the primitive tech blogger guy is not trying to live off the land. he just have a Survivor/Bigbrother kinda of tv show for survival nerds. he probably live off the proceeds of paracord bracelets and pocket knife banners :)
Depends on your criteria. If you only aim to feed a small group, it is significantly less cost to make a handful of enclosures than to clear a large amount of space for a field, even if the field is more efficient at scale.
The point is that "a handful of enclosures" would only provide a few meals for a small group but would take six months to produce them. The group needs to eat for the entire six months.
Let's say each enclosure produces three-days worth of yams in six months. To feed one person for a year you need 100 enclosures, and you need to stagger their planting so you can harvest them continously.
Each enclosure takes up about one square meter, so you need a line of them 100m long for each person in your group. You also need space to walk between them, so you need 3m for each two lines of enclosures. For a ten-person group, that's a 100m x 30m yam farm.
In my country, we grow yams pretty frequently in the villages and despite being low density, subsistence farming, people still clear land. It's basically impossible to live off the land by farming without clearing away trees.
You are mostly correct, and should not be downvoted.
However, the Irish of the 1800s lived off potatoes and cows butter SOLELY. Of course, they were extremely skinny because they had to stretch a 3 month harvest across 12 months. But they were not malnourished. There were irishmen living into their 100s at this time.
Of course there was a famous potato blight that killed the crop and starved most everyone to death. But I'm talking about nutrition, not epidemiology
