Well, yes, there are such people with those skills out there, but they are a distinct minority these days. The average suddenly turned subsistence farmer is unlikely to have you as a neighbor just based on statistics. That said, anyone who is your neighbor will have a distinct advantage.
In my magical world I’m king and being condescending to me is a felony. But this is based on the assumption that the beliefs of the anarcho-primivists on the left and the NWO/illuminati types on the right are true, and infrastructure actually breaks down. It seems there are no real scenarios where it would be more effective to farm yourself than to let a professional do it. The quality and quantity would always be higher on a professional farm with access to heavy machinery and professional farmers.
If society collapses into lawlessness to the point where stores and transportation break down, I don’t see why/how growing food in your backyard and expecting it to be unmolested until harvesting season is realistic.
So you have 2 options the way I see it
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Infrastructure and law/order break down to the point where professional farms, roads and stores stop functioning. In this case your farm in your backyard will likely be razed and robbed so farming yourself probably isn’t realistic.
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Infrastructure and commerce still exists, which means that a professional farm with access to heavy machinery, professional farmers and bulk produce will produce higher quality crops for lower cost than an amateur farmer on a small lot w/o access to heavy machinery.
Either way, being reduced to subsistence farming doesn’t sound realistic.
Why isn’t it realistic? Most crops have little value until they’re ripe; there’s no reason to bother a backyard garden until then. Bandits bent on wanton destruction wouldn’t make it two blocks before being gunned down in the street. Fire would be the biggest threat in that particular situation.
Drive through the suburbia around any large city and you’ll find miles and miles of backyards. That’s a lot of carrots. Would it be enough carrots to feed the local community? That largely depends on how big the backyards are and on how many people are left.
You’re correct that if there is so much social disorganization that city and suburban dwellers can’t get food from the supermarkets, then backyard farming is probably out of the question as well. And people who live in urban areas aren’t going to be able to do backyard farming anyway.
So if the trains and trucks aren’t delivering food to the cities, then the city dwellers starve to death.
But what sort of social disintegration are we talking about? Why exactly don’t cars and trucks and trains and airplanes work anymore? Go to any third world country, and you’ll find gigantic cities with millions of people, yet the people in these gigantic slums almost never starve to death. So why is it that they can figure out how to get food to the 15 million people in Lagos, Nigeria, a country not noted for it’s modern infrastructure, yet in a few years we won’t be able to feed New York City and Los Angeles?
In other words, there are parts of the world today that aren’t that much different than your Mad Max scenario. Heavily armed bandit gangs roam the countryside. Almost no government, and the government that exists is hard to tell from the aforementioned bandits. No money for anything. And yet there are still roads, there are still stores, there is malnutrition but actual starvation is pretty rare. So if the economy and infrastructure of the United States collapsed to Nigerian levels (averaging somewhere around $2,000 per year per capita), we’d still have roads and stores and a government.
Not really a GQ quality cite, but the BBC did a program called “Victorian Farm” a few years ago where three people basically did all the work on the titular farm for a whole year. That included building a new stone pig stall (using rough stones and old bricks), ploughing the fields, seeding, harvesting, making beer, and keeping livestock (a flock of sheep, about 8 pigs, a lot of chickens, I think two cows and a horse for labour and transportation). Supplemented with a little poaching 
Now, some of the work is time-critical and needs to be done by more people, so you’d have to have the support of a small community do the harvest, for example, and you probably want some specialists like vets and blacksmiths and brick & barrel makers, a few carpenters etc, and a little trade to get some useful and pleasant stuff like tea, soap, boots* and fine cloth - stuff that’s relatively light and keeps well - but on the whole, as long as your local community doesn’t break down completely you could do pretty well provided you work hard and the weather doesn’t conspire against you.
Actually, as long as the weather is OK and there aren’t many gangs of thieves roaming the land, my main worry would be finding good medical care when you need it.
- My grandpa had a smaller farm than that (and managed to feed 8 kids). He walked around on clogs, which are a pretty good alternative to safety boots and easy to make yourself if you have a chisel.
Nigeria is not a great example. Most people in the area consider it to be a relatively prosperous and organized place, if you can believe that!
I’ve lived in subsistence farming areas, and have spent time in villages that are only accessible by motorcycle and do not have much trade beyond a weekly market selling locally produced food. I have a few points to add:
No chemical fertilizers would be a problem. Even then poorest poor subsistence farmers in the world today use chemical fertilizers. I think a lot of the knowledge that allowed our ancestors to do okay without them has been lost.
Speaking of knowledge, you need A LOT of knowledge. Today’s subsistence farmers have generally been farming since they could walk, and have spent their whole lives absorbing generations of knowledge. Cameroonians could look at the sky in the morning and tell me “Morning will be cool. It’ll rain around 4:00 PM, then heat up a bit before nightfall” and they would be right. They knew every plant. They knew every bit of soil. They knew everything there was to know about the weather. Nothing in their environment was a mystery. Nothing on the farm was a surprise. They knew this stuff inside out. Subsistence farming is not brainless work- it’s an art and a science that requires a huge amount of knowledge. They know the land the way a PhD knows their subject. We obviously don’t have that knowledge.
It’s not as hard of a life as people make it out to be. The work is very hard during planting and harvesting, but there is often a lot of time where there is no work. Margins can get thin- my village would harvest their millet in September. Usually people would start running low on their millet supply in August. They called that “the hungry month.” But outside of crop failures and droughts, actual starvation would be rare. The biggest problem would be protein acquisition. Better grow some peanuts! Chickens would become expensive luxury item since they are far more useful as egg producers and processing a chicken yourself is a pain in the butt.
It’s likely some sort of community structure would emerge. In small villages the land is usually worked communally and the grain distributed as needed. In larger villages, an extended family will work together. In our fragmented society, we’d have to come up with something else. One of the useful things the traditional leaders (the equivalent of a small-time king, ruling over county-sized areas) would do was college a tax on harvested grain, in kind. This tax was then stored to be distributed in case of famine. There is more to being a leader than brute force, and small communities like that are kind of inherently democratic- it’s never too hard to depose a leader.
Local level smithing is very viable and tons of people do it. Don’t know where they would get raw materials from, though.
In the OP’s scenario, I imagine there would be metric assloads of (now mysteriously not working) cars, trains, and the like just laying around rusting. IIRC getting decent quality iron from rusted iron is easier than extracting it from ore.
This seems obviously wrong to me. Just looking out my window right now, I’m surrounded by literally thousands of acres of arable land that currently is being used for…nothing at all. I’m in “the country” but certainly nothing very remote. Everywhere I’ve ever lived has had tons of usable land nearby that was just sitting there, doing nothing.
Everyone who’s terribly concerned that without industrial farming, we’d all starve should do some research on organic farming techniques. There are a great many people out there who believe that our current industrial agriculture model is unsustainable and doing us all more harm than good, and are currently growing excellent quality food without chemical fertilizers or pesticides. Would things be more difficult? Of course, but we’d mostly survive.
I, personally, feel very confident that should society collapse, my family would be just fine, but then we’re quite handy as a group and have land. People who live in big cities and who can’t figure out how to cobble together a shovel out of the copious amounts of scrap metal available in this world might have more problems, but in the US, at least, not having enough land in the entire country to feed our population would not seem to be a problem. I do see the transportation problem, but like other posters have pointed out, there are always alternatives to what we’re doing now, and I’d think there would be mass migration out of the cities if society completely collapsed.
A lot of land that is covered with wild plant life is still unsuitable for agriculture. Some plants are adapted to fill very marginal conditions.
And before that, there was the BBC documentary Good Neighbors. 
If transport has broken down, then one won’t be able to obtain seeds for one’s backyard crops. I don’t have carrot and bean seeds already stored, for instance.
Certainly, I could try to lay in a supply if I see that society is going to hell, but in that scenario, I’d probably stock up on fertilizer and tools too.
Right now, every store with a garden-care center (including Wal~Mart and Lowes) has a jillion vegetable seed packets set out for sale, with another jillion probably in their warehouse.
But if the Great Infrastructure Breakdown happens between Septemberish and Februaryish, we could all be seedless and out of luck.
Also, if the Breakdown happens too late in the year, many of the backyard crops will be hit with winter frost before they can ripen.
A little off-track, but my Grandparents migrated here from farming country in Germany in the 1920’s. They lived on the edge of a fairly major city but had a 1/4 acre (or so) lot on half of which they basically had a suburban farm. They grew chickens, raised vegetables, and had a number of fruit trees and berry bushes.
The chickens were pretty much self-propogating and the cost of feeding them was …err…chickenfeed. Their droppings fertilized the vegetable garden IIRC, which they planted from seed every year. And the fruit trees and berry bushes required little maintenance.
During the 30’s Depression they raised a significant amount of their food supply. My Mom hated the taste of chicken for the rest of her life, after living on it for years.
So, this is a far cry from year round self-sufficiency but it does show you can go quite a way with even a small patch of land.
I do. 
One problem I do foresee, however, is that many of today’s backyard gardeners have no clue how to produce their own seeds for next year. They rip everything out of the ground at harvest and never let anything go to seed. At which point… if suddenly you had to collect seed do you really know the life cycle of your garden vegetables? When are radish seeds ripe for picking? How best to store them? And so forth.
As it happens I’m probably more prepared than most to be that sort of self-reliant. In addition to gardening I also know how to make things like soap. I can produce fiber, spin it, and weave it into cloth (I own one good sized loom that can produce cloth 60" wide, plus I know how to make a loom). I know something of natural dyes. I have some skill at animal husbandry. I also have skill at leather working, papermaking… all sorts of very, very handy things. Even so, I’d dread having to make such a change because I lack certain pieces of knowledge. I know nothing of smithing. I can’t produce medicine. I don’t know how to make any sort of milling device for grains. Storage of food and materials would be a problem. Procuring water would be a problem - I have a well but the pump runs on electricity and I haven’t a clue how to convert it to handpumping.
One could just plant marijuana and thereby hasten the resumption of commerce.
And some cultures have adapted to marginal conditions as well.
People have been known to survive under some of the harshest conditions on earth. The Inuit. The tribes on the slopes of the Himalayas or in the Andes in Peru.
Would we ALL survive, nope. And I doubt I’d be one of the survivors. I lack the skills. Would humanity survive. Yep.
(Goat herding…in the apocalypse, I’m raising goats)
You ever actually raised goats? Given a choice, I think I’d prefer the apocalypse…
I come from a substantial farming family. Every year for at least the last century my family has produced more grain (wheat/oats/barley/rice), meat (sheep/cattle/poultry) and fibre (wool) than the family could possibly consume in a century. Plus producing our own eggs, fruit, milk and vegetables etc.
We’d be as well equiped as any western family in the OP scenario.
But if you were to suddenly take away fuel and consequently machinery then we’d go subsistance, if fact probably hunter/gatherer short term. Where we’d struggle is in grain and vegetables.
We would probably have 1,000MT on farm so seed is not an issue. My 80yo father has worked horses, though not as draught animals. The riding hacks we do have couldn’t be used for that purpose. I think we’d have a collar and harness somewhere in the back sheds. Training some of the bullocks to pull a plough isn’t like teaching your dog to roll over. Would probably take a couple of years, though not beyond us. None of the cropping equipment (ploughs, harrows, discs and combines) we have could be drawn by a team horses so we’d have to make them ourselves. That would be fun without mains power and welding. Sowing via broadcasting is straightforward, just laborious and time consuming. Harvesting the grain, well there are scythes around the properties so that’s just backbreaking work. Threshing the grain manually would represent a few challenges. Milling the grain for flour, now you are getting a real stretch.
Vegetables might also be an issue as as many of those commercial seeds currently being planted are hybrids. Whether their seed would be viable or productive is unknown.
Anybody getting the idea in that scenario that Mr&Mrs 9-5 nuclear family from the city are going to struggle to make it through the second year? And we don’t get any snow in the winter. You thought about what is required to get milk on your porridge in the morning? Keeping food if you don’t have a fridge? Could you make a Coolgardie Safe?
The OP world has no fuel and you’re proposing that we can have a backyard smelter? :smack:
Check out what happened in China during the “Great Leap Forward” they turned high quality steel into low quality pig iron using wood fired furnaces.
I can’t envision a scenario that would cause that sudden and massive a breakdown that wouldn’t at the same time kill of 75% of the population. That solves a lot of the problems right there.
I think all that’s needed for the scenario is a lack of oil. As has been mentioned, that wouldn’t stop wood- or coal-powered engines from running, and electric vehicles would last a short time, but there would certainly be no diesel engines in operation.