Yep,
Close to the big cities a 10 acre plot intensively farmed for veggies made a good living for a big family with a lot of kids ( free labour) until the 80's when supermarkets took over .
But out of town, or over the hill, no chance
A friend just sold his fathers old farm. 1000 acres ( consolidation of 90 ex-service blocks ) which included the entire town of Brooklana with 300, residential blocks, surveyed, laid out but never actually sold because tractors got bigger and you no longer needed 1 man / 5 acre . Ten acres is the limit one man could farm using only walk behind impliments or horses.
Most of our early pollies were either the sons of squatters / former pollies or Pommie rejects.
As late as the 70's they still believed that "rain follows the plow" and the "cure" for our deserts was to farm them, just like merry old England.
If just one of them sat down with a black man who had 50,000 years of orally recorded history of the country they would have found out why only a few Nations bothered to farm their tribal lands other than fire improving pastures.
In the 70's we spent a fortune building a beautiful dam, draining the Upper Hunter valley, where incidentially they had been growing DRY CLIMATE WINE GRAPES for around 80 years so the "beautiful dam has never been more than 1/3 full.
