If shit properly hits the fan, I suspect things are going to be way more desperate.

To be a little more precise, people have studied this question carefully at a planetary scale.

The total agricultural production possible in the absense of artificial inputs like fertilizers, pesticides, diesel tractors, cold storage and refrigerated supply chains etc is around no more than 3billion people running off solar inputs and natures nutrient cycles and the amount of land and water available.

Pretty shocking number if you don’t have the context, but here is a place to get started on the information this is based on.

So for example, in the green revolution, land and agriculture technology increased a modest amount, but artificial fossil inputs into the existing technology system increased 90-fold. Most of the gains in food production are because it’s now based on fossil energy and nutrients rather than natural sources.

Currently, today ~40% of all the human food supply molecules come from fossil fuels and are incorporated into the plants and animals we eat.

So it’s not “just” a land management issue, or urbanization. Humanity is literally on artificial life support. There is no simple, survivable way out of this commitment. Fundamentally this is far, far from penciling out any other way we know how to survive. Humanity population passed some threshold for change around 3-4 generations ago.