What it would take to feed the county

A model of the nutrition, land, and labor to feed ~80% of Garland County — about 80,000 people — with honest numbers, ranges, and the one finding that changes the whole plan: in this county, land is not the wall. Growers are.

Every building-block figure is cited below. The county totals are simple arithmetic on those figures, and the assumptions are stated in the open. Treat this as a planning model, not a promise — the ranges are wide on purpose.

What one person needs a year

• Calories: ~2,000 kcal/day → ~730,000 kcal/year (USDA Dietary Guidelines reference; real needs run 1,600–3,200/day by age and activity).
• Vegetables: the US eats ~414 lbs of vegetables and pulses per person a year (USDA ERS) — MyPlate's target is about 2½ cups a day.
• Protein: 46 g/day (women) to 56 g/day (men) (National Academies RDA).

For 80,000 people, the vegetables alone come to ~32 million pounds a year.

Three tiers — and what each would take

Feeding a county isn't one number; "fully fed" splits into very different asks.

Tier A — everyone's vegetables & fruit (the health-and-resilience tier)

• Land: ~500–1,000 acres. Intensive market gardens can feed a lot from a little (one documented Québec farm feeds 200+ families from 1.5 acres); conventional production needs more. Plan on the middle.
• Labor: ~300–600 full-time growers. Diversified vegetable production runs roughly 850–2,000 labor-hours per acre (SARE) — which, divided into a 2,000-hour work year, is a few hundred livelihoods.
• Versus today: Garland grows vegetables on 27 acres. This is a 20–40× increase — but on just 2–4% of the county's existing 29,001 farm acres. The land is already here.

Tier B — everyone's calories, from staples (the survival tier)

• Land: ~3,800 acres if it were all potatoes (potatoes yield ~15.3 million calories per acre — the land-efficient calorie champion), or ~8,000–15,000 acres for a realistic staple mix (potatoes, sweet potatoes, beans, winter squash, grain).
• Versus today: that fits inside the county's 29,001 farm acres, though it exceeds the current 8,531 acres of cropland — a real land-use shift, but physically possible.

Tier C — the whole current diet (meat, dairy, grain, oil, everything)

• Land: ~80,000–200,000 acres (peer-reviewed carrying-capacity research puts a full mixed diet at ~1–2.5 acres per person; the more meat, the more land).
• Versus today: Garland has 29,001 acres in farms. Full local self-sufficiency for the whole diet would take 3 to 7 times the county's entire farm base. It is not physically possible to grow the complete diet inside the county — and that's true almost everywhere. No county is a food island. You grow the resilient, health-critical slice locally and stay connected for the rest.

The finding that changes the plan

Put the tiers next to what the county actually has, and the constraint flips from what everyone assumes:

• Garland County sits on 29,001 acres of farmland and grows food-crops on almost none of it — 27 acres of vegetables, with 73% of farm sales coming from poultry and livestock and only 9% of farms selling directly to people.
• Feeding everyone's produce takes a few hundred acres and a few hundred growers. The land is there. What's missing is the growers, the training, the markets, and the cold chain.

So land was never the limit. Growers are. That is exactly why the rest of this build exists — the hub, the apprenticeships, the hoop houses, the anchor buyers, the $400K of capital — none of it grows a tomato. All of it manufactures the missing ingredient: people who can make a living growing food, and a market steady enough to keep them doing it. Feed the county and you don't just get fed — you get 300–600 new livelihoods on land that's sitting idle.

The honest caveats

• Ranges are wide because intensive and conventional production differ by 5–10×; the labor figures come from a real but non-random 19-farm study (SARE) and are directional, not a national average.
• Diet drives everything. The land numbers swing enormously with how much meat is in the diet — the whole-diet tier assumes the current American diet; a lower-meat diet cuts it sharply.
• Staple yields use USDA national/regional figures (sweet-potato yield is a Mississippi proxy); Arkansas-specific yields would refine Tier B.
• This isn't a call to grow everything here. It's a map of which slice is reachable — the produce and storage-staples that carry the health and resilience payoff — and which slice stays part of a wider system.

Building blocks (each cited): USDA Dietary Guidelines; USDA ERS food availability; National Academies protein RDA; Peters et al., "Carrying Capacity of U.S. Agricultural Land," Elementa 2016; USDA NASS yields; SARE labor study LNC01-194; and the USDA 2022 Census of Agriculture — Garland County profile. See also the food flywheel, the two pots, and the $400K blueprint.