China has around 330 million acres of farmland and, until relatively recently, they were a net food exporter with a population of 1.4 billion. That's around 4 people fed per acre, and that's not especially remarkable. Even urban homesteads are also able to match this. Here's [1] a heavily commercialized one that is/was operating on a fifth of an acre for a family of four.
And meat also provides an excellent nutrient:calorie ratio with extremely low upkeep. You can sustain around 50 free range chickens per acre, and they're ready for harvest in 6 weeks. That's more than a whole chicken per day, on a single acre. If you want to get real crazy you can also get into things like vertical farming/aquaponics [2] and more, where the densities are limited really only by cost. Though on the still very reasonable end, you can do things like potato boxes where you can get hundreds of pounds of potatoes in tens of square feet.
Not the person you’re replying to, but China over literally Millenia have effectively terraformed mountains into channels and channels of rice paddies for the cultivation of rice - areas that westerners would not typically consider farmland.
Of course you can also plant rice on flat fields (and China does as well), but this does skew the comparative ratios of acres of land use : people fed.
I'm a westerner in agriculture (Australian, northern territory cattle stations -> mining - Geophysics -> large acre grains) and I consider that to be farmland.
Maybe you're thinking of some specific subset of urban western non agricultural people.
Of course in western culture the "typical" westerner lives in an urban environment so perhaps that explains the disconnect.
I expect people think I'm somehow 'tricking' them with terminology with China's farmland figures. Many seem to think that you need multiple acres per person for basic sustainability, so there must be some catch. Nope, farmland is just any land where farming (or ranching) is happening. It's not fixed, nor does it exclude certain types of farm/ranchland.
Friend, I’m Aussie as well and listing mining and geophysics as having anything to agriculture weakens your appeal to authority, making the subsequent snark even less appropriate for HN.
"Friend" my actual life experience is no appeal to authority, it's two decades around cattle and stations, two decades travelling the world writing GIS code for exploration geophysics across more than half the existing countries of the globe and another two decades around agriculture.
Everybody I've met in 60+ years considers the land that rice farmers farm rice on to be farmland.
Perhaps you might do better policing others less and working more on making a point.
Several cogent points have been made about why China might have unexpectedly high agriculture output per acre used to a lay person - all of which you seem to wish to curmudgeonly argue against strawmen variants of.
And meat also provides an excellent nutrient:calorie ratio with extremely low upkeep. You can sustain around 50 free range chickens per acre, and they're ready for harvest in 6 weeks. That's more than a whole chicken per day, on a single acre. If you want to get real crazy you can also get into things like vertical farming/aquaponics [2] and more, where the densities are limited really only by cost. Though on the still very reasonable end, you can do things like potato boxes where you can get hundreds of pounds of potatoes in tens of square feet.
[1] - https://www.urbanhomestead.org/
[2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vertical_farming