This is just a tiny part of a much broader goal, which is to create a completely self sustaining town of 100 to 1000 people within my lifetime. My intention is with 100k that could get you 10 acres. 1 acre for food, 5 for solar/energy production and 4 for housing/community. Of course, with the comments in this thread, I'd need more land, haha.
As far as the economics goes: I've been doing reading but haven't formed a good conclusion yet. Initially I thought a communalist approach would work. I thought of too many ways that would fail and then opted more for a centralized, socialist approach, but that seems like it would fail as well. Capitalism, of course, would just result in what we have now, defeating the purpose. Personally I think communities where each person knows everyone else have unique advantages not present in large cities.
Disclaimer: I haven't done a ton of due diligence on these things yet. When I get closer to actually doing this I'll start doing more serious research.
The keyword here is "intentional community", and there's a long history of people trying to make it work and sometimes succeeding nicely.
But neither farming nor technology is key to making it work. The challenges in decreasing order of size are: interpersonal (requires a lot more collaborative effort and management of drama than you'd expect); legal/administrative (you still need to pay e.g. property tax & comply with building codes & farming law); cashflow (you still need to buy from outside, especially if you're hightech); and only then the day to day of growing food (which may be more labour than you or the community is used to).
On the <100 people scale it's like having roommates who are also co-workers. Hence the tendency for intentional communities to come with some level of cultishness to ensure the community sticks together without being pulled apart by individuality.
This may be exactly the opposite way to look at it, but have a peek at [1] the One Straw Revolution. TL;DR: Masanobu Fukuoka was a scientist with an idea of using existing biological systems to reduce the amount of labour involved in farming. He created a very nearly zero-input farming system with the hope of enabling people to grow enough food to sustain themselves in their spare time.
Unfortunately, lots and lots of hype surrounded the project and reliable numbers of yield, etc, etc are probably not to be found. Still there have been lots and lots of similar initiatives with interesting results. I think you would need quite a lot of land for 100 people, but land is cheaper than robots (and is self repairing, and adds to your quality of life). I have a friend who grows all his rice and vegetables for the year in his spare time using Fukuoka's methods (he studied with him for a while). I helped him harvest once and I was quite surprised how well he was doing (easily as much yield as his neighbour's commercial farm). Farm land is trivial to get in Japan and you can often borrow enough to live off of in exchange for a bottle of whiskey or so per year.
How will this town get medicine and technologies like replacement solar panels? Will people pay with USD into a general fund that would be used to buy from the outside world? What happens if people can't pay?
Sorry about all the questions, but a community that small can hardly be self sustaining in a real sense without lots of imports or a massive step down in quality of life.
Indeed. Ideally (need to do more research) the community would self sustaining with a low quality of life, however, all of the usual amenities would be provided. The difficulty is setting it up so that they don't necessarily become entitled or dependent on the advanced amenities.
As far as the economics goes: I've been doing reading but haven't formed a good conclusion yet. Initially I thought a communalist approach would work. I thought of too many ways that would fail and then opted more for a centralized, socialist approach, but that seems like it would fail as well. Capitalism, of course, would just result in what we have now, defeating the purpose. Personally I think communities where each person knows everyone else have unique advantages not present in large cities.
Disclaimer: I haven't done a ton of due diligence on these things yet. When I get closer to actually doing this I'll start doing more serious research.