Yeah, people here who are not constantly on the move are using the ground they have available to make gardens. It is often not "needed" but has become a fashionable expression of survival mindedness in the current economy.

A lot of people here in Portland are catching on to being more independent and "off the grid", or at least "less dependent on the grid" and are looking to learn. Not exactly joining militias and talking conspiracy theories, but privately looking at the government/corporate situation and trying to position themselves into being less dependent on it.

A lot of people have been dealing with the food survival situation in various ways to the point that I don't think anyone would be starving. If there are riots here, it will NOT really be over food. It may be something else, but not food.

Toward the end of summer, the food banks start to get stocked with local fresh garden food that people grew as a hobby but then don't know what to do with it. My current garden will likely go that route as I am doing it as an experiment for "SHTF" but have no intention of keeping it going long term full time. The experiment side of it being hanging plants grown basically up on a ten foot concrete wall. Thus, no "stooping" to deal with trimming or harvesting and I can make use of a very small square footage area of ground.

I am not screwing around with storing glass jars of vegtables I'll never eat that much of. I keep MREs for use in the second couple months of any "SHTF situation" along with "convenience meals" for work that I have to do away from easy access to fast food joints.

The idea is this:
Anyone should easily have a one to two month supply of regular food around their basic home, whether it is a room rental of six bed three and a half bath house. That's the kind of food you eat all of the time, in regular supply. In the first week or two of a power grid faliure, you will live on the refrigerated and frozen stuff in luxury, pig out or it will just go bad on you anyway. Share it with friends, neighbors and passers-by. Make big pots of stew and share it for free. Let folks know you are into sharing and organizing.

That, and as people who have less but can come up with things, let them know you are in the same situation they are (just a little better prepared) and they are welcome to come back provided they don't come back empty handed. Chances are what they bring will be those perishable staples as they move about and you stay put.

Of those who want to "stay put" with or around you, they get put to work building and expanding the gardens post hasted.

Thus goes month one. Month two, you are still living on your groceries, the gardens are starting to get in, maybe someone starts figuring out how to hunt or get out and trade with some farms because your meat will have run out at this point. Maybe someone gets fish.

Months three and four, you break into the MREs for two reasons, you are running low on regular groceries, and you are likely to need to do some travelling and need fast compact meals for what you are doing. That might mean hunting, it might mean heading out to the farmlands to get live chickens and rabbits for local food production back home. The cities at that point still have things the farms need, and the bigger factory farms would likely be wanting to reduce volume anyway, since without grid infrastructure to sustain their fuel and electricity needs, they will scale back to closer to a subsistence level. The big chicken farms for instance, would no longer be selling frozen chickens processed on site, but would likely still be selling feeder chicks, same with pigs. I think dairy operations would do something similar. You would no longer be able to go buy processed homogenized milk, but you could still buy cows.

Months five and six, you have hopefully adjusted to your economic situation of raising food and doing local trade to eat. Depending on the season, you are toughing out some hard weather or your first garden foods will be coming in. Your basic Broiler chickens exist on a life cycle that can run as short as two months, at three months fully grown and consumable. If you got your baby chicks during month two or three of the collapse, then it is only a short time between the runout (or self enforced rationing) of your two months supply of MREs before you are into a sustainable diet which includes regular supplies of chicken.

Pork cycles run a little differently depending on processing times (think smokehouse time). Personally, I think the decentralization of farming could in fact happen quickly if and people become motivated to do it. There is actually no less food production per capita in the US right now compared to 1920, just the centralization of production and processing has changed, and the fashionable tastes in food have been shifting toward a lot of imports which of course would be reduced if "SHTF".