Memes of Production

Does it? Using Australia as an example, we waste ~312kg of food per person per year. That is half an humans entire yearly food needs, turned into trash because the crops needed to be burned as profits were low, that it was an odd colour and wouldn’t sell as easily at the supermarket, or because people prepared more food than they ate and scrapped the rest into the bin.

That really doesn't dispute my point - half a person's food needs per year would increase carrying capacity by ~50% from the current status - so being able to provide, by your numbers for Australia, ~45 million instead of ~30 million.

But the larger issue is that agriculture itself is responsible for a much larger percentage of current carrying capacity. Without agriculture, we would be looking at something more like 3 million, or even less. And certainly that 3 million would not have the same societal capabilities to, say, allow us to not abandon disabled children in the woods to spare the community a mouth it cannot afford to feed.

We do not need gigantic input machines to survive, populations and people can survive in a dispersed connected manner. Aiding each other rather than aiding one source.

That may be so, but however you want to define civilization, agriculture is definitely not what you want to take aim at.

Civilisation is a centralised/decentralised system, that is not the most effective system or the only one that can work, it is simply the easiest to be controlled and managed by a state/authority. Distributed systems of society are adaptive and can support people, especially if we cut back on the waste issue. They are also less resource extractive and harmful to local ecosystems.

I don't think I agree with that definition of civilization, per se; but I also acknowledge that you're discussing a different issue than I would be under the label of 'civilization', so my objections are limited to the point about abandoning agriculture (which necessarily would destroy what I would regard as civilization).

And regardless current agriculture is going to kill billions of us as the climate collapses and our inefficient imported crops die off en mass.

Not really. Of all the threats to human survival, agricultural collapse is pretty low on the board. At most you could say that the current system of decentralized production of crops which allows year-round access to seasonal foodstuffs would collapse, and cheap fertilizer would go the way of the dinosaur. But agriculture itself is not unsustainable, and, especially, modern agricultural techniques which allow 1 acre to feed 50 people, or more, are largely not predicated on access to expensive materials, but modern knowledge and political stability.

A mixture of crop rotation and composting (only approaching the modern standard for such techniques come the 18th century AD) can provide extremely high returns compared to early agriculture. Combined with the understanding of soil and plant needs, and of (non-chemical) pest control, plant genetics, and the effects of individual traits on crop yields, yields do not have to significantly decrease to be sustainable.

Even assuming that we're going under the idea that all motorized farming equipment (other than transport infrastructure) is non-kosher, labor requirements are affected much more than yields. Artificial fertilizer in particular is mostly used as a way to create high yields without needing educated farmers, long-term farming plans, or crop rotations (which reduce profits, horror of horrors!) It's not the death of modern agricultural yields to be stripped of it entirely, assuming one is interested in a system where artificial fertilizers are no longer used at all.

If you can provide stability/safety, there's no reason why you need to abandon agriculture, and I would go so far as to say that abandoning agriculture (in the sense of intensive land cultivation) is abandoning the vast majority of human beings to a miserable death, and arguably also a miserable life - not just the ones alive now, but all future generations as well.