only be in place, but also channels of logistics planning that allow other models to be rapidly constructed, which is seeded from the original - and then multiplied from there.
Anyway, something I like to think about. Place yourself in the catastrophe, not as the patriarch that died - because what your idiot kids do after the fact is beyond your control - but as the living patriarch who is right there with a working model, even as all hell breaks loose.
One nice thing is that for as fast as crashes happen, and for as much as chaos can hit - there is still a gap of time; not to think through and plan, but to ACT. There will be runs on everything for survival, but if you can offer a way out of hell, you can channel the runs on things that are most important for long term sustainability.
