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Tolkien never specified that the cities lacked farmlands. We never see enough of the area around them to know. Likewise with the movies. We see cities, and some battlefields, and the deserted areas orcs frequent, but Minas Tirith could have a whole farming hinterland that just doesn't happen to be in the small spot we're looking.
Using Tolkien as an example, though, consider his languages: what we saw in the books (especially LotR) was only a tiny fraction of what he actually created. He had a lot more than ever went in the books, more than even his son has published. The purpose of research and worldbuilding is not to shove a reader's face in it (the Civil War guy comes to mind) but to know, very intimately, how things are put together and how they work, so you can naturally do things which do work, just as you would if writing a modern novel about the real world. If you want to write well, you need to know so much about your fictional world that someone who doesn't know it at all could ask you random questions and you wouldn't have to think about the answers (or not much). That's why writing non-real fiction is so hard: we all know how things work in the real world, so we've got that basis to start from. Figuring out how they work, and work together, in a world that has some significant differences from the familiar one can be wrenchingly hard.
The things you need to ask yourself:
1. What changes do I want to make here?
2. What purpose will they serve in my story?
3. What will the fallout from these changes be?
4. What other changes are necessary to permit the changes I want?
5. Iterate 1-4 for each of those other changes.
For example, let's say you want a world where copper is much rarer than it is in the real world, even rarer than gold. It's unlikely that such a world would develop telephones as we know them, for instance, because they, and the telegraphs that preceded them, require thousands and thousands of miles of copper wire. Aside from the difficulty of procuring so much, think of what would happen if you strung up that much solid gold: it would be stolen. So all of the things we have been accustomed to using phones and telegraphs for, going back to their invention, would never have happened. Electrical distribution lines are copper, too. You can't cheat with aluminum, either, because purifying aluminum requires ... wait for it ... copper wire. Lots of copper wire. And the electrical infrastructure to support it. Think of every significant telegram, every significant phone call, every newswire story, never having existed at all. That alone (leaving out all the other uses of copper) would change society drastically.
I just read that the old TV series "Connections" is available on YouTube. It might not be a bad idea to watch that. Everything ties in to everything else; that's how the world works. Not only no man is an island, but no toothpick is an island either.
And make some time to read Guns, Germs, and Steel. It's not that long, relatively speaking, and it's a book that someone who's trying to do what you're trying to do just read.
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