Not all 5 hours can be worked in the field. First of all, many of those hours are after dark, which limits how much can be accomplished, but more importantly, many of those hours aren't exclusive: They are watching TV, and eating dinner and things like that...

(Not that that changes your point, there are more than enough hours that people are sitting on the couch watching TV during the day for them to farm a little bit of land.)

I believe to cling to hopes that life will go on just like it has with a 4-8% oil decline is completely unrealistic. Aside from this being simply a belief, if a plausible one, it seems a bit of a straw-man. If life is indeed no longer going on "just like it is [now]", but is nonetheless sufficiently close that "transportation to and from work, school, grocery/pharmacy, shopping, etc" is at issue, then all this hard labor seems a rather superfluous waste that might be better spent on, say, more productive adaptations to less oil. OTOH if things are allowed to go so far that all this hard labor is truly unavoidable, then such transportation seems unlikely to be a huge issue, as we will be in a doom scenario such as 'cjwirth' harps on ad nauseam, with little or no "work, school, grocery/pharmacy, shopping, etc" to be transported to. That's what I see as incoherence in the list of points.

...in bygone times, the town blacksmith, tanner, baker, or shopkeeper, was not necessarily also a farmer. That's rather hedged, not a terribly blanket statement. However, and for example, IIRC, at the historic site of Bethabara in North Carolina, I was told that about 1/3 of the working-age population was engaged in occupations other than farming, circa 1800. I was quite astounded since that was quite inconsistent with what I was taught in school, namely that the percentage of farmers back then was in the high 90s, but there it is. I suspect that what I was taught, and what I sometimes read here, owes a little something to a synthetic romantic mythology, some of it propounded by people riding philosophical hobby horses about matters such as "the simple life" - and seeing nothing at all odd about riding them over some of the most complex machines ever built - Web servers!

During the war, the young men were off fighting. Yes. And somewhat older men were farming, but with great assistance from priority fuel rations and some assistance from younger men with agricultural draft exemptions. And in either war, the currently tremendous population of frail people in middle and old age simply did not yet exist. Back then, they were still carried off in great numbers by infectious disease or its treatment - penicillin was not yet in wide use and the sulfa drugs had nasty side effects and serious issues with effectiveness - something which was often still greatly aggravated by heat or cold. For good and sufficient reasons, "flu" derives from "influenza di freddo", and likewise, a good deal of European poetry [scroll down to "In Winter"] and literature muses on the terrors of deadly winter.

A little fresh air and exercise... Another straw man, perhaps. We're not discussing raising a few luxury vegetables of negligible caloric value as a hobby - which is what, if the truth be told, even many of the victory gardeners were up to. We're discussing a great deal of time-consuming back-breaking work, not just "a little fresh air" (hard labor to be done by people who in at least a good many cases are plopping down in front of the TV in the evening and pretending to watch through half-closed eyes because they're knackered out.) So I still think that as a prescription, it's rather less suited to the population of 2008 than it might have been to the youthful population of the early 20th century.

...wanting to look good for the rare picture-taking event. LOL.

in bygone times, the town blacksmith, tanner, baker, or shopkeeper, was not necessarily also a farmer.

Already I've heard of some people in the UK basically going from house to house, offering to grow a garden in the back in return for a share of the produce. This has been working out quite nicely. It gives a job to someone who might otherwise be unemployed. It lets some specialization of work occur (the gardener does gardening all day, so becomes very good at it, while the homeowner specializes in something else). Both of them benefit, and make use of a resource (the land) that would otherwise lie fallow.

You see? Humans are a lot more resilient than some give us credit for. The main thing we need to avoid is a sudden collapse, something that I see as less likely than some doomers suggest. If we are smart, we can navigate a more gradual path of energy descent, allowing for these things to arise sometimes spontaneously, sometimes in a planned way, without massive amounts of social chaos and death.

Many people in the early 19th century had multiple jobs. My grandfather was a wheat farmer in Minnesota, and also built and repaired houses. He was a fine carpenter. My parents lived through the Great Depression right after being married in 1933. They sustained themselves raising chickens for meat and eggs, and had a 1/2 acre vegetable garden for themselves. I was taught how to garden at an early age. I was born in 1940, and by 1943, I was removing rocks from the garden and stacking them for removal in a wheelbarrow. I planted alongside my parents for as long as they had a garden, which was about when my mother went to work in 1952. Ah, inflation was already beginning to make it necessary for two in a household to work. I have gardened every year of my life, and enjoy producing about 25% of my vegetables. Anyone can learn to do it, and it improves your health, and people that garden (per info from my doctor)live longer. Next year I will grow much more, as I am seeing hyper-inflation in grocery prices. I don't know why people don't think they can work full time and garden. I did it all my life. At the end of the season, you either freeze or can your produce, and enjoy it through the winter. I do not use pesticides, and can be sure that what I eat will not poison me, and will not have e-coli bacteria. My suggestion is to start with a small veggie patch, that you feel is manageable, and I guarantee you will want to increase its size each year. There are good books out there on managing your garden, and proper use of compost and compost tea, and rotating your crops and how to encourage pollinating insects, and discourage destructive insects. Have fun with this for heaven's sake. It will become a necessity in the future.