Perfect showcase of aforementioned city boy hubris, equating a small home garden with some trees to a modern day farming operation.
Growing 100 potatoes is not even in the same stratosphere of complexity and logistics as growing 100,000 potatoes.
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Potatoes are not a good counter example because they are indeed stupidly easy to grow and scale. You can easily grow hundreds of pounds of potatoes per year indoors with fairly small potato boxes going through a few harvests per year. The main limiting factor is energy costs - you'll end up paying more per kg of potato than you would if you just bought them at the grocery store.
But there's a very good reason potatoes will be one of the early staples for fresh food on Mars. It's really hard to go wrong with them. It's also the reason it was chosen as the first food to ever be grown in space, back in 1995!
Potatoes are easy to grow, however even if you grow 1000 lbs of potatoes per year, at farm sale prices that is worth like $130. So how much of that $130 did you spend on growing them, and how many hundreds of thousands of pounds would you have to be able to harvest and transport to make your salary - the fertilizer and equipment maintenance costs?
All but the largest corporate megafarms are happy to make just a few percent profit on their investment, its one of the lowest return investments out of any industry. And it isn't a stable return either, that is the average over a few decades, with year-to-year yield and profit varying up to 30%.
If you want to survive on all plants you grew yourself, potatoes are a good choice for the bulk of your calories and nutrients, but if you want to make any actual money off of it, the scale of operations needed quickly grow to massive proportions that makes it anything but easy.
I'm aware, I grew up on a farm growing potatoes (amongst other things). My point is, again, growing a few potatoes is very, very different to growing multiple field fulls of potatoes at an industrial scale and the whole hubris thing is people thinking such a thing is scaleable.
Sure, grow a few potatoes in your garden, growing your own food is commendable. But to pretend a home garden is scaleable to a proper farm is ignorant at best, and is exactly what happens very often when technologists talk about the topic of farming.
It's possible to go to extremes in either direction in this topic, because there are things you can do objectively better but are cost constrained. For instance with indoor potato farms you can harvest multiple times per year anywhere, get crazy yields/health by jacking up CO2 levels, grow in absolutely perfect temperature/humidity conditions, have far less issue with pests/weeds, and so on endlessly.
And in the context of an early Mars expedition, which probably wouldn't have more than a dozen people anyhow, you could get practically infinite potatoes in a very small land area. This is all dramatically better and more efficient than classical farming with long sprawling fields in every way except for cost/kg, but in contemporary industrial farming the only thing that matters is cost/kg.