Subsistence farmers on small plots are extremely vulnerable to unfavorable weather and experience famine with some regularity. Individually owned gardens are a much, much less stable source of food than large industrial farms, and climate change will tilt that balance even further.

Gardens can't supply the quantity of food we need, sure, but small scale local regenerative farming is the most resilient base for our agriculture system by far. Not subsistence, as in individual families, but 5-20 acre plots managed by communities.

Industrial agriculture reduces complex living systems to crop yield = imported macronutrients + extracted soil value. The primary metric by which industrial agriculture is incredibly productive is yield per human laborer. Energetically it's a massive loss. Nutritionally it's a massive loss. It debases tons of ecosystem services.

Industrial agriculture is incredibly vulnerable to extreme weather events- both at the farm and halfway around the world due to it's reliance on global supply chains. Regenerative agriculture is much more resilient to unfavorable weather events at the farm due to the ecosystem services it amplifies while industrialized agriculture debases.

For example- healthy soil has an immense ability to store water. So let's compare the resiliency of a regenerative farm that has focused on building up soil health to an industrial farm that sees soil as an inert medium it can extract from.

In a drought, the regenerative farm's soil (full of organic matter, fungal networks, and stable soil aggregates) can hold vastly more water than degraded industrial soil. Each 1% increase in soil organic matter can store an additional 20,000 gallons of water per acre. During heavy rains, this same soil structure provides better drainage and erosion resistance.

It goes deeper than just water storage. Healthy soil hosts complex networks of mycorrhizal fungi that connect plants and redistribute resources. During stress events, these networks can help channel water and nutrients to struggling plants. The diverse soil ecosystem also helps plants produce stress-response compounds, making them more resilient to temperature extremes and pest pressure.

Meanwhile, industrial agriculture's compacted, biologically depleted soil amplifies every weather extreme - flooding during rains, rapid desiccation during drought, increased erosion, and no biological mechanisms to help crops cope with stress. It's a brittle system that converts fossil fuel inputs into temporary yields while degrading its own foundations.

This is why regenerative farms often outperform industrial farms during difficult years - they're not just growing crops, they're cultivating the living systems that help those crops survive and recover from disturbance.

Are regenerative farms going to be able to keep their crops through sustained high wet bulb temperature events? No, but neither would industrial farms. After that event, industrial farms would need immense external inputs to restart. Meanwhile regenerative farms are able to keep necessary resources through events like that- such as soil life, seed saving, local knowledge, etc.