Some stuff you can def grow yourself easily and not have to buy at the store. I don’t have to buy tomato's all summer just from a few plants. Never buy herbs. But yeah sustenance farming I am not. Support local farmers!
That's cool, I wanted to point out that saying cheap and then a price point without reference isn't really helpful because price varies so much.
Also, 270 per week per person!?!? What the fuck, that can't be true, that's more than what I extrapolated it would cost me in the European expensive countries when I visited and went to random grocery stores. As always, the american dream seems to be a scam fetish xD.
I spend 1/3rd of that on all of my groceries combined per month. If I was spending that much per week I would be over 1000$ in debt after a single month. Is the average person really that rich? And what food are they buying that they need to spend that much?
This is baffling to me as a poor person.
I'm thinking that price is per household not person. I hope that's the case. But I'm seriously impressed that you can swing $90/mo for food. That's amazing.
American grocery store produce is really expensive now. $40 for a week of veggies would be a good deal in my area. Plus you’re supporting local agriculture.
It's not you who said I should assume, it was them who didn't specify, implying we should asume, sorry if I made you think otherwise. Canadians and Australians afaik aso use dollars, just not USD.
In any case, this was quite the small complaint I had, so I'll just drop it haha. Have a great day.
I live in a quite expensive Spanish area and we usually spend 50ish for 2 people's worth of food. We do go out or order food on the weekend sometimes but being vegetarian we don't spend more than 15€ on produce a week at most so 40 a week sounds a lot.
Surplusable farming is literally the basis on which all civilization is built
Like the whole point of the way things work for us now is that you don't have to be a farmer or a hunter or a gatherer to be able to have access to a consistent source of food.
People romanticize about the idealic agrarian past but human civilization was literally invented over how back breakingly difficult that kind of work is for people who aren't built for it.
This is also a major point of livestock. If you have more produce than you can eat, feed the excess to some animals and they will keep those calories fresh and delicious over the winter.
Adding on to that, its not just the surplus produce. Its all the rest of the
produce that's unusable by us humans.
When we grow something like corn, we're only growing it for the kernels that we can consume. We can't physiologically make use of the stalks, stems and leaves, but an animal like the goat? They'll chew up anything green and turn that into usable calories we humans can make use of.
Doesn’t even need to be green, just any sort of plant or really any sort of organic matter. Eating goats that have lived off of old trash is probably not the best idea though
Which neatly raises the point of how modern large monoculture does a lot less of that kind of use of agricultural products unusuable by humans.
Absolutelly, the whole of a cow slaughtered in a slaughterhouse is famously used (down to the hoves) and nothing thrown out, however you don't see goats being raised on the unusable parts of a corn plant (whilst wheat straw is actually used as feed, for corn the silage for cattle made from it uses the whole plant including kernels not just the left-over unusable by humans parts).
This is one of the things I find funny about modern day self sufficient communes. Subsistence farming is awful, industrialized farming is less awful, but still far more work than most are willing to ever do.
Modern farming techniques consider sustainability, the larger problem is countries using traditional methods that are extremely harmful like burning forests.
The industrial farming of corn in the US requires using hybrid corn strains to reach the yields it has, which in turn requires the use of fertilizers because the natural soils is incapable of sustaining the density of corn plants that hybrid varieties achive.
Those fertilizers in turn are mainly made from Oil, which is a non-renewable resource, making the whole thing unsustainable. It's is possible to make the fertilizers sustainably, it's just much more expensive so that's not done.
The US is so deeply involved (including outright military invasions) in the Middle East from where most of the oil comes because in the US oil it's not just a critical resource for Transportation and Energy, it's also a critical resource for Food because it's so incredibly dependent on corn (which is estimated to add up directly and indirectly to more than 70% of the human food chain there)
PS: There is a book called The Omnivore’s Dilemma which is a great read on this.
Fertilizers are made from Amonia which in turn is made using the Haber-Bosch process which requires fossil fuels to provide the necessary energy and as reactants (see this related article).
There is also "natural" fertilizer made from organic mass left over from other activities which would otherwise go to waste, but that's insufficient for large scale intensive farming (composting is fine for your community garden or even for supplementing low intensity agriculture, but not for the intensive industrial farming growing things like hybrid corn).
Finally, the use of techniques like crop rotation which lets letting fields lie fallow so that natural nitrate fixation occurs and the soil recovers do not make the soil rich enough in nitrates to support hybrid corn growing because, as I mentioned, the plant density is too high to be supported by natural soil alone without further addition of fertilizers.
Fertilizers are made from Amonia which in turn is made using the Haber-Bosch process which requires fossil fuels to provide the necessary energy and as reactants
That's exactly what I said! Fertilizer is not made from oil. The factory is powered by oil. Just like your home where you garden is powered by oil.
Yeah sure. They consider sustainability in that the current generation of poisons they use haven't been proven unsustainable YET. When they are proven unsustainable, they'll move to the next generation, that hasn't been proven YET...
Also systemically annihilating everything except that one crop you want to grow makes your farmland an ecological desert, that doesn't sound very sustainable either.
Unless you're of the conviction that farmland shouldn't be in any way part of nature, and we should concentrate on just growing crops there and every other kind of life there should be discouraged, and by doing that as dense as possible we keep more space for actual nature.
Though i think farming that leaves meaningful room for (some) nature to coexist with it doesn't do that much worse in yield to make the modern 'kill everything' approach worth it. But we'll see what the future brings i guess.
But just being like 'modern farming techniques consider sustainability' seems pretty naive to me...
In theory, some of those communes are cool. Way less wasteful than suburban living arrangements.
But I do worry about those communes, honestly. The demographics they attract are easy to abuse: aging conspiracy theorists with low education. If the commune owns the land, or even worse if an individual owns the land, then those people could be forced to leave and become homeless. Even if they did own property in the commune, it might be able to act as an HOA or local township and start charging them until they can claim the property that way.
There's still different approaches to it though. The default industrial gigantic monocultures with massive aquifer drilling is for sure missing a few delayed, less visible costs in the equation. "Improve industrial farming, adjust it back to a more normal scale and add some diversity between the fields and rotate crops!" just isn't a very catchy slogan I guess.
Fun fact: IDK about like a backyard vegetable garden, but small family-sized farms are actually more productive per unit of land than big industrial agriculture.
The farming conglomerates like to enforce big farming operations because they make things easier for the managerial class, and let them be in charge of everything. But if your goal is just to produce food and have the farmers make a living, small farms are actually better even economically (and not just for like 10 other reasons).
Also, you can't just look at the amount of food produced, but the amount produced vs waste, storage and transportation costs. Most things in the garden can stay ripe on the plant for a while and can be picked as needed.
Anecdotally, we were supplying about 80% of our fruit and veg needs on our own garden plot on our standard city residential lot with a family of 7. And we were literally giving tomatoes, citrus and zucchini away as fast as we could.
Aragón conducted a study on farm productivity of more than 4,000 farming households in Uganda over a five-year period. The study considered farm productivity based on land, labour and tools as well as yields per unit area of cultivated land. His findings suggested that even though yields were higher for smaller farms, farm productivity was actually higher for larger farms. Similar research in Peru, Tanzania and Bangladesh supported these findings.
What explains these divergent findings? Answering this question is important given its consequential policy implications. If small farms are indeed more productive, then policies that encourage small landholdings (such as land redistribution) could increase aggregate productivity (see the discussion in Collier and Dercon, 2014).
We argue that these divergent results reflect the limitation of using yields as a measure of productivity. Our contribution is to show that, in many empirical applications, yields are not informative of the size-productivity relationship, and can lead to qualitatively different insights. Our findings cast doubts on the interpretation of the inverse yield-size relationship as evidence that small farms are more productive, and stress the need to revisit the existing empirical evidence.
Meaning the author is advocating for more scrutiny against the claim and against land redistribution as a policy stance with the intention of increasing productivity.
First, farmers have small scale operations (the average cultivated area is 2.3 hectares).
The definition of "small family farms" in this case is on average more than 5 acres, which would absolutely be under the umbrella of subsidized industrial agriculture in developed nations.
Yeah, that's why I included "per unit of land." It is in practice a little more complex, and a lot of times the smaller farms are more labor-intensive.
My opinion is that modern farming is efficient enough that we can very obviously sustain the farmer, and sell the food at a reasonable price, and it all works -- the only reason this is even complicated at all and we have to talk about optimizing for labor (certainly in 1st-world farms) is that we're trying to support a bloodsucking managerial class that demands six-figure salaries for doing fuck-all, and subsistence wages for the farmers and less than that for farmworkers, and stockholder dividends, and people making fortunes from international trade; and if we just fixed all that bullshit then the issue would be land productivity and everything would be fine.
But yes, in terms of labor productivity it's a little more complex, and none of the above system I listed is likely to change anytime soon, so that's fair.
My god it’s like they’re deliberately trying to make their paper unintelligible to other humans. If I am reading this paper correctly, it is in line with other research on the topic, by indicating that smaller farms tend to have higher yields due to greater labor inputs. While I’m sure an economist would think this puts the issue to rest, being able to feed more people on a smaller land area might still be beneficial even if it requires more labor. Economists often assume that the economy represents the ideal allocation of resources, but I reject this assumption.
By the way, 5 acres is minuscule compared to conventional agriculture, at least in the US. So these aren’t backyard gardens but they are likely quite different from agribusiness as well.
If you think 5 acres on average isn't subsidized or industrialized then I challenge you to try it out of your own pocket: fertilize with shovels, till with a hoe, water and pest control without anything but hand pumps or windmills, reap the harvest with a scythe.
Wait, 5 acres wouldn't be all vegetables! Fruit trees, grains, grassland all spread in time so you can work on them when your vegetables don't need attention.
I don’t know why you’re assuming small farms need to be worked with medieval technology—that’s not what I’m saying at all. What I am saying is that 5 acre farms are far smaller than typical for modern agribusiness, and the differences in management are enormous. And I’ve actually worked on a farm that was 8 acres and we did much (though not all) of the labor by hand.
The average US farm is just under 500 acres. It’s totally different to grow food on that scale.
I have no idea how this comment relates to what I was saying or what you are trying to communicate. I believe I do understand why industrialized farming is industrialized. Do you?
Industrialized farming is industrialized by definition as it involves the use of Machinery and Automation such as large vehicles. I'm sitting here in awe and disbelief at how stupid a person could be as to lecture others on this topic while not knowing why "[I'm] assuming small farms need to be worked with medieval technology" to be considered outside of the scope of Industrialized.
100% granted. In the 100 square feet of my property I set aside for vegetable gardening in my spare time, I cannot grow as much food as a full time professional farmer can in a given 100 square feet of a multi-acre field.
I can, however, produce more food than the non-native species of turf grass that used to grow there.
This is a totally specious argument. Everyone doesn't have to make 100% of their own furniture any more than every one has to grow 100% of their food.
If I make two chairs it's more efficient than 1 chair and I only need to spend maybe 70% more time than 1, not 100% I sell/barter one chair to my neighbor, who, because they have grown 6 tomato plants instead of 4 (at most 10% more of their labor), has excess tomatoes and gives me some in exchange.
Funny enough 'efficiency' industrially tends to just mean what makes the most money anyways, so most crop's have been trained to be nutrient sparse, yet large
You mean, compared to what goes to the market for people?
I don't eat much of not industrial agriculture products, even local farms only produce fruits, and I would say they are also industrial (not sure where is the line)
More than three-quarters of global agricultural land is used for livestock, despite meat and dairy making up a much smaller share of the world's protein and calories.
[...] However, only half of the world’s croplands are used to grow crops that are consumed by humans directly. We use a lot of land to grow crops for biofuels and other industrial products, and an even bigger share is used to feed livestock.
As per the article two thirds of that 'agricultural land' is graze-lands, so like a 12.5% of that agricultural land is actually farmland dedicated to feed livestock.
I see, 25% is still not too little, I expected this to be less than 10% based on how you phrased the first comment. But you're right, it's possible to greatly reduce strain on land
Why would home gardeners optimize for yield and cost effectiveness? They can't deploy automation or economies of scale.
You garden at home because you enjoy the flavor, freshness, and variety. Those are the perks. Miss me with those mealy, flavorless grocery store tomatoes.
I came to the realization earlier today that there are an alarming number of people who theorize that they can just live off homegrown and composting. They think they can challenge big agriculture by "going off the grid" and that society would be better without subsidized industrial farming.
That's why they would optimize for yield and cost effectiveness. They think they can compete.
EDIT: Also I've tried making tomatoes in colder climates before and they almost always succumb to disease. Huge success with zuccini and onions, though.
This Pretty outdated (from 2007) and I position it in more pop sci than hard science. But from my own perspective, gardening makes me chill out for sure.
Absolutely you can compete my dude. Just not if you're doing it commercially. If you have the space you can grow everything you need and save a ton of money.
The problem is everyone can't do that. It doesn't scale. To feed 8 billion you need the big ag machine. But you, yourself, if you want to focus your time and effort on digging in the soil instead of being a corporate cog, can absolutely support your needs for very cheap.
How northern are we talking? Our tomatoes didn't so well last year in Northern Ohio, but the summer before i was absolutely drowning in cherry tomatoes!
I ran commercially successful regenerative farms for many years. Here is the shocking truth Corporate Jesus ™ didn't want you to know:
You aren't "competing" on price or quantity. You are competing on quality. Quality in taste, quality in freshness which also means quality in nutrition^ and quality in sustainability.
So... it might cost you a bit more in money and/or time to grow food in your garden but you are getting so much more value out of it. That's the yield and that's the cost effectiveness.
That's massively more efficient than subsidizing huge-scale industrial agriculture so that some giant corporation can yield higher profits. In fact, come to think of it, shouldn't home gardens be subsidized?
^ E.g. 90% of vitamin C in spinach is lost after 72 hours from harvest
It’s largely a privilege for those who have both. not a solution for the economically depressed who have neither.
I'm pretty sure that's what Corporate Jesus would want people to believe. And to be honest, sometimes labeling something as "privileged" is just another way of reinforcing that thinking. It doesn't have to be that way.
Gardening does not require much time relative to the value of the output. Many new gardeners will say "oh but it's so time consuming" because they are still learning and make lots of mistakes. If you have your systems up and running and your processes down, it's a fraction of the actual value produced and is extremely efficient. Don't get me started or I will go on about this in extreme nerdy detail from personal experience.
Collective action can massively increase both the availability of suitable land and the output relative to any one individual's effort. An obvious example of this is community gardens such as the Gill Tract in Albany, CA. If Occupy the Farm had been better supported we the people could have had the whole thing, but there still is a large garden available for use by neighboring houses. And there are community gardens and vacant land waiting to be community gardens everywhere. It just takes folks to say they can do it to make it happen.
A key component in this is a general misunderstanding of the value of your labor. When you garden you retain 100% of the value of your labor and your time is worth much more. When you work for others and then have to pay for food at a significant markup, you are losing a very large proportion of that labor. This is one of the central lies of capitalism that forces you into wage slavery and promotes false narratives like "growing food is most efficient on a huge scale". Efficient to whom? Not to you.
Edit: Another related example is the Berkeley Student Farm on the Oxford Tract and 6 other urban spaces. They are doing some amazing work and it's worth a few moments to read about them: https://www.studentfarms.berkeley.edu/
Please do! I am just starting with some gardening and haven’t much experience yet.
Uh oh.
Well I'll just mention one thing... just. one. thing. Ok, no, let me do my top beginner mistakes, which seem to all be not understanding what plants need.
Over-watering. For example, tomatoes (and solanaceae in general) like periodic deep watering and shouldn't be overly moist. I always starve them for water until they start to get a little crispy (literally they look like shit) and do my weekly-ish harvesting the day before watering.
Not hardening-off starts. Don't plant those peppers in the ground without having them gradually outside over a few days, ending in being out overnight for a day or three.
Not understanding soil and air temperatures. It's super helpful to know the daytime highs and nightime lows and ideally soil temps as well. Some plants just really won't grow well when it's too hot (lettuce) or too cold (tomatoes, cukes, etc)
Growing starts in your living room window because it "gets lots of sun". If your plants are leggy and weak it's because they get sun for part of the day and it shifts around too much.
Assuming you have to nuke every living thing anywhere near your veggies. 95% of all insects are beneficials and if you do not provide habitat for them and/or you use copious pesticides, you are killing more good things than bad. On my last farm we used no pesticides, organic-approved or otherwise. This works if you have pathways of (ideally natives) for beneficials to thrive in. The classic example is flea beetles - they thrive in barren hot soil while the beneficials that would eat them avoid that. So plant your arugula near some grasses (like right up against it) and you will not likely have a flea beetle problem.
What are the solutions to #4? Had that problem this year. Something killed about a 1/4 of my tomato and pepper starts because they were still really small when it was time to plant them outdoors (guessing snails or cutworms; I have a lot of both).
What are the solutions to #4? Had that problem this year.
Cutworms and similar (I have armyworms) are very annoying. Standard advice is tilling and keeping things clear of weeds but that has the effect of removing habitat for beneficials. My approach is mechanical removal, which I've found very effective: go out when said critters are active, usually at night, and pick them off. It's labor intensive but you only need to do it 1-2 times. For many worms, they'll bury themselves just under the soil surface during the day so if you lightly till with a hand trowl or something in about a 4-6" circle around the plant you can often find them. I also just over-plant, expecting to lose some - we also have gophers here who take about a 10% tythe on nearly everything. Some folks use cardboard collars around the base of peppers and tomatoes but I didn't find that effective and it was a pain.
Obviously the bigger and stronger the plants are the greater the more damage they can take and still survive. Often really small solanaceae are still susceptible to damping off (too much moisture) or may just not be big enough to withstand the shock of transplanting.
So... a cheap and very effective solution to the "living room window" problem is a mini greenhouse or cold frame of some kind, if you have the space. The idea being to give your starts a more ideal growing environment to strengthen them as much as possible before going in the ground.
Even just a simple 2'x4' cold frame made from scrap wood and recycled glass or plexiglass (or better, double walled greenhouse panels) can help the starts make the transition better. You can still start things inside when it's too cold and be careful to move them around to get maximum sun, but then move it to the cold frame as soon as night time temperatures support it and then let the starts mature in there - they will do much better in the heat and light. I use a passive solar greenhouse made from an old Costco barn frame and covered in proper greenhouse plastic (about $130). I have these dark grey barrels (55 gallon food grade barrels used by factories to hold things like syrups - $15 each) that are filled with water and heat up during the day. This provides enough thermal mass that I can start things even when daytime highs are in the 30s. You can replicate this on a smaller scale in a cold frame with even just a few gallons of water.
Other options include season extension methods like row covers (Remay or Agribon). The idea being to even out temperature extremes as much as to protect from frost. A simple hoop made from metal conduit will last way longer than PVC and can be stuck in the ground better. Heavy row covers like AG-50 will get you a lot of frost protection and even if it's not freezing at night many starts will appreciate the higher nighttime temps. Just be sure to ventilate during the day as it can get too hot. For smaller areas an old blanket or even sheet will help retain some heat. Or alternatively, a small plastic container that you put over the start, usually just at night... like a yoghurt container or bottle of some kind.
I use this last method quite a bit for things like watermelons where I've got 8' spacing and Agribon is just not efficient. I made little "hats" out of wire and scraps of Agribon and cover the mounds (I direct seed) until they germinate and get their true leaves. I have to do this because I grow heirloom varieties that take forever and my season is relatively short.
that's why OP was suggesting we subsidize home (and I'd add allotment) gardens - give people money to plant food and flowers and they'll be better of f both physically and mentally.
and who will till the soil, weed, fight pests, harvest, etc.
govt going to provide the physical labor and extra hours per week that is required too?
I mean I get it. I'm a rich white person with a lot of leisure time and I own property where I can have a garden... but turns out not everyone has this stuff. Half my younger friends have no time and no property on which to garden. And those folks are much better off that say, a single mom of two who rents and is struggling to provide her kids with food because she's working 50 hours a week to pay rent. Should I just tell her to 'make your own garden! that will totally feed your family of three...' just put dozens of hours into your concrete driveway of plastic tubs that will provide you with a few weeks of vegetables, most of which will rot before you can use them... unless you want to devote more time and money into canning.
Gardening is great. But jerking myself off and generalizing and saying everyone else should be doing what i have the luxury to do... just makes me a smug self-righteous ass. People buy food from stores because it's convenient and fast.
Involvement in food production to some degree is involvement in your own freedom and independence from capitalist hegemony. To me it's the opposite of privilege. It's not a luxury and it's so so sad that people think of it in those terms.
Somehow along the way folks were instilled with the idea that growing their own food is hard, not efficient... even equated with being poor or some kind of peasant. And there's a very good reason for this - big industrialized agriculture doesn't work except at huge scales and it takes everyone buying cheetos and hot dogs for it to work. And somehow we got into this rut where you have to work 50 hours a week - paid a fraction of the real value of your labor - to afford the "value-added" food that is not nutritionally dense, tasty or grown sustainably.
The truth is that growing food is about as simple and basic as it gets IF you have the knowledge. It is even more viable if people work collectively to get some of those economies of scale.
So take 10 hours of that week and use it to produce valuable food for yourself and for your neighbors. 2-3 families working 10 hours a week each grows A LOT of food. You do not need a lot of land... indeed there is land out there available to be used for community gardens, for free.
Unlike a lot of folks, I'm not going to say this can't work in every situation because I believe it can. Further, I believe it's an existential necessity.
and who will till the soil, weed, fight pests, harvest, etc.
In the case of a home garden, the homeowners, just like it's expected for a homeowner to care for all the other plants on their property.
In the case of an allotment/community garden, community members would provide the labor. That's how they currently work.
I mean I get it. I'm a rich white person with a lot of leisure time and I own property where I can have a garden... but turns out not everyone has this stuff.
I'm confused what the problem is - just because you know some people that wouldn't benefit from a home garden subsidy, doesn't make it a bad idea, if it encourages more people to grow food at home. It's not a one-size-fits-all solution to be sure, but it is a solution that would work for some, with little to no downside that I can conceive of.
Also the whole "you need a lot of land if you want to garden" thing is kind of a myth. You can do a surprising amount in containers, with vertical systems, or even indoors with grow lights or hydroponics these days.
Edit to address your edit:
Gardening is great. But jerking myself off and generalizing and saying everyone else should be doing what i have the luxury to do... just makes me a smug self-righteous ass. People buy food from stores because it's convenient and fast.
I don't think anyone's saying "everyone should garden", just "more people should garden". The original suggestion we're discussing was to subsidize gardening, which would help reduce the barrier to entry and make it a more attractive option. Option being the keyword there - subsidizing something doesn't mean everyone has to do it, and it certainly isn't an attempt to belittle or shame anyone that can't or doesn't want to garden.
I don't understand why anyone would argue against a garden. Should my yard just be grass? Why shouldn't I plant something I can eat in it? It doesn't matter if it's less efficient than industrial farming, it's basically unused land to start with.
That's because nobody is arguing that. The argument is against people saying that industrial farming is evil and should be stopped, which is a bit of a past time hobby around here.
Monoculture is terrible for the ecosystem. Fertilizer runoff causes algal blooms and dead zones in the ocean. Multinational agricultural conglomerates force developing world farmers to purchase their GMO seeds sue them for copyright infingement if they try to use their seed stock in the next season. Rainforests are being burned down to make room for pastures of methane emitting cattle and monocultured palm oil plantations. The Haber-Bosch process is responsible for 5% of global greenhouse gas emissions. Should I go on? At what point am I supposed to like this?
Fix the system, make a new system, buy discerningly. Have a garden if you can and advocate for more of them if you want. Fight against monoculture, irresponsible fertilizer and pesticide use, copyright abuse, and more. None of that is an irreplacable part of growing food at a large and efficient scale.
By the way, I'm curious about the Haber-Bosch figure. Isn't that the process that allows us to easily make fertilizer, and greatly increase productivity? It seems like that 5% is doing much more heavy lifting than, for example, the ~20% from cow burps.
Right, those are all irreplacable parts of global capitalism and its ruling oligarchy.
Haber Bosch is basically just squeezing nitrogen and oxygen together with a catalyst to make ammonia. To generate high pressures you need energy which you get by burning hydrocarbons. Legumes and bacteria can also do this, which is why crop rotation and letting fields lie fallow has been done for centuries. But you can't let your field lie fallow if you have to compete with other firms who are burning coal to make fertilizer...
They worked out four-crop rotation during the agrarian revolution in the 18th century, they haven't let fields lie fallow since they worked out how to rejuvenate the soil with crops like turnips that could become horse feed...
Pre-Columbian Meso-Americans were already exploiting nitrogen fixing bacteria with the milpa (corn, beans, squash). Anyway the point is if your yield is dependent on how much fertilizer you produce industrially then the sky is the limit for how much coal to burn.
I think at the point where you have food on the table. Without haver, you wouldn't have food on your table and you'd die from hunger
Nobody is claiming it's perfect, nobody is claiming things cannot or should not be improved.
The point is that these systems are there because like it or not, they work. Haber works, you are alive, ain't you? Now from here on we must improve.
Rotate crops more often, cut the stranglehold from agriculture conglomerates, lower the world population by lowering birth rates, be super 8+ billion and rising is just too much for this world to handle... Things like that.
Either way, tonight you can eat, maybe be at least a little grateful for that?
Haber will obviously continue to be used and work but as long as there's a fossil fuel price to make it happen expect more extreme storms, fires, droughts, floods, ocean acidification, and possibly methane clathrate release triggering a runaway greenhouse effect like during the Paleocene-Eocene thermal maximum.
it's no different than the yahoos who they they would run the govt better. then they try and give up because it's 'too hard'. this is basically the same as soveign citizen BS, but with vegetables instead of guns.
but we can't let a complex reality get in the way of our well-intention delusions of smugness. because apparently if every citizen isn't providing themselve wiht their own fruits and vegetables... it's their complicity with corporations... or something.
Because a terrifyingly large percentage of soil is very polluted, and really isn't suitable for growing food. If you eat a lot of homegrown food, getting the soil tested for (at least) heavy metals is probably a good idea, especially if you have little kids or pregnant people.
Honestly, there are no good home tests for heavy metals, and there definitely aren't any for everything else.
If you eat mostly home-grown food, you can Google around for labs that do testing near you. You should be prepared for something near a 100 dollar bill though, for heavy metal tests. If you eat a 15 homegrown tomatoes and some herbs a year, then I personally wouldn't bother testing.
Is probably true. However, one should question their world view if they measure everything as a minimization problem with respect to cost efficience and yield.
I get what you mean. Our system produces a ridiculous amount of quantity, which should be great! But in the context of where it's firmly placed within existing socioeconomics, stupid things happen like "destroying all the product to keep the value from crashing" and the "distribution problem" that feeding the poor isn't profitable.
Maybe industrial agriculture wouldn't be so terrible if food production for the human race didn't operate on the same metrics as handbags or funkopops. =\
I agree that commodifying food, especially locking nutrition behind class walls is barbaric. I also get that the current iteration of industrial farming is scary (don't get me wrong, it sucks shit) and that "small scale farming solutions just haven't been tried!" but clearly small scale farming is a long term fantasy that would take many decades of work and public acceptance, not even to mention the process of decommodifying the agriculture industry. All I'm saying is that if I'm playing in the same space, the method that would be the most environmentally friendly and efficient (not in an economic sense) is large scale industrial farms.
The other concern I have about small-scale farming I had, arose because I had this notion about "What if we could eliminate food deserts that are literally in the desert through household hydroponics?"
It sounded like such an awesome idea. Federated food! What a revolution!
But I also found out there's a ton that can go very wrong when you have no idea where food came from or how it is grown.
It's also my experienced opinion that a not-small percentage of the human population in this metropolis range from clinically insane to dangerously ignorant.
Industrial farming sucks in a lot of ways, but I'm also glad the (horribly underfunded) FDA and USDA exists.
Perhaps pushes for education in this field could go a long way? It seems outside of farming communities, food production is very much thought of as "farmers' work." and not much else.
I can’t afford fresh Basil leaves, I maintained a plant in my kitchen in some of the apartments I lived in. The current one doesn’t have enough sun. It took 10 minutes of work to arrange and emptying left over water.
The basil plants you buy in grocery stores are designed to die after a while. It's not lack of sun or water, it's because there are just way too many plants in the tiny pot and basil does not like to be root-bound. They basically strangle themselves to death.
You can easily propagate the plant through cuttings or you can separate the grown plants and re-pot them in smaller groups.
It sounds like you live in the US or something. Tomatoes from the market should be freshly picked overnight to be sold early in the morning. There's literally no difference.
I used to grow tomatoes myself and then transport them 80km away to my family. No issues there. They can survive a lot, especially if you have a refrigerated truck.
I went back and looked at some of your posts on this thread because I was thinking "they can't really be that unimaginative" and lo and behold, it's true, you can be!
Agree, but also do plant something that you'll use just a small amount from time to time, like herbs, spices, scallion, chive, and so on. Thing that you'll want it fresh but you can never use it all before it compost. Don't even need a garden, just plant it in pot.
I have screwpine leaf, lemon grass, coriander, and scallion in my garden, and i can harvest the onion when i need it.
The more you grow and eat at home, the less the food industry needs to burn fuel to ship. I know you folks in the US hate doing anything to help out with the world, but if you took the saying of be the change you want to see, imagine the tens of millions of acres being wasted on lawns being put to environmental and nutritional use. Imagine instead of putting leaves into plastic bags to get shipped to a landfill, or burning, houses normalized having compost piles. You get to put waste paper and cardboard in there too instead of bagging it.
I challenge all of yall to grow beans this season. They grow fast, they grow easy, theyre pretty nutritionally complete, they fertilize your soil themselves. Make use of your land.
Yup we should normalize gardening and canning. It's a thing my grandparents knew. Their families survived times of world wars, dust bowls and the great depression. They probably didn't have much choice in the moment but even when times got better they kept up a wonderful little garden. Kid me didn't get why they didn't just buy the things they needed.
I love the conveniences of modern farming and I use it every day. But like all big industialized systems they can be fragile. Covid was a huge problem for a lot of indistries and thankfully farming wasn't really one of them. But if it was countless people would have struggled.
I'm not really a prepper or anything crazy but I don't want to forget the lessons learned just a few decades ago- gardening is great and worth the effort.
It makes sense for it to be the same as solar power: just because most of energy generation is done in big facilities and even some kinds of solar generation (such as solar concentrators) can only be done in large facilities, doesn't make having some solar panels providing part of one's needs (or even all of one's needs for some of the time) less cost effective in Economic terms or a good thing in Ecologic terms.
So it makes sense to grow some of one's food, but maybe not go as far as raise one's own beef or even aim for food self sufficiency, both for personal financial reasons and health reasons. That it's also good in Ecological terms (can lower the use of things like pesticides and definitelly reduces transportation needs) is just icing on the cake.
Imagine instead of putting leaves into plastic bags to get shipped to a landfill, or burning, houses normalized having compost piles.
I appreciate your argument but there's no need to throw in a strawman. Leaves in plastic bags have been illegal in most US states for decades. Yard waste must be in paper bags.
What a bullshit blanket rude comment. Lots of folks in the US are working hard to affect change at their personal and local level. You should edit your comment because it's nationalistic and disparaging.
Don't leave out Australia and Canada, since Australia is worse and Canada is next on the list after the USA.
Go ahead and tell everybody how Australia, USA, and Canada are such bad countries.
Meanwhile, with the freedom afforded to me as a land owner in the USA I work from home, harvest solar energy with solar panels to run my electronics, and am growing my own produce and eggs in a backyard farm. As an individual I'm probably doing more for the environment than most people reading this whole Lemmy post.
A. Do a carbon footprint analysis of your life, if it's above 2,5 tons coe/year you're a net burden on the planet. My country is as well, although considerably lower than the US.
B. It is possible for you to be a paragon of environmentalism and still live in a country with inefficient systems for water, infrastructure, zoning, industry and food production. Not to mention live in a culture of unsustainable lifestyle. Many Chinese or Indian persons are simply too poor to have a major impact on the environment, but their national industrial practices drive up the average pollution to levels comparable to the US (although still lower). Most US people aren't as poor, and also have shitty industry standards, and also the means to change that without losing your standing internationally.
C. Multiple countries are shitty, in fact most of the non-developing world countries are a net burden.
D. As opposed to the other countries at the top, the US has had the economy, data, and access to resources to be able to something about it for generations, whereas most have had half the time and considerable need of modernising.
E. The US is much larger than the other countries, and could with quite simple measures make great impact and help pressure other great polluters.
I smoke a lot of weed. Always have. Last year I grew 4 plants in my backyard garden and this year I've saved thousands of dollars on weed. It's not as strong as store stuff but you get used to to it quickly and there's less paranoia with homegrown I find. I'm always gonna grow my own weed from now on. Only reason I didn't before was that it was illegal. This year I germinated 3 seeds but only one took so I'll have one super tall pot plant in my backyard haha.
Home gardening is an important element of individual food security. It’s not meant to replace industrial agriculture which maintains food security for the nation as a whole
Home gardening is an important element of individual food security.
And food independence
It’s not meant to replace industrial agriculture which maintains food security for the nation as a whole
Hard disagree. Industrial agriculture maintains profits for a few corporations. That large-scale agriculture is productive, necessary, efficient or any of that is a myth. It's massively inefficient when viewed from the perspective of value - especially nutritional value- to the consumer.
I don’t have any love lost for mega corporate farms and agree that we need more family and cooperative owned farms that would be more concerned with sustainability and environmental impact.
The thing about it is that I'm keeping the benefit of the cost effectiveness myself instead of some farmers and taking heads elsewhere. It's more efficient per dollar for ME.
Your time is not free. In fact it's incredibly valuable. So why are you giving it away to corporations for pennies on the dollar? You could be getting 100% of the value of your time when you garden.
I’m saving money for myself with my own efforts? It’s specifically to exclude external economics.
and here:
The thing about it is that I’m keeping the benefit of the cost effectiveness myself
By using your own efforts you retain more of the value for yourself. When you work for others you get paid only a fraction of the value you produce. Ie, your time is more valuable than you are getting paid for.
You think I can just go to my workplace and sit on the clock whenever I want? No. There are hours when I cannot be at work. Those hours are not equivalent to work hours.
Also, WTF are you smoking? These arguments are nothing alike.
May I ask a favor? Make a distinction between small-scale direct-to-consumer farmers (ie the kind that sell at farmer's markets) and large-scale commodity farmers and the huge agricorps that own them.
Why would I make that distinction when the point of it is that I'm saving money for myself with my own efforts? It's specifically to exclude external economics.
Because (a) you say it in a way that comes across as derogatory. Unless you grow 100% of your food you need a farmer in there somewhere to live; (b) because the closer you get to the farmer (ie buy from small-scale farms) the more value you retain.
Yeah sure, if everybody else is enduring and/or paying for the bad side effects of the way somebody conducts an economic activity, it's "cost effective" for those doing that activity that way.
I think the hypothetical here implies transport would still exist for a primarily home-garden non-industrial agriculture replacement system. Or do you think the whole world should suddenly stop trading? Might as well since we're writing a fantasy fiction, anything goes.
And for the inevitable "it's too expensive" and related comments:
Find the markets where you are buying directly from the farmers, not aggregators/resellers.
Shop around and buy things that are less in demand. You can ask what's not selling and try to negotiate a little and if you go right at the end, say 15-30 minutes before vendors have to pack up, you will find lots of bargains.
Build relationships with growers. You will get better deals and freebees.
It's the same situation as when you grow a pear in Argentina, send it to Malaysia and back to usa.
Boats are simply too big
A local farmer doing restocking trips, buying and transporting, you on trips buying the stuff needed to make those sweet iron and vitamin deficient mini tomatoes, soil, fertilizer, etc, consume lots of energy. Which might seem like a little but multiply that effort by the proposed method of "everyone planting and harvesting their own shit" and you soon see that it was kinder to mother earth and the climate to just transport shit over a cargo ship burning 400 trucks worth of fuel in one trip and transporting the equivalent of 9000 trucks, than you doing the 400 trucks worth of fuel trips and transporting, well 400 trucks worth of goods
It’s basically about scale. Shipping container ships run at low speed and maximize fuel efficiency.
When you drive, most of the fuel is used propelling the car forward, backwards, upwards and downwards. You make up a small amount of the stuff moved. You also change speeds. You come to full stops, take turns, maybe even go the wrong way. All of that is “wasted” energy that goes to the polluting impact of your vitamin deficient mini tomatoes.
However, a ships engine mostly works way more in per portion to move product across the oceans. Importantly once it maps out it’s routes and hits speed, it doesn’t deviate. Once the ship is up to speed getting it to keep going forward isn’t very hard.
It’s almost (because of need if preexisting infrastructure) the same with rail. The ability to carry a ton of stuff and maintain the same course and speed saves so much fuel, lowering the carbon footprint of any transported goods to your place to something miniscule you could never actually achieve by your own machinations
That's why they pollute more. That's right your homegrown tomatoes are more polluting than those of a mega corporation
Not to mention, per kilogram, it’s more polluting than simply buying at a grocery store
Absolute nonsense. If you are going to make such ridiculous claims you should probably take the time to back it up with some kind of data. Good luck with that.
Simply adding up the food miles gets you more "pollution" with store bought than local farms.
It depends how you measure it, and what counts as 'polluting'. Does broad-scale habitat destruction count? Because there's a lot more of that in industrial agriculture. Also yields are prioritised over quality, so you're literally not comparing apples with apples if you're getting local heirloom varieties from nearby orchards, compared with apples grown in the PNW for the broader market and kept chilled until ready for sale. These are generalisations of course and there are staple crops that are much more efficient when produced with broadacre cropping.
Have you tasted store bought vegetables? Farmers market may be grown, may be store bought. I have 2 4x2ft planters full of veggies, out $200 this year setting it up. Next year just the price of seeds.
Seeds and amendments. You gotta add more nutrients to the soil or else your yields will start to suffer. Although, there's a lot of permaculture ways to add nutrients for free.
Unless you live somewhere with 0 soil quality or literally never do any work to fertilize it's not that much extra cost to fertilize and keep soil doing well
Run a compost heap and you're practically going to supply yourself with everything needed for free if you can scale it enough (which is like, 2 2x4 beds and remembering to dump organic food remnants too)
Oh for sure. You don't need much. I just recently watched a cool video about tossing all your weeds in a couple of small water barrels to make liquid fertilizer. It doesn't take a lot.
Maybe in utopistic communist fantasy where goverment farms grew me the produce I need, but in current capitalist world home grown is way cheaper to me than store bought.
Yeah like look up organopónicos in Cuba. Thanks to the collapse of the import market that fuelled industrial agriculture and government support of local growers, a good chunk of food in the country now comes from ecology-sound urban agriculture.
"Hi, this is Chett from the local government non-industrial agriculture office. We see that you grew 6 tomato vines this year and didn't take advantage of our program to loan you the costs of 34% of maintaining the crop, as it isn't your first year, would you like to be pre-approved for a $46.38 loan for next year? In return, we ask you to install flood barriers and have your soil tested regularly."
It's better to encourage native fauna by planting native flora than plant a vegetable garden that you give up on after 2 months and then gets overrun with foreign weeds.
Last year I bought a packet of sugar pumpkin seeds just because I thought the flowers looked nice the previous time I'd tried (and failed) to grow pumpkins. Got plenty of pumpkins out of it, saved some of the seeds, and started buying butternut squash when the pumpkins ran out. Saved the seeds from those, too, and now I've got seedlings of both popping up. I'm gonna have so much pie!
You're getting a lot of hate here, but you're not entirely wrong. Cost aside, home gardens are massively more carbon intensive than modern industrial agricultural methods. Community gardens are generally better.
That said, gardens do still offer a ton of other benefits, both for your mental health and your taste buds. But let's not completely decentralize our agricultural system.
Sometimes.
You cannot go to a store and buy the freshest, most mouth watering and delicious fruits because they cannot handle being shipped even locally.
A warm, juicy peach right off the tree is an amazing experience.
Also, you know 100% of what what was and what wasn't done to your stuff.
That said, I don't have the time or will to grow all my own veggies that I like daily.
I can, however make enough other stuff that's saleable so I can afford fresh veg year round.
I mean the government could open up facilities for cooking meals or processing food for cold storage that would otherwise be thrown out, and regulate both farming and grocery stores so that anything that would get wasted instead goes to feed homeless people or something. Its a massive yeah right though. All industrial farming has done on this side of this rock is pump us full of ready roundup and microplastics, crush small independent grocers, drive up water and other resource consumption, and people are still going hungry regularly. Corporate america will never let people be happy and healthy without wealth divisions on this continent, and likely as much of the others as can be influenced.
Judging by the median quality of life (rat race, anybody) and the obesity epidemic (and related diseases), neither "happy" nor "healthy" seem to be objectives and it looks a lot more like it's just "alive and energized enough to work".
Industrial Food (and that includes the Intensive Farming and Cattle Rearing side) in the US is particularly bad at the healthy part, and even in countries with better food regulations the industrial stuff (and again that includes the products of intensive farming and livestock ranching) is still significantly worse in that sense than the non-industrial kind but at least they don't shove corn so hard that it adds up to over 70% of the human food chain directly and indirectly like in the US.
Not that I'm saying that the World can sustain this big a population without intensive farming. I'm just disputing that the modern version of it even tries to have "happy" or "healthy" as objectives, much less have succeeded in achieving either.
Some things are ridiculously easy to grow in some places and we should for exactly that reason.
It's like drinking bottled water when you have an amazing spring in your backyard of great tasting clean water.
Neither does industrial farming? We grow more than enough food to feed the world every year, but don't because that's not the point of industrial farming. The point of increasing the amount of industrial level farming every year is to increase the profit margins of large agriculture conglomerates.
But it doesn't need to have a better overall yeld or lower price. It can work as a complementary production, to bring variety, resiliency, and protect local crops and pollinators.
Although I have certainly mentioned that 40+ acres are required to sustain a family agriculturally I believe that it is still worth it to grow food and herb and spices where one can. Just don't expect it to change the direction of inflation.
That is true. But the cost of getting quality garden beds together from the soil without yard-fill toxic contaminants, the wood or metal for the beds, and the produce starts and seeds, the water, and the labor can make it a loss financially. That said it is a great hobby and does yield very satisfying results.
Yeah, with sufficient unthoughtfulness, refusing to do research, and with poor enough planning, you can fuck up literally anything? I'm not sure what your point is. I didn't say it was suitable for everybody, or that it magically cannot fail, or that it will always be worth it in all circumstances (if your soil's contaminated, yes, you will want to be careful about how you garden and your costs will likely be higher), or that gardening, unlike anything else, is a good fit for everybody's brain and that every single person can do it effectively.
I just think it's kinda dumb to go after home gardening as somehow not useful or valuable just because it's not a complete, viable replacement for industrial agriculture. It's a completely stupid false dichotomy.
Basically you need to think about how to do it cost-effectively and sanely. Just like anything else you do (you do think about that, right?)
You know you don’t need “beds” made of wood and metal to grow plants, right? You’d be shocked to know that most plants just grow right in the ground. Raised beds offer some benefits for sure, but are completely unnecessary for most home gardens.
Counterpoint: if you, personally, can save some dollars so you're mainly spending on the things you can't grow, that's hardly a bad thing. Also, working with soil is known to be good for you. Exposes you to soil bacteria that are known to boost mood.
And it sounds corny as fuck and I didn't really take it seriously until I did it, but homegrown produce can be so incredibly much better than what you get off an industrial farm.
Just let people participate in feeding themselves and be happy, fuck.
Why subsidized? A fair comparison would be subsidized home farming vs. subsidized industrial farming, or neither are subsidized.
The exact problem was discussed in Seeing Like a State by James C. Scott, where he reached a very different and nuanced conclusion. You can have a read if you are truly interested.
Subsidizing home farming isn't really possible with our current society, and not subsidizing industrial farming could be disastrous and lead to famine. The subsidies guarantee that food options will be available at all times.
A lot of industrial produced food is cheap because of child, forced, and otherwise exploited labor (undocumented workers, for example). Heavily mechanized farming (mostly used for grains) is cheap because of the vast amount of fossil fuel "energy slaves" used. And that's only cheap because the costs are externalized.
Anyways, growing your own food can definitely be cheaper than buying it. Of course, not if you start plants under lights, build raised beds and fill them with purchased soil, buy organic pelletized fertilizer, or stuff like that. It can be nearly free to grow your own food (if you don't count the cost of your own labor) by saving seeds and intercepting materials from waste streams (wood chips, lawn clippings, manure, used coffee grounds, etc) to "feed your soil."
A third of all food goes uneaten in the USA, at the CONSUMER AND RETAIL LEVEL. It's not going to waste on the farm, nor would that change from gardening on your own.
Right, the yields of the industrialized farms are what go to waste. You dont need a level of productivity that gets bottlenecked at what I'll definely broadly and loosely as 'distribution'--from a garden.
The quality and variety of what produce you can eat will be much higher, though. There's a lot of cultivars that don't make financial sense at scale but are wonderful to eat.
You can have both and it doesn't need to compete with industrial farming or meet some business model. It just needs to meet your needs and/or goals.
Gardening lets you grow the stuff you want how you want and eat it fresh without taking days and trucks on a highway to get it to you.
I'm thankful for the conveniences of modern agriculture but if gardening didn't have any positive impact why did they push victory gardens so much in WW2?
It feels good, teaches valuable skills, makes your neighborhood more resiliant and gives you healthy things you want to eat. It's more than simply therapeutic.
If my home was on several acres of fertile land and I had modern machinery to cultivate it, I could reach pretty good production levels. But then I'd have way too much that would simply go to waste. If I had a small garden just big enough to sustain my needs, I would have no waste and not need as much land or resources to cultivate it.
The only thing I grew at home (in a pot, because dogs) was chili, because it's more scarce in stores than stuff like onions. Some do fear that the store ones are all "GMO" secretly, or even manufactured from some petroleum products, like my stepmother, who once learned that things like milk powder, egg powder, and meat powder exists, but she thought they all weren't made of the real things, because she couldn't believe the Earth could feed this many people, and the rich hoard all the good stuff for themselves.
Assuming it used all the same tools and techniques, making only minor replacements of tractors for voluntary domestic labor .. I don't see why it couldn't reach averages in a similar magnitude. Given them larger plots where they could use industrial tools and they should produce about the same on average.
Eother way there attempts more self sufficiency are to be commended... So the I'm not sure of the point of the post really.
If we had a socialist style of market economy like Vietnam we'd produce more crops.
Also in a correctly valued economy we wouldn't have to subsidize farming.
I feel like there are helpful and harmful fantasies, and villainizing the foundation of all modern life in favor of unrealistic self-sustenance is leaning harmful.
We have the means to all enjoy good produce for minimal costs, we don't need to change to a worse system that costs us more.
Honestly, you don't have to do much to villainize some aspects of industrial farming. It's mostly only possible due to the haber-bosch nitrogenation process, which was invented by the same guy who invented chemical warfare, and the process itself uses lots of petrochemicals and dumps a lot of nitrogen into the natural environment. That's not even getting into the use of migrant workers, or the patenting of dna over some crops, and the food monopolies that exist in some countries.
I also don't think it's a case of "there can be only one system"... And I don't run into a lot of people saying that.
For myself, this isn't one of the more pressing issues in the world. I don't really think people have enough land to be able to be self-sufficient, but gardening is a nice hobby.
Food markets vary from nation to nation, and have political aspects I'm fairly disinterested in, so can't really comment on that.
It depends on what and how much you grow in your garden. Growing up and even when our kids were young and at home, we grew a large garden to save money. Growing things that store well, like potatoes, squash, carrots, turnips, rutabagas, and other root crops will save you money because they require no very little to no extra processing to store.
Tomatoes, while VERY tasty straight off the vine, often get highly processed into sauces and jarred to preserve. That is time consuming and expensive. But, if you have enough freezer space, you can freeze tomatoes and peppers very easily. But you need enough freezer space for them. Growing string beans are also fairly efficient crops that require little processing to freeze. But, there is still some extra work to be done with them. Sweet Corn take a lot of room to grow enough to make it worth your while preserve.
But best of all is to garden because you want to and you enjoy it. I no longer grow a large garden - me and Grandma don't need much anymore, but I still grow tomatoes and peppers, turnips, green onions, and amaranth. Amaranth is often used as a background plant in flower gardens, but the whole plant is edible. From the roots to leaves to the seeds. It has a wonderful nutty flavor and is stupidly easy to grow.
Agreed, my wife and I had that conversation recently, as it happens. Though, for some things, there are other benefits. Herbs is the best example, even the fresh, packaged herbs that you can buy at a grocery will be noticeably not-as-good as something that you picked fresh in the backyard 2 minutes ago. Dill, basil, thyme, mint, what have you. I've found the same to be true of things like bell peppers and jalapenos.
This only true in places that aren't environmentally supportive of agriculture. My family never had to buy vegetables. Granted we had about 2 acres of farmable land. We didn't sell produce, we harvested and froze until we needed it
Edit: Initial start up is definitely not as cost effective as buying from the grocery, but once you're able to harvest your own seeds, it's not that expensive to sustain your production
Where's that 4chan post where all the BLM rioters tried to set up a new community in Seattle or something. Then they had everyone give there skills and what that want to do in the new world, everyone was saying they can grow food. Then there was the crappest plot of veggies I have ever seen.
I recall the one you're thinking of, but did not find it. This is a textbook case of how photography is just another aspect of journalism that can be very biased depending on what you decide to show and the context in which you place it.
For my part, isn't it more interesting to know that it was started by a scholar of energy and sustainability who used the opportunity to promote gardening skills and raise awareness of the history and politics of land use rights?
There is a whole thing about land use rights and energy and sustainability. But just because one guy was right on that doesn't mean the whole movement wasn't a complete disaster from the start.
As much as this website hates capitalism I'm still pro capitalist. But even I admit a lot needs to be changed. Land is one of the big things I have been contemplating lately. Having said that, there wont be any meaningful food production in cities for anything but mental health reasons.
What can I say except that I hope you're wrong about food production? The allotment system in the UK is a good example of this, and could be expanded on to good effect for the overall goal of more mutually supportive communities. Obviously we're not going to turn every city into homesteaders, but reducing the imbalances in our economic systems is worthwhile.
As for CHAZ/CHOP, I find it more useful not to judge it based on whether an impromptu short-lived anarchistic community can govern itself perfectly during that chaotic moment in time (especially as police had every reason to try and subvert it - after all, they did lose that precinct), but based on its vision and the hope it gave people. It only lasted a short while, but hopefully the memory of it can live on as a hope for what could be, and as a part of the dialogue between communities and state forces going forward.
The problems of quality with mass agriculture corn that has enough might to have lobbying power to influence regulatory policy aren't solved by growing your own corn that you can regulate and control the cultivar and farming methods?
It makes me really sad that you've apparently never tasted GOOD corn. Like the kind where you start boiling the water before you pick the corn. Or just eat it in the field.
I garden all the time, it won't feed any single nation on earth except maybe Principality of Sealand. You're either being disingenuous or not understood the conversation taking place.
I garden all the time, it won’t feed any single nation on earth except maybe Principality of Sealand. You’re either being disingenuous or not understood the conversation taking place.
I'm sure your personal experience gardening for yourself is valid, but it would be disingenuous to take it as valid for a larger scale commercial operation that wants to feed people on more than a 1:1 basis.
I've had this discussion dozens if not hundreds of times over the years and the one thing that always stands out is that the claims of "X won't feed Y" never come with substantive data and always have to side-step the original premise. At best they come with personal anecdotes that tend to be amusingly irrelevant.
In fact the logic of my basic premise - that small farms can and do feed people efficiently - is rather simple and well-supported by the data. For posterity let me work through a representative scenario.
I'll use the example of the smallest small farm I know to kind of show the boundaries of the problem. It's a real farm near me - out of respect I won't give it's real name but let's call it Fox Farm. You can find examples like this all over.
This farm is just under 2.5 acres, but that includes the house, a barn and a greenhouse so probably 2 acres in production. It's well positioned near a town of about 5,000, has good soil, is right on a busy road and has easy access to lots of manure from several cattle operations within a mile or two. Fox Farm's owner has been farming for about 12 years and has really mastered hand-scale operations - his only "large" equipment is a walk-behind tractor with a rotary plow. He runs the whole thing with just him and his wife.
Fox Farm sells direct via their small farm stand and at up to three farmer's markets. The last time we spoke about it they were earning a decent living - their "take home" was around $55k after all expenses. At that time total revenue was a bit over $100k annually. You may say, oh that's not much but (a) their revenue and margins get better every year; (b) they are quite happy with this and are able to raise a family and save for the future; (c) that's not a production problem it's a selling problem due to the town size and the fact that most markets operate only part of the year.
How many people do they feed? They have about 150 regular customers, but we can do some quick math: You could use the $100k figure and divide it by the annual grocery budget per person to get a representative figure - so $100000 / $3865 (California average) yields just under 25 individuals. That's of course if they got 100% of their food from this one farm.
So in rough terms you could say that a single 2 acre farm can entirely feed 25 people and provide a decent living to the farmer as well. Now I can tell you from my experience on 15 acres that as you scale a bit more you gain (and lose) some efficiencies but probably it's about 10-15% more per acre every time you double in size but that gain diminishes a lot past about 20 acres for a bunch of management reasons but mainly because of your ability to actually sell it all. Selling produce is way way harder than growing it.
I know for a fact that small farms work because I have not only my personal experience but the experience of several farms around me. If you don't believe me go see for yourself. Seek out the nearest three farms under 100 acres in your area and ask them. I feel I have to point this out even though it should be obvious: your garden is not very productive relative to something run by a professional farmer. Not only will we get way bigger yields for any one crop but at this scale we'll get multiple crops out of the same patch of dirt in a season using carefully planned rotations. As just one example, I will plant peas (nitrogen fixers!) using T-posts and a simple trellis. When the peas are done the tomatoes go in and use the same post-and-weave trellising. This is partly why you should never think of small farms in terms of acreage but rather in terms of revenue.
@FiniteBanjo it is true, but what no one has directly mentioned yet is, that home grown provides a high bar on what industrial agriculture can ask for as a price. If it gets so expensive that growing your own is more cost effective for yourself, you don't need to pay for overpriced products. That's a possible competition, obviously only for those that are fortunate enough to have the fitting and needed resources to grow(being poor is expensive).
Some stuff you can def grow yourself easily and not have to buy at the store. I don’t have to buy tomato's all summer just from a few plants. Never buy herbs. But yeah sustenance farming I am not. Support local farmers!
Local farm has a dirt cheap produce subscription. $40 a week for locally grown produce!
That's super expensive... 40 a week for just veggies? I spend 40 a week on all my groceries at most.
Average is $270 per week in the USA.
That's cool, I wanted to point out that saying cheap and then a price point without reference isn't really helpful because price varies so much.
Also, 270 per week per person!?!? What the fuck, that can't be true, that's more than what I extrapolated it would cost me in the European expensive countries when I visited and went to random grocery stores. As always, the american dream seems to be a scam fetish xD.
$270 includes everything like Keurig coffee pods, ground beef, and laundry detergent- not just vegetables.
That's fair, but the comment above said that they "spend 40 a week on all my groceries at most."
I spend 1/3rd of that on all of my groceries combined per month. If I was spending that much per week I would be over 1000$ in debt after a single month. Is the average person really that rich? And what food are they buying that they need to spend that much?
This is baffling to me as a poor person.
I'm thinking that price is per household not person. I hope that's the case. But I'm seriously impressed that you can swing $90/mo for food. That's amazing.
no, food costs that much
American grocery store produce is really expensive now. $40 for a week of veggies would be a good deal in my area. Plus you’re supporting local agriculture.
Sure, but they didn't specify they were american, did they?
Wasn’t saying you should have assumed, just corroborating. But also doesn’t the $ imply he’s American?
It's not you who said I should assume, it was them who didn't specify, implying we should asume, sorry if I made you think otherwise. Canadians and Australians afaik aso use dollars, just not USD.
In any case, this was quite the small complaint I had, so I'll just drop it haha. Have a great day.
Haha gotcha you too!!
Where do you live? I'm in central Europe and hit the local currency equivalent of 60$ per person per week...
I live in a quite expensive Spanish area and we usually spend 50ish for 2 people's worth of food. We do go out or order food on the weekend sometimes but being vegetarian we don't spend more than 15€ on produce a week at most so 40 a week sounds a lot.
Surplusable farming is literally the basis on which all civilization is built
Like the whole point of the way things work for us now is that you don't have to be a farmer or a hunter or a gatherer to be able to have access to a consistent source of food.
People romanticize about the idealic agrarian past but human civilization was literally invented over how back breakingly difficult that kind of work is for people who aren't built for it.
Also the fact that one bad year in your tiny part of the world means you and everyone you know die slow agonizing deaths. Fun!
This is also a major point of livestock. If you have more produce than you can eat, feed the excess to some animals and they will keep those calories fresh and delicious over the winter.
Adding on to that, its not just the surplus produce. Its all the rest of the produce that's unusable by us humans.
When we grow something like corn, we're only growing it for the kernels that we can consume. We can't physiologically make use of the stalks, stems and leaves, but an animal like the goat? They'll chew up anything green and turn that into usable calories we humans can make use of.
Doesn’t even need to be green, just any sort of plant or really any sort of organic matter. Eating goats that have lived off of old trash is probably not the best idea though
Which neatly raises the point of how modern large monoculture does a lot less of that kind of use of agricultural products unusuable by humans.
Absolutelly, the whole of a cow slaughtered in a slaughterhouse is famously used (down to the hoves) and nothing thrown out, however you don't see goats being raised on the unusable parts of a corn plant (whilst wheat straw is actually used as feed, for corn the silage for cattle made from it uses the whole plant including kernels not just the left-over unusable by humans parts).
Explains the name perhaps
This is part of the reason why early farming was so inefficient. Have a plot up the hill, have one in the valley, grow multiple crops, etc etc.
That's not done to have more food, that's done so you don't die when something bad happens.
This is one of the things I find funny about modern day self sufficient communes. Subsistence farming is awful, industrialized farming is less awful, but still far more work than most are willing to ever do.
The issue is that the current farming techniques are not sustainable.
The fertilizers and pesticides used are burning the land, polluting the underground water pools and killing a bunch of animals and insects.
The agriculture needs to change to something sustainable.
Modern farming techniques consider sustainability, the larger problem is countries using traditional methods that are extremely harmful like burning forests.
The industrial farming of corn in the US requires using hybrid corn strains to reach the yields it has, which in turn requires the use of fertilizers because the natural soils is incapable of sustaining the density of corn plants that hybrid varieties achive.
Those fertilizers in turn are mainly made from Oil, which is a non-renewable resource, making the whole thing unsustainable. It's is possible to make the fertilizers sustainably, it's just much more expensive so that's not done.
The US is so deeply involved (including outright military invasions) in the Middle East from where most of the oil comes because in the US oil it's not just a critical resource for Transportation and Energy, it's also a critical resource for Food because it's so incredibly dependent on corn (which is estimated to add up directly and indirectly to more than 70% of the human food chain there)
PS: There is a book called The Omnivore’s Dilemma which is a great read on this.
On indirect consumption, corn is largely used to feed cattle, make high fructose corn syrup, and other products that are not directly eaten as corn.
This makes corn insanely inefficient as a food source.
There is a book called The Omnivore's Dilemma which is a great read on this.
But for now my PLA 3D printer filament is still cheap! Yay? =\ lol...why is everything so broken...
Greed
Fertilizer is not made from oil. Oil/gas is used to power the factory but that doesn't make the farming unsustainable.
Because if you use the criteria of where we get our energy from, home gardening isn't sustainable either because your house is powered by oil/gas.
Fertilizers are made from Amonia which in turn is made using the Haber-Bosch process which requires fossil fuels to provide the necessary energy and as reactants (see this related article).
There is also "natural" fertilizer made from organic mass left over from other activities which would otherwise go to waste, but that's insufficient for large scale intensive farming (composting is fine for your community garden or even for supplementing low intensity agriculture, but not for the intensive industrial farming growing things like hybrid corn).
Finally, the use of techniques like crop rotation which lets letting fields lie fallow so that natural nitrate fixation occurs and the soil recovers do not make the soil rich enough in nitrates to support hybrid corn growing because, as I mentioned, the plant density is too high to be supported by natural soil alone without further addition of fertilizers.
That's exactly what I said! Fertilizer is not made from oil. The factory is powered by oil. Just like your home where you garden is powered by oil.
"Modern farming techniques consider sustainability"
Yeah sure. They consider sustainability in that the current generation of poisons they use haven't been proven unsustainable YET. When they are proven unsustainable, they'll move to the next generation, that hasn't been proven YET...
Also systemically annihilating everything except that one crop you want to grow makes your farmland an ecological desert, that doesn't sound very sustainable either.
Unless you're of the conviction that farmland shouldn't be in any way part of nature, and we should concentrate on just growing crops there and every other kind of life there should be discouraged, and by doing that as dense as possible we keep more space for actual nature.
Though i think farming that leaves meaningful room for (some) nature to coexist with it doesn't do that much worse in yield to make the modern 'kill everything' approach worth it. But we'll see what the future brings i guess.
But just being like 'modern farming techniques consider sustainability' seems pretty naive to me...
Modern agriculture uses ammonia pellets that more than half will evaporate by the time it enters the soil and it seeps into aquifers and rivers.
There is nothing sustainable with modern agriculture.
In theory, some of those communes are cool. Way less wasteful than suburban living arrangements.
But I do worry about those communes, honestly. The demographics they attract are easy to abuse: aging conspiracy theorists with low education. If the commune owns the land, or even worse if an individual owns the land, then those people could be forced to leave and become homeless. Even if they did own property in the commune, it might be able to act as an HOA or local township and start charging them until they can claim the property that way.
The Agricultural Revolution was a trap
Q: what does a subsistence farmer do when something goes wrong?
A: they die.
There's still different approaches to it though. The default industrial gigantic monocultures with massive aquifer drilling is for sure missing a few delayed, less visible costs in the equation. "Improve industrial farming, adjust it back to a more normal scale and add some diversity between the fields and rotate crops!" just isn't a very catchy slogan I guess.
Fun fact: IDK about like a backyard vegetable garden, but small family-sized farms are actually more productive per unit of land than big industrial agriculture.
The farming conglomerates like to enforce big farming operations because they make things easier for the managerial class, and let them be in charge of everything. But if your goal is just to produce food and have the farmers make a living, small farms are actually better even economically (and not just for like 10 other reasons).
Also, you can't just look at the amount of food produced, but the amount produced vs waste, storage and transportation costs. Most things in the garden can stay ripe on the plant for a while and can be picked as needed.
Anecdotally, we were supplying about 80% of our fruit and veg needs on our own garden plot on our standard city residential lot with a family of 7. And we were literally giving tomatoes, citrus and zucchini away as fast as we could.
This article about the study:
And then the Actual Study HERE:
Meaning the author is advocating for more scrutiny against the claim and against land redistribution as a policy stance with the intention of increasing productivity.
The definition of "small family farms" in this case is on average more than 5 acres, which would absolutely be under the umbrella of subsidized industrial agriculture in developed nations.
Yeah, that's why I included "per unit of land." It is in practice a little more complex, and a lot of times the smaller farms are more labor-intensive.
My opinion is that modern farming is efficient enough that we can very obviously sustain the farmer, and sell the food at a reasonable price, and it all works -- the only reason this is even complicated at all and we have to talk about optimizing for labor (certainly in 1st-world farms) is that we're trying to support a bloodsucking managerial class that demands six-figure salaries for doing fuck-all, and subsistence wages for the farmers and less than that for farmworkers, and stockholder dividends, and people making fortunes from international trade; and if we just fixed all that bullshit then the issue would be land productivity and everything would be fine.
But yes, in terms of labor productivity it's a little more complex, and none of the above system I listed is likely to change anytime soon, so that's fair.
My god it’s like they’re deliberately trying to make their paper unintelligible to other humans. If I am reading this paper correctly, it is in line with other research on the topic, by indicating that smaller farms tend to have higher yields due to greater labor inputs. While I’m sure an economist would think this puts the issue to rest, being able to feed more people on a smaller land area might still be beneficial even if it requires more labor. Economists often assume that the economy represents the ideal allocation of resources, but I reject this assumption.
By the way, 5 acres is minuscule compared to conventional agriculture, at least in the US. So these aren’t backyard gardens but they are likely quite different from agribusiness as well.
If you think 5 acres on average isn't subsidized or industrialized then I challenge you to try it out of your own pocket: fertilize with shovels, till with a hoe, water and pest control without anything but hand pumps or windmills, reap the harvest with a scythe.
Wait, 5 acres wouldn't be all vegetables! Fruit trees, grains, grassland all spread in time so you can work on them when your vegetables don't need attention.
I have around 15 acres I work on. Mostly alone, with a tractor. I have let parts of it go wild.
I quit my day job, I have a sick father and brother to take care of.
Yes, farming is really hard work, and animals need attention all the time. My farm isn't making me any money, I get some subsidies though.
But my fruit trees are over an acre. I keep ducks, pigs and sheep. I have a woodlot. It all makes me happy, that's why I do it.
We still buy groceries, we could go 3 months without that. But I'm not a prepper.
I don’t know why you’re assuming small farms need to be worked with medieval technology—that’s not what I’m saying at all. What I am saying is that 5 acre farms are far smaller than typical for modern agribusiness, and the differences in management are enormous. And I’ve actually worked on a farm that was 8 acres and we did much (though not all) of the labor by hand.
The average US farm is just under 500 acres. It’s totally different to grow food on that scale.
You don't know why Industrialized farming is Industrialized? Are you for real, right now?
I have no idea how this comment relates to what I was saying or what you are trying to communicate. I believe I do understand why industrialized farming is industrialized. Do you?
Industrialized farming is industrialized by definition as it involves the use of Machinery and Automation such as large vehicles. I'm sitting here in awe and disbelief at how stupid a person could be as to lecture others on this topic while not knowing why "[I'm] assuming small farms need to be worked with medieval technology" to be considered outside of the scope of Industrialized.
Absolute nonsense. Hyperbole is not helping your argument.
100% granted. In the 100 square feet of my property I set aside for vegetable gardening in my spare time, I cannot grow as much food as a full time professional farmer can in a given 100 square feet of a multi-acre field.
I can, however, produce more food than the non-native species of turf grass that used to grow there.
Who the fuck prioritized efficiency over quality in their backyard garden?
My handmade solid maple and walnut furniture will never reach the yield or cost-effectiveness as IKEA. I guess I’ll just have to burn my shop down
You are missing the point.
It's not about your shop. It's about everyone making their own furniture... which doesn't scale and isn't feasible.
This is a totally specious argument. Everyone doesn't have to make 100% of their own furniture any more than every one has to grow 100% of their food.
If I make two chairs it's more efficient than 1 chair and I only need to spend maybe 70% more time than 1, not 100% I sell/barter one chair to my neighbor, who, because they have grown 6 tomato plants instead of 4 (at most 10% more of their labor), has excess tomatoes and gives me some in exchange.
It scaled and was feasible before the industrialization of production.
I think you mean, you don't want it to scale or be feasible.
Funny enough 'efficiency' industrially tends to just mean what makes the most money anyways, so most crop's have been trained to be nutrient sparse, yet large
The Billions of human beings who rely on agriculture to live.
counterpoint: industrial agriculture exists mostly to sustain animal products
That's a really good counterpoint.
Crops like soybeans are mostly cultivated for animal consumption, but are you sure it holds for the entirety of the industrial agriculture?
You mean, compared to what goes to the market for people?
I don't eat much of not industrial agriculture products, even local farms only produce fruits, and I would say they are also industrial (not sure where is the line)
Cows and other farm animals need a lot of food:
Source (OWID)
As per the article two thirds of that 'agricultural land' is graze-lands, so like a 12.5% of that agricultural land is actually farmland dedicated to feed livestock.
I see, 25% is still not too little, I expected this to be less than 10% based on how you phrased the first comment. But you're right, it's possible to greatly reduce strain on land
That wasn't me, but I found out about it relatively recently and I'm happy to share it.
Oh, true, sorry I'm a bit sloppy
Thanks for sharing, anyway ❤️
No worries :)
The animal products are also just more industrial scale, subsidized farming, too.
Why would home gardeners optimize for yield and cost effectiveness? They can't deploy automation or economies of scale.
You garden at home because you enjoy the flavor, freshness, and variety. Those are the perks. Miss me with those mealy, flavorless grocery store tomatoes.
I came to the realization earlier today that there are an alarming number of people who theorize that they can just live off homegrown and composting. They think they can challenge big agriculture by "going off the grid" and that society would be better without subsidized industrial farming.
That's why they would optimize for yield and cost effectiveness. They think they can compete.
EDIT: Also I've tried making tomatoes in colder climates before and they almost always succumb to disease. Huge success with zuccini and onions, though.
Ok, I'm just curious, do you have a source for that soil antidepressants statement? Not being argumentative, legit want to read the source.
This Pretty outdated (from 2007) and I position it in more pop sci than hard science. But from my own perspective, gardening makes me chill out for sure.
https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/66840#1
From a comment thread lower down:
permaculture.com.au/why-gardening-makes-you-happy-and-cures-depression/
I'm telling you that some people think it can be a replacement. I'm explaining to you that this is an unfortunately common stance.
Everybody knows the moon is made of cheese.
Like no cheese I've ever tasted.
(Just beware of vending machines with dreams of skiing.)
Absolutely you can compete my dude. Just not if you're doing it commercially. If you have the space you can grow everything you need and save a ton of money.
The problem is everyone can't do that. It doesn't scale. To feed 8 billion you need the big ag machine. But you, yourself, if you want to focus your time and effort on digging in the soil instead of being a corporate cog, can absolutely support your needs for very cheap.
How northern are we talking? Our tomatoes didn't so well last year in Northern Ohio, but the summer before i was absolutely drowning in cherry tomatoes!
47th Lat, so a fair bit further but the high winds of my region could contribute to hanging crops declines.
It's certainly something besides latitude. Western Canada grows hella tomatoes and that's 49 lat at the bare minimum
British Columbia for sure has some very diverse hardiness zones.
My parents are around 44 deg lat and their tomatoes do very well. It seems like something else must be limiting your success.
I ran commercially successful regenerative farms for many years. Here is the shocking truth Corporate Jesus ™ didn't want you to know:
You aren't "competing" on price or quantity. You are competing on quality. Quality in taste, quality in freshness which also means quality in nutrition^ and quality in sustainability.
So... it might cost you a bit more in money and/or time to grow food in your garden but you are getting so much more value out of it. That's the yield and that's the cost effectiveness.
That's massively more efficient than subsidizing huge-scale industrial agriculture so that some giant corporation can yield higher profits. In fact, come to think of it, shouldn't home gardens be subsidized?
^ E.g. 90% of vitamin C in spinach is lost after 72 hours from harvest
home gardening requires time and land.
It's largely a privilege for those who have both. not a solution for the economically depressed who have neither.
I'm pretty sure that's what Corporate Jesus would want people to believe. And to be honest, sometimes labeling something as "privileged" is just another way of reinforcing that thinking. It doesn't have to be that way.
A key component in this is a general misunderstanding of the value of your labor. When you garden you retain 100% of the value of your labor and your time is worth much more. When you work for others and then have to pay for food at a significant markup, you are losing a very large proportion of that labor. This is one of the central lies of capitalism that forces you into wage slavery and promotes false narratives like "growing food is most efficient on a huge scale". Efficient to whom? Not to you.
Edit: Another related example is the Berkeley Student Farm on the Oxford Tract and 6 other urban spaces. They are doing some amazing work and it's worth a few moments to read about them: https://www.studentfarms.berkeley.edu/
Please do! I am just starting with some gardening and haven't much experience yet.
Uh oh.
Well I'll just mention one thing... just. one. thing. Ok, no, let me do my top beginner mistakes, which seem to all be not understanding what plants need.
Thank you, that was interesting. I would like to subscribe to your newsletter 🙂
But I am not sure I understand point 2. Are you talking about seeds?
People buy or grow "starts" - little baby plants in pots - and often don't let them adjust to being outside before sticking them in the ground.
Ah, gotcha, thanksñ
What are the solutions to #4? Had that problem this year. Something killed about a 1/4 of my tomato and pepper starts because they were still really small when it was time to plant them outdoors (guessing snails or cutworms; I have a lot of both).
Cutworms and similar (I have armyworms) are very annoying. Standard advice is tilling and keeping things clear of weeds but that has the effect of removing habitat for beneficials. My approach is mechanical removal, which I've found very effective: go out when said critters are active, usually at night, and pick them off. It's labor intensive but you only need to do it 1-2 times. For many worms, they'll bury themselves just under the soil surface during the day so if you lightly till with a hand trowl or something in about a 4-6" circle around the plant you can often find them. I also just over-plant, expecting to lose some - we also have gophers here who take about a 10% tythe on nearly everything. Some folks use cardboard collars around the base of peppers and tomatoes but I didn't find that effective and it was a pain.
Obviously the bigger and stronger the plants are the greater the more damage they can take and still survive. Often really small solanaceae are still susceptible to damping off (too much moisture) or may just not be big enough to withstand the shock of transplanting.
So... a cheap and very effective solution to the "living room window" problem is a mini greenhouse or cold frame of some kind, if you have the space. The idea being to give your starts a more ideal growing environment to strengthen them as much as possible before going in the ground.
Even just a simple 2'x4' cold frame made from scrap wood and recycled glass or plexiglass (or better, double walled greenhouse panels) can help the starts make the transition better. You can still start things inside when it's too cold and be careful to move them around to get maximum sun, but then move it to the cold frame as soon as night time temperatures support it and then let the starts mature in there - they will do much better in the heat and light. I use a passive solar greenhouse made from an old Costco barn frame and covered in proper greenhouse plastic (about $130). I have these dark grey barrels (55 gallon food grade barrels used by factories to hold things like syrups - $15 each) that are filled with water and heat up during the day. This provides enough thermal mass that I can start things even when daytime highs are in the 30s. You can replicate this on a smaller scale in a cold frame with even just a few gallons of water.
Other options include season extension methods like row covers (Remay or Agribon). The idea being to even out temperature extremes as much as to protect from frost. A simple hoop made from metal conduit will last way longer than PVC and can be stuck in the ground better. Heavy row covers like AG-50 will get you a lot of frost protection and even if it's not freezing at night many starts will appreciate the higher nighttime temps. Just be sure to ventilate during the day as it can get too hot. For smaller areas an old blanket or even sheet will help retain some heat. Or alternatively, a small plastic container that you put over the start, usually just at night... like a yoghurt container or bottle of some kind.
I use this last method quite a bit for things like watermelons where I've got 8' spacing and Agribon is just not efficient. I made little "hats" out of wire and scraps of Agribon and cover the mounds (I direct seed) until they germinate and get their true leaves. I have to do this because I grow heirloom varieties that take forever and my season is relatively short.
that's why OP was suggesting we subsidize home (and I'd add allotment) gardens - give people money to plant food and flowers and they'll be better of f both physically and mentally.
and who will till the soil, weed, fight pests, harvest, etc.
govt going to provide the physical labor and extra hours per week that is required too?
I mean I get it. I'm a rich white person with a lot of leisure time and I own property where I can have a garden... but turns out not everyone has this stuff. Half my younger friends have no time and no property on which to garden. And those folks are much better off that say, a single mom of two who rents and is struggling to provide her kids with food because she's working 50 hours a week to pay rent. Should I just tell her to 'make your own garden! that will totally feed your family of three...' just put dozens of hours into your concrete driveway of plastic tubs that will provide you with a few weeks of vegetables, most of which will rot before you can use them... unless you want to devote more time and money into canning.
Gardening is great. But jerking myself off and generalizing and saying everyone else should be doing what i have the luxury to do... just makes me a smug self-righteous ass. People buy food from stores because it's convenient and fast.
Involvement in food production to some degree is involvement in your own freedom and independence from capitalist hegemony. To me it's the opposite of privilege. It's not a luxury and it's so so sad that people think of it in those terms.
Somehow along the way folks were instilled with the idea that growing their own food is hard, not efficient... even equated with being poor or some kind of peasant. And there's a very good reason for this - big industrialized agriculture doesn't work except at huge scales and it takes everyone buying cheetos and hot dogs for it to work. And somehow we got into this rut where you have to work 50 hours a week - paid a fraction of the real value of your labor - to afford the "value-added" food that is not nutritionally dense, tasty or grown sustainably.
The truth is that growing food is about as simple and basic as it gets IF you have the knowledge. It is even more viable if people work collectively to get some of those economies of scale.
So take 10 hours of that week and use it to produce valuable food for yourself and for your neighbors. 2-3 families working 10 hours a week each grows A LOT of food. You do not need a lot of land... indeed there is land out there available to be used for community gardens, for free.
Unlike a lot of folks, I'm not going to say this can't work in every situation because I believe it can. Further, I believe it's an existential necessity.
Do you fertilizer your garden with your own shit?
In the case of a home garden, the homeowners, just like it's expected for a homeowner to care for all the other plants on their property.
In the case of an allotment/community garden, community members would provide the labor. That's how they currently work.
I'm confused what the problem is - just because you know some people that wouldn't benefit from a home garden subsidy, doesn't make it a bad idea, if it encourages more people to grow food at home. It's not a one-size-fits-all solution to be sure, but it is a solution that would work for some, with little to no downside that I can conceive of.
Also the whole "you need a lot of land if you want to garden" thing is kind of a myth. You can do a surprising amount in containers, with vertical systems, or even indoors with grow lights or hydroponics these days.
Edit to address your edit:
I don't think anyone's saying "everyone should garden", just "more people should garden". The original suggestion we're discussing was to subsidize gardening, which would help reduce the barrier to entry and make it a more attractive option. Option being the keyword there - subsidizing something doesn't mean everyone has to do it, and it certainly isn't an attempt to belittle or shame anyone that can't or doesn't want to garden.
Hell yea! Let's bring back victory gardens! With a subsidy!
I don't understand why anyone would argue against a garden. Should my yard just be grass? Why shouldn't I plant something I can eat in it? It doesn't matter if it's less efficient than industrial farming, it's basically unused land to start with.
That's because nobody is arguing that. The argument is against people saying that industrial farming is evil and should be stopped, which is a bit of a past time hobby around here.
Monoculture is terrible for the ecosystem. Fertilizer runoff causes algal blooms and dead zones in the ocean. Multinational agricultural conglomerates force developing world farmers to purchase their GMO seeds sue them for copyright infingement if they try to use their seed stock in the next season. Rainforests are being burned down to make room for pastures of methane emitting cattle and monocultured palm oil plantations. The Haber-Bosch process is responsible for 5% of global greenhouse gas emissions. Should I go on? At what point am I supposed to like this?
Fix the system, make a new system, buy discerningly. Have a garden if you can and advocate for more of them if you want. Fight against monoculture, irresponsible fertilizer and pesticide use, copyright abuse, and more. None of that is an irreplacable part of growing food at a large and efficient scale.
By the way, I'm curious about the Haber-Bosch figure. Isn't that the process that allows us to easily make fertilizer, and greatly increase productivity? It seems like that 5% is doing much more heavy lifting than, for example, the ~20% from cow burps.
Right, those are all irreplacable parts of global capitalism and its ruling oligarchy.
Haber Bosch is basically just squeezing nitrogen and oxygen together with a catalyst to make ammonia. To generate high pressures you need energy which you get by burning hydrocarbons. Legumes and bacteria can also do this, which is why crop rotation and letting fields lie fallow has been done for centuries. But you can't let your field lie fallow if you have to compete with other firms who are burning coal to make fertilizer...
They worked out four-crop rotation during the agrarian revolution in the 18th century, they haven't let fields lie fallow since they worked out how to rejuvenate the soil with crops like turnips that could become horse feed...
Pre-Columbian Meso-Americans were already exploiting nitrogen fixing bacteria with the milpa (corn, beans, squash). Anyway the point is if your yield is dependent on how much fertilizer you produce industrially then the sky is the limit for how much coal to burn.
I think at the point where you have food on the table. Without haver, you wouldn't have food on your table and you'd die from hunger
Nobody is claiming it's perfect, nobody is claiming things cannot or should not be improved.
The point is that these systems are there because like it or not, they work. Haber works, you are alive, ain't you? Now from here on we must improve.
Rotate crops more often, cut the stranglehold from agriculture conglomerates, lower the world population by lowering birth rates, be super 8+ billion and rising is just too much for this world to handle... Things like that.
Either way, tonight you can eat, maybe be at least a little grateful for that?
Haber will obviously continue to be used and work but as long as there's a fossil fuel price to make it happen expect more extreme storms, fires, droughts, floods, ocean acidification, and possibly methane clathrate release triggering a runaway greenhouse effect like during the Paleocene-Eocene thermal maximum.
I know. Same for cars, which cause up to 25% of all CO2 exhaust, much easier to curb that. We can do with much less cars, food would be harder.
Right?
it's no different than the yahoos who they they would run the govt better. then they try and give up because it's 'too hard'. this is basically the same as soveign citizen BS, but with vegetables instead of guns.
but we can't let a complex reality get in the way of our well-intention delusions of smugness. because apparently if every citizen isn't providing themselve wiht their own fruits and vegetables... it's their complicity with corporations... or something.
Definitely not!
Because a terrifyingly large percentage of soil is very polluted, and really isn't suitable for growing food. If you eat a lot of homegrown food, getting the soil tested for (at least) heavy metals is probably a good idea, especially if you have little kids or pregnant people.
how/where do tests for soil are made? didnt know i had to check for that here in Mx.
Honestly, there are no good home tests for heavy metals, and there definitely aren't any for everything else.
If you eat mostly home-grown food, you can Google around for labs that do testing near you. You should be prepared for something near a 100 dollar bill though, for heavy metal tests. If you eat a 15 homegrown tomatoes and some herbs a year, then I personally wouldn't bother testing.
I don’t understand why anyone thinks I ever argued against a garden.
They have to defend capitalism and the idea that overproduction is good, regardless of the waste.
They simply don’t care, about anything but money.
Is probably true. However, one should question their world view if they measure everything as a minimization problem with respect to cost efficience and yield.
I think it's less about ruthless efficiency and more about which system will enable even the poorest in society to have nutritious food.
as if this system has done so..
250 years ago people would rent pineapples for parties as status symbols because they cost $8000.
Nowadays the most expensive pineapple you can get is barely $400.
That's progress
If it helps, I could sell you a pineapple for more than that.
I'll have to see what my social status raising fruit budget looks like.
No you couldn't, they would never buy an 8000$ pineapple today because he could get one down the street for a couple bucks.
Is that Canadian toonies?
Borlaug's green revolution of the mid-20th century did lead to a rapid reduction in famines across Asia and Africa...
Not saying anything about the system, just about which farming method has the most potential to equitably distribute resources.
I get what you mean. Our system produces a ridiculous amount of quantity, which should be great! But in the context of where it's firmly placed within existing socioeconomics, stupid things happen like "destroying all the product to keep the value from crashing" and the "distribution problem" that feeding the poor isn't profitable.
Maybe industrial agriculture wouldn't be so terrible if food production for the human race didn't operate on the same metrics as handbags or funkopops. =\
I agree that commodifying food, especially locking nutrition behind class walls is barbaric. I also get that the current iteration of industrial farming is scary (don't get me wrong, it sucks shit) and that "small scale farming solutions just haven't been tried!" but clearly small scale farming is a long term fantasy that would take many decades of work and public acceptance, not even to mention the process of decommodifying the agriculture industry. All I'm saying is that if I'm playing in the same space, the method that would be the most environmentally friendly and efficient (not in an economic sense) is large scale industrial farms.
The other concern I have about small-scale farming I had, arose because I had this notion about "What if we could eliminate food deserts that are literally in the desert through household hydroponics?"
It sounded like such an awesome idea. Federated food! What a revolution!
But I also found out there's a ton that can go very wrong when you have no idea where food came from or how it is grown.
It's also my experienced opinion that a not-small percentage of the human population in this metropolis range from clinically insane to dangerously ignorant.
Industrial farming sucks in a lot of ways, but I'm also glad the (horribly underfunded) FDA and USDA exists.
Perhaps pushes for education in this field could go a long way? It seems outside of farming communities, food production is very much thought of as "farmers' work." and not much else.
I mean. It has? Even the poorest of the poor eat better than they did a couple hundred years ago
Well to be fair, that 3rd home in the Hamptons and a bigger yacht are not going to pay for themselves.
The basil plants you buy in grocery stores are designed to die after a while. It's not lack of sun or water, it's because there are just way too many plants in the tiny pot and basil does not like to be root-bound. They basically strangle themselves to death.
You can easily propagate the plant through cuttings or you can separate the grown plants and re-pot them in smaller groups.
It sounds like you live in the US or something. Tomatoes from the market should be freshly picked overnight to be sold early in the morning. There's literally no difference.
I used to grow tomatoes myself and then transport them 80km away to my family. No issues there. They can survive a lot, especially if you have a refrigerated truck.
Okay but how does this feed 8 Billion People?
I went back and looked at some of your posts on this thread because I was thinking "they can't really be that unimaginative" and lo and behold, it's true, you can be!
Sorry for not having the time and energy to respond to hundreds of comments with full paragraphs, as if it would sway you anti-industrial advocates.
"Sorry for not being able to back up my assertions with facts, data, or even whole paragraphs"
I forgive you, but you should really try to fix it.
It's such a pity you aren't able to engage in meaningful conversation.
Oh well.
Yeah, despite my efforts you don't seem capable.
Agree, but also do plant something that you'll use just a small amount from time to time, like herbs, spices, scallion, chive, and so on. Thing that you'll want it fresh but you can never use it all before it compost. Don't even need a garden, just plant it in pot.
I have screwpine leaf, lemon grass, coriander, and scallion in my garden, and i can harvest the onion when i need it.
The more you grow and eat at home, the less the food industry needs to burn fuel to ship. I know you folks in the US hate doing anything to help out with the world, but if you took the saying of be the change you want to see, imagine the tens of millions of acres being wasted on lawns being put to environmental and nutritional use. Imagine instead of putting leaves into plastic bags to get shipped to a landfill, or burning, houses normalized having compost piles. You get to put waste paper and cardboard in there too instead of bagging it.
I challenge all of yall to grow beans this season. They grow fast, they grow easy, theyre pretty nutritionally complete, they fertilize your soil themselves. Make use of your land.
Yup we should normalize gardening and canning. It's a thing my grandparents knew. Their families survived times of world wars, dust bowls and the great depression. They probably didn't have much choice in the moment but even when times got better they kept up a wonderful little garden. Kid me didn't get why they didn't just buy the things they needed.
I love the conveniences of modern farming and I use it every day. But like all big industialized systems they can be fragile. Covid was a huge problem for a lot of indistries and thankfully farming wasn't really one of them. But if it was countless people would have struggled.
I'm not really a prepper or anything crazy but I don't want to forget the lessons learned just a few decades ago- gardening is great and worth the effort.
It makes sense for it to be the same as solar power: just because most of energy generation is done in big facilities and even some kinds of solar generation (such as solar concentrators) can only be done in large facilities, doesn't make having some solar panels providing part of one's needs (or even all of one's needs for some of the time) less cost effective in Economic terms or a good thing in Ecologic terms.
So it makes sense to grow some of one's food, but maybe not go as far as raise one's own beef or even aim for food self sufficiency, both for personal financial reasons and health reasons. That it's also good in Ecological terms (can lower the use of things like pesticides and definitelly reduces transportation needs) is just icing on the cake.
Im pretty sure the easy decentralization of solar is a big reason its gotten so much pushback from politicians and lobbyists.
Can't have people give less of their income to rent-seekers...
I appreciate your argument but there's no need to throw in a strawman. Leaves in plastic bags have been illegal in most US states for decades. Yard waste must be in paper bags.
Ive never seen yard waste in a paper bag, I have seen loads of plastic bags. pumpkin faces for autumn are extremely popular here.
These states and cities have yard debris bans:
https://www.compostingcouncil.org/page/organicsbans
maybe its an enforcement issue but from what I've seen in Arkansas its all plastic bags. Video with examples https://www.thv11.com/article/news/local/little-rock-stop-yard-waste-pick-up/91-4745aa35-0cd5-4261-b87a-8ac44a2cfc3a
What a bullshit blanket rude comment. Lots of folks in the US are working hard to affect change at their personal and local level. You should edit your comment because it's nationalistic and disparaging.
Notice how the US is among the largest polluters per capita by quite the margin.
Again that doesn't change shit. My point is that a nation is not a monolith.
You wouldn't make a statement like they did about a race, or a people from another country, so it isn't appropriate here either.
Edit It is simply untrue that all Americans "hate to help the world", and therefore that statement is bullshit.
Are we calling out the qatari, bahraini and UAE assholes here aswell?
I'm comfortable saying yes to that
Based
Don't leave out Australia and Canada, since Australia is worse and Canada is next on the list after the USA.
Go ahead and tell everybody how Australia, USA, and Canada are such bad countries.
Meanwhile, with the freedom afforded to me as a land owner in the USA I work from home, harvest solar energy with solar panels to run my electronics, and am growing my own produce and eggs in a backyard farm. As an individual I'm probably doing more for the environment than most people reading this whole Lemmy post.
Lol. Check your privilege.
A. Do a carbon footprint analysis of your life, if it's above 2,5 tons coe/year you're a net burden on the planet. My country is as well, although considerably lower than the US.
B. It is possible for you to be a paragon of environmentalism and still live in a country with inefficient systems for water, infrastructure, zoning, industry and food production. Not to mention live in a culture of unsustainable lifestyle. Many Chinese or Indian persons are simply too poor to have a major impact on the environment, but their national industrial practices drive up the average pollution to levels comparable to the US (although still lower). Most US people aren't as poor, and also have shitty industry standards, and also the means to change that without losing your standing internationally.
C. Multiple countries are shitty, in fact most of the non-developing world countries are a net burden.
D. As opposed to the other countries at the top, the US has had the economy, data, and access to resources to be able to something about it for generations, whereas most have had half the time and considerable need of modernising.
E. The US is much larger than the other countries, and could with quite simple measures make great impact and help pressure other great polluters.
I checked my privilege, and found that it was cool. I don't have a carbonometer to check the other stuff so you can work on that if you want.
Nah Americans need to do better
I smoke a lot of weed. Always have. Last year I grew 4 plants in my backyard garden and this year I've saved thousands of dollars on weed. It's not as strong as store stuff but you get used to to it quickly and there's less paranoia with homegrown I find. I'm always gonna grow my own weed from now on. Only reason I didn't before was that it was illegal. This year I germinated 3 seeds but only one took so I'll have one super tall pot plant in my backyard haha.
While it's still in the "vegetation" stage look up how to "clone" plants and you can make that one plant into as many as you can successfully clone!
I was wondering about this. Looked it up. Definitely starting a couple clones tomorrow. Thankyou.
Alright, I'd like to retroactively change my statement to have the amendment: "Except for Weed. You can easily be self-sustaining on weed."
Home gardening is an important element of individual food security. It’s not meant to replace industrial agriculture which maintains food security for the nation as a whole
And food independence
Hard disagree. Industrial agriculture maintains profits for a few corporations. That large-scale agriculture is productive, necessary, efficient or any of that is a myth. It's massively inefficient when viewed from the perspective of value - especially nutritional value- to the consumer.
I don’t have any love lost for mega corporate farms and agree that we need more family and cooperative owned farms that would be more concerned with sustainability and environmental impact.
Glad to see you agree with me 100%.
The thing about it is that I'm keeping the benefit of the cost effectiveness myself instead of some farmers and taking heads elsewhere. It's more efficient per dollar for ME.
That only really applies if your time is free, OR you're actually enjoying it.
Your time is not free. In fact it's incredibly valuable. So why are you giving it away to corporations for pennies on the dollar? You could be getting 100% of the value of your time when you garden.
On the one hand that's true. On the other hand, I'm self employed and I loathe gardening.
That argument is nonsense for anyone who doesn't live at work.
It's the same argument you made earlier:
and here:
By using your own efforts you retain more of the value for yourself. When you work for others you get paid only a fraction of the value you produce. Ie, your time is more valuable than you are getting paid for.
You think I can just go to my workplace and sit on the clock whenever I want? No. There are hours when I cannot be at work. Those hours are not equivalent to work hours.
Also, WTF are you smoking? These arguments are nothing alike.
I'm sorry you weren't able to understand that simple point. But have a nice day!
You didn't make any point. You're here to troll.
You are apparently here to not read. I was literally agreeing with you.
Bye now.
May I ask a favor? Make a distinction between small-scale direct-to-consumer farmers (ie the kind that sell at farmer's markets) and large-scale commodity farmers and the huge agricorps that own them.
Why would I make that distinction when the point of it is that I'm saving money for myself with my own efforts? It's specifically to exclude external economics.
Because (a) you say it in a way that comes across as derogatory. Unless you grow 100% of your food you need a farmer in there somewhere to live; (b) because the closer you get to the farmer (ie buy from small-scale farms) the more value you retain.
You're one of those people who is anticipating being insulted somehow and just looking for a reason to complain.
'Cost effectives' when not counting all the costs of monoculturing all the things. Or transport.
Most "cost effective" things are only that if you don't count Negative Externalities.
The obvious example is fossil fuels.
Yeah sure, if everybody else is enduring and/or paying for the bad side effects of the way somebody conducts an economic activity, it's "cost effective" for those doing that activity that way.
Subsidized cost effectiveness.
I think the hypothetical here implies transport would still exist for a primarily home-garden non-industrial agriculture replacement system. Or do you think the whole world should suddenly stop trading? Might as well since we're writing a fantasy fiction, anything goes.
Went to a local farmers' market over the weekend. Everything was very good, y'all should give it a try
And for the inevitable "it's too expensive" and related comments:
Not to mention, per kilogram, it's more polluting than simply buying at a grocery store
If you're saying local farmers pollute more then I think you're mistaken. Local farmers by definition are local so they drive closer.
It's the same situation as when you grow a pear in Argentina, send it to Malaysia and back to usa.
Boats are simply too big
A local farmer doing restocking trips, buying and transporting, you on trips buying the stuff needed to make those sweet iron and vitamin deficient mini tomatoes, soil, fertilizer, etc, consume lots of energy. Which might seem like a little but multiply that effort by the proposed method of "everyone planting and harvesting their own shit" and you soon see that it was kinder to mother earth and the climate to just transport shit over a cargo ship burning 400 trucks worth of fuel in one trip and transporting the equivalent of 9000 trucks, than you doing the 400 trucks worth of fuel trips and transporting, well 400 trucks worth of goods
It’s basically about scale. Shipping container ships run at low speed and maximize fuel efficiency.
When you drive, most of the fuel is used propelling the car forward, backwards, upwards and downwards. You make up a small amount of the stuff moved. You also change speeds. You come to full stops, take turns, maybe even go the wrong way. All of that is “wasted” energy that goes to the polluting impact of your vitamin deficient mini tomatoes.
However, a ships engine mostly works way more in per portion to move product across the oceans. Importantly once it maps out it’s routes and hits speed, it doesn’t deviate. Once the ship is up to speed getting it to keep going forward isn’t very hard.
It’s almost (because of need if preexisting infrastructure) the same with rail. The ability to carry a ton of stuff and maintain the same course and speed saves so much fuel, lowering the carbon footprint of any transported goods to your place to something miniscule you could never actually achieve by your own machinations
That's why they pollute more. That's right your homegrown tomatoes are more polluting than those of a mega corporation
Read this scientific article and you might be right
https://phys.org/news/2024-01-food-urban-agriculture-carbon-footprint.html
Absolute nonsense. If you are going to make such ridiculous claims you should probably take the time to back it up with some kind of data. Good luck with that.
Simply adding up the food miles gets you more "pollution" with store bought than local farms.
It depends how you measure it, and what counts as 'polluting'. Does broad-scale habitat destruction count? Because there's a lot more of that in industrial agriculture. Also yields are prioritised over quality, so you're literally not comparing apples with apples if you're getting local heirloom varieties from nearby orchards, compared with apples grown in the PNW for the broader market and kept chilled until ready for sale. These are generalisations of course and there are staple crops that are much more efficient when produced with broadacre cropping.
Yeah, a lot of farmers are good hardworking people.
Have you tasted store bought vegetables? Farmers market may be grown, may be store bought. I have 2 4x2ft planters full of veggies, out $200 this year setting it up. Next year just the price of seeds.
I grew up hating tomatoes until we started growing our own. It's like it's an entirely different food
Seeds and amendments. You gotta add more nutrients to the soil or else your yields will start to suffer. Although, there's a lot of permaculture ways to add nutrients for free.
All hail the compost worms!
Blessed be our wormy overlords!
Unless you live somewhere with 0 soil quality or literally never do any work to fertilize it's not that much extra cost to fertilize and keep soil doing well
Run a compost heap and you're practically going to supply yourself with everything needed for free if you can scale it enough (which is like, 2 2x4 beds and remembering to dump organic food remnants too)
Oh for sure. You don't need much. I just recently watched a cool video about tossing all your weeds in a couple of small water barrels to make liquid fertilizer. It doesn't take a lot.
I ate a garden grown cucumber for the first time. I couldn't believe how refreshing it tastes!
The supermarket version tastes like filler food.
I can't stand the produce from Walmart. They have to be doing something bad to it for it to taste so bland and go bad so quickly.
no shit you can't compete with something subsidized lol, how is that an impressive argument?
just.. subsidize the homegrown produce if you want it to be competitive? big brain moment
Cost ineffective? To whom?
Maybe in utopistic communist fantasy where goverment farms grew me the produce I need, but in current capitalist world home grown is way cheaper to me than store bought.
Yeah like look up organopónicos in Cuba. Thanks to the collapse of the import market that fuelled industrial agriculture and government support of local growers, a good chunk of food in the country now comes from ecology-sound urban agriculture.
"Hi, this is Chett from the local government non-industrial agriculture office. We see that you grew 6 tomato vines this year and didn't take advantage of our program to loan you the costs of 34% of maintaining the crop, as it isn't your first year, would you like to be pre-approved for a $46.38 loan for next year? In return, we ask you to install flood barriers and have your soil tested regularly."
He's not the Messiah, he's a very naughty boy!
It's better to encourage native fauna by planting native flora than plant a vegetable garden that you give up on after 2 months and then gets overrun with foreign weeds.
Last year I bought a packet of sugar pumpkin seeds just because I thought the flowers looked nice the previous time I'd tried (and failed) to grow pumpkins. Got plenty of pumpkins out of it, saved some of the seeds, and started buying butternut squash when the pumpkins ran out. Saved the seeds from those, too, and now I've got seedlings of both popping up. I'm gonna have so much pie!
You're getting a lot of hate here, but you're not entirely wrong. Cost aside, home gardens are massively more carbon intensive than modern industrial agricultural methods. Community gardens are generally better.
https://phys.org/news/2024-01-food-urban-agriculture-carbon-footprint.html
That said, gardens do still offer a ton of other benefits, both for your mental health and your taste buds. But let's not completely decentralize our agricultural system.
Sometimes. You cannot go to a store and buy the freshest, most mouth watering and delicious fruits because they cannot handle being shipped even locally.
A warm, juicy peach right off the tree is an amazing experience.
Also, you know 100% of what what was and what wasn't done to your stuff.
That said, I don't have the time or will to grow all my own veggies that I like daily.
I can, however make enough other stuff that's saleable so I can afford fresh veg year round.
That's what roadside fruit stands are for
Haha no.
The fruit will not travel.
Some produce has to be enjoyed immediately or preserved immediately.
If you mean at the farm where it came from then sometimes.Youd have know when it was picked.
The best sweet corn is heated, not cooked, within minutes of picking at peak quality.
Great but that has nothing to do with keeping a population of 8 Billion People happy and healthy.
I mean the government could open up facilities for cooking meals or processing food for cold storage that would otherwise be thrown out, and regulate both farming and grocery stores so that anything that would get wasted instead goes to feed homeless people or something. Its a massive yeah right though. All industrial farming has done on this side of this rock is pump us full of ready roundup and microplastics, crush small independent grocers, drive up water and other resource consumption, and people are still going hungry regularly. Corporate america will never let people be happy and healthy without wealth divisions on this continent, and likely as much of the others as can be influenced.
Yes, we can call these structures "Food Pantries" and we can have a system that allots it fairly and evenly called a "faring well" system.
Judging by the median quality of life (rat race, anybody) and the obesity epidemic (and related diseases), neither "happy" nor "healthy" seem to be objectives and it looks a lot more like it's just "alive and energized enough to work".
Industrial Food (and that includes the Intensive Farming and Cattle Rearing side) in the US is particularly bad at the healthy part, and even in countries with better food regulations the industrial stuff (and again that includes the products of intensive farming and livestock ranching) is still significantly worse in that sense than the non-industrial kind but at least they don't shove corn so hard that it adds up to over 70% of the human food chain directly and indirectly like in the US.
Not that I'm saying that the World can sustain this big a population without intensive farming. I'm just disputing that the modern version of it even tries to have "happy" or "healthy" as objectives, much less have succeeded in achieving either.
Some things are ridiculously easy to grow in some places and we should for exactly that reason. It's like drinking bottled water when you have an amazing spring in your backyard of great tasting clean water.
Neither does industrial farming? We grow more than enough food to feed the world every year, but don't because that's not the point of industrial farming. The point of increasing the amount of industrial level farming every year is to increase the profit margins of large agriculture conglomerates.
I
Imagine if the powers that be actually tried to solve for "How do we keep 8 billion people happy and healthy." Lol
Surely, it stretches the imagination...
Oh, those dastardly powers that be! Haha, such scoundrels.
But it doesn't need to have a better overall yeld or lower price. It can work as a complementary production, to bring variety, resiliency, and protect local crops and pollinators.
it's therapeutic and it helps - fucking cucumbers are just co2 and a few random minerals from the soil my man, grow that shit, it's easy af
Although I have certainly mentioned that 40+ acres are required to sustain a family agriculturally I believe that it is still worth it to grow food and herb and spices where one can. Just don't expect it to change the direction of inflation.
Considering how expensive fresh produce is getting, it doesn't have to change the direction of inflation to be worth it.
That is true. But the cost of getting quality garden beds together from the soil without yard-fill toxic contaminants, the wood or metal for the beds, and the produce starts and seeds, the water, and the labor can make it a loss financially. That said it is a great hobby and does yield very satisfying results.
Yeah, with sufficient unthoughtfulness, refusing to do research, and with poor enough planning, you can fuck up literally anything? I'm not sure what your point is. I didn't say it was suitable for everybody, or that it magically cannot fail, or that it will always be worth it in all circumstances (if your soil's contaminated, yes, you will want to be careful about how you garden and your costs will likely be higher), or that gardening, unlike anything else, is a good fit for everybody's brain and that every single person can do it effectively.
I just think it's kinda dumb to go after home gardening as somehow not useful or valuable just because it's not a complete, viable replacement for industrial agriculture. It's a completely stupid false dichotomy.
Basically you need to think about how to do it cost-effectively and sanely. Just like anything else you do (you do think about that, right?)
You know you don’t need “beds” made of wood and metal to grow plants, right? You’d be shocked to know that most plants just grow right in the ground. Raised beds offer some benefits for sure, but are completely unnecessary for most home gardens.
Counterpoint: if you, personally, can save some dollars so you're mainly spending on the things you can't grow, that's hardly a bad thing. Also, working with soil is known to be good for you. Exposes you to soil bacteria that are known to boost mood.
And it sounds corny as fuck and I didn't really take it seriously until I did it, but homegrown produce can be so incredibly much better than what you get off an industrial farm.
Just let people participate in feeding themselves and be happy, fuck.
EDIT -- to make a pedant happy
They're not feeding themselves, though, they're primarily reliant on buying what they cannot produce themselves.
Why subsidized? A fair comparison would be subsidized home farming vs. subsidized industrial farming, or neither are subsidized.
The exact problem was discussed in Seeing Like a State by James C. Scott, where he reached a very different and nuanced conclusion. You can have a read if you are truly interested.
Subsidizing home farming isn't really possible with our current society, and not subsidizing industrial farming could be disastrous and lead to famine. The subsidies guarantee that food options will be available at all times.
New Zealand stopped subsidizing farmers, and survives. So we have at least one data point showing that it is possible.
New Zealand only grows meat and most of it goes to export. Growing veggies is not effective in general.
It does say "yield and cost effectiveness" in the picture, so I'm not emphasizing on availability, but discussing just that.
A lot of industrial produced food is cheap because of child, forced, and otherwise exploited labor (undocumented workers, for example). Heavily mechanized farming (mostly used for grains) is cheap because of the vast amount of fossil fuel "energy slaves" used. And that's only cheap because the costs are externalized.
Anyways, growing your own food can definitely be cheaper than buying it. Of course, not if you start plants under lights, build raised beds and fill them with purchased soil, buy organic pelletized fertilizer, or stuff like that. It can be nearly free to grow your own food (if you don't count the cost of your own labor) by saving seeds and intercepting materials from waste streams (wood chips, lawn clippings, manure, used coffee grounds, etc) to "feed your soil."
Given the sheer volume of food waste produced to begin with: it sure don't have to be as 'efficient'.
A third of all food goes uneaten in the USA, at the CONSUMER AND RETAIL LEVEL. It's not going to waste on the farm, nor would that change from gardening on your own.
Right, the yields of the industrialized farms are what go to waste. You dont need a level of productivity that gets bottlenecked at what I'll definely broadly and loosely as 'distribution'--from a garden.
Did Nestle posted this?
Yes, you caught me, hand over the water and you'll get to live just a little longer.
And still a vastly more efficient use of our resources than chemical-fest irrigated lawns.
Yeah fuck lawns. I mow mine but I don't feed or water it. The weeds can overtake the grass and I wouldn't care.
Quality ≠ quantity
The quality and variety of what produce you can eat will be much higher, though. There's a lot of cultivars that don't make financial sense at scale but are wonderful to eat.
You can have both and it doesn't need to compete with industrial farming or meet some business model. It just needs to meet your needs and/or goals.
Gardening lets you grow the stuff you want how you want and eat it fresh without taking days and trucks on a highway to get it to you.
I'm thankful for the conveniences of modern agriculture but if gardening didn't have any positive impact why did they push victory gardens so much in WW2?
It feels good, teaches valuable skills, makes your neighborhood more resiliant and gives you healthy things you want to eat. It's more than simply therapeutic.
You can have both, or you can have just industrial, but you cannot have only homegrown non-industrial.
Sure, but I don't have to pay for the food they produce, just some seeds. Seeds are way cheaper than whatever is available from the local grocery.
It might yield a relatively small amount but I'm not feeding a city. I only need enough for me and my family.
If I can save a couple hundred bucks over the year, not buying produce at the shop, I'll fucking do it.
The economy isn't doing me any favors.
If my home was on several acres of fertile land and I had modern machinery to cultivate it, I could reach pretty good production levels. But then I'd have way too much that would simply go to waste. If I had a small garden just big enough to sustain my needs, I would have no waste and not need as much land or resources to cultivate it.
Ironically Jerusalem artichokes
The only thing I grew at home (in a pot, because dogs) was chili, because it's more scarce in stores than stuff like onions. Some do fear that the store ones are all "GMO" secretly, or even manufactured from some petroleum products, like my stepmother, who once learned that things like milk powder, egg powder, and meat powder exists, but she thought they all weren't made of the real things, because she couldn't believe the Earth could feed this many people, and the rich hoard all the good stuff for themselves.
Assuming it used all the same tools and techniques, making only minor replacements of tractors for voluntary domestic labor .. I don't see why it couldn't reach averages in a similar magnitude. Given them larger plots where they could use industrial tools and they should produce about the same on average.
Eother way there attempts more self sufficiency are to be commended... So the I'm not sure of the point of the post really.
If we had a socialist style of market economy like Vietnam we'd produce more crops.
Also in a correctly valued economy we wouldn't have to subsidize farming.
I feel like there are helpful and harmful fantasies, and villainizing the foundation of all modern life in favor of unrealistic self-sustenance is leaning harmful.
We have the means to all enjoy good produce for minimal costs, we don't need to change to a worse system that costs us more.
Honestly, you don't have to do much to villainize some aspects of industrial farming. It's mostly only possible due to the haber-bosch nitrogenation process, which was invented by the same guy who invented chemical warfare, and the process itself uses lots of petrochemicals and dumps a lot of nitrogen into the natural environment. That's not even getting into the use of migrant workers, or the patenting of dna over some crops, and the food monopolies that exist in some countries.
I also don't think it's a case of "there can be only one system"... And I don't run into a lot of people saying that.
For myself, this isn't one of the more pressing issues in the world. I don't really think people have enough land to be able to be self-sufficient, but gardening is a nice hobby.
Food markets vary from nation to nation, and have political aspects I'm fairly disinterested in, so can't really comment on that.
Bye!
It depends on what and how much you grow in your garden. Growing up and even when our kids were young and at home, we grew a large garden to save money. Growing things that store well, like potatoes, squash, carrots, turnips, rutabagas, and other root crops will save you money because they require no very little to no extra processing to store.
Tomatoes, while VERY tasty straight off the vine, often get highly processed into sauces and jarred to preserve. That is time consuming and expensive. But, if you have enough freezer space, you can freeze tomatoes and peppers very easily. But you need enough freezer space for them. Growing string beans are also fairly efficient crops that require little processing to freeze. But, there is still some extra work to be done with them. Sweet Corn take a lot of room to grow enough to make it worth your while preserve.
But best of all is to garden because you want to and you enjoy it. I no longer grow a large garden - me and Grandma don't need much anymore, but I still grow tomatoes and peppers, turnips, green onions, and amaranth. Amaranth is often used as a background plant in flower gardens, but the whole plant is edible. From the roots to leaves to the seeds. It has a wonderful nutty flavor and is stupidly easy to grow.
Whoa, Black Betty, amaranth!
https://www.jacn.org/are-food-crops-in-the-usa-becoming-less-nutritious/
Agreed, my wife and I had that conversation recently, as it happens. Though, for some things, there are other benefits. Herbs is the best example, even the fresh, packaged herbs that you can buy at a grocery will be noticeably not-as-good as something that you picked fresh in the backyard 2 minutes ago. Dill, basil, thyme, mint, what have you. I've found the same to be true of things like bell peppers and jalapenos.
This only true in places that aren't environmentally supportive of agriculture. My family never had to buy vegetables. Granted we had about 2 acres of farmable land. We didn't sell produce, we harvested and froze until we needed it
Edit: Initial start up is definitely not as cost effective as buying from the grocery, but once you're able to harvest your own seeds, it's not that expensive to sustain your production
Where's that 4chan post where all the BLM rioters tried to set up a new community in Seattle or something. Then they had everyone give there skills and what that want to do in the new world, everyone was saying they can grow food. Then there was the crappest plot of veggies I have ever seen.
For an entire community space without any centralised leadership that lasted about one calendar month, the garden looked alright:
https://crosscut.com/environment/2020/06/seattles-chaz-community-garden-takes-root
Edit: further interesting background https://www.thestranger.com/slog/2020/06/12/43897621/meet-the-farmer-behind-chazs-vegetable-gardens
There was definitely a crappier looking photo than that.
It looks like an abandoned building plot, a small one.
Wow, 4chan would post a bad photo of something people on the left did?
I recall the one you're thinking of, but did not find it. This is a textbook case of how photography is just another aspect of journalism that can be very biased depending on what you decide to show and the context in which you place it.
For my part, isn't it more interesting to know that it was started by a scholar of energy and sustainability who used the opportunity to promote gardening skills and raise awareness of the history and politics of land use rights?
There is a whole thing about land use rights and energy and sustainability. But just because one guy was right on that doesn't mean the whole movement wasn't a complete disaster from the start.
As much as this website hates capitalism I'm still pro capitalist. But even I admit a lot needs to be changed. Land is one of the big things I have been contemplating lately. Having said that, there wont be any meaningful food production in cities for anything but mental health reasons.
What can I say except that I hope you're wrong about food production? The allotment system in the UK is a good example of this, and could be expanded on to good effect for the overall goal of more mutually supportive communities. Obviously we're not going to turn every city into homesteaders, but reducing the imbalances in our economic systems is worthwhile.
As for CHAZ/CHOP, I find it more useful not to judge it based on whether an impromptu short-lived anarchistic community can govern itself perfectly during that chaotic moment in time (especially as police had every reason to try and subvert it - after all, they did lose that precinct), but based on its vision and the hope it gave people. It only lasted a short while, but hopefully the memory of it can live on as a hope for what could be, and as a part of the dialogue between communities and state forces going forward.
Alright? That's the saddest "garden" I've ever seen!
CHAZ was such a bizarre fever dream
Also subsidized industrial agriculture: "lmao let's grow nothing but corn in a pool of roundup ready corrosive acid"
"Here's your high fructose heart attack, double dipped in glyphosates, in a can. enjoy lol"
Problems with quality is a regulatory issue that is not in any way addressed by trying to make your own corn.
The problems of quality with mass agriculture corn that has enough might to have lobbying power to influence regulatory policy aren't solved by growing your own corn that you can regulate and control the cultivar and farming methods?
Yeah I know I just thought it was funny to point out the lopsided subsidized corn production because byproducts go brrrrrrrrr
It makes me really sad that you've apparently never tasted GOOD corn. Like the kind where you start boiling the water before you pick the corn. Or just eat it in the field.
I garden all the time, it won't feed any single nation on earth except maybe Principality of Sealand. You're either being disingenuous or not understood the conversation taking place.
I'm sure your personal experience gardening for yourself is valid, but it would be disingenuous to take it as valid for a larger scale commercial operation that wants to feed people on more than a 1:1 basis.
I've had this discussion dozens if not hundreds of times over the years and the one thing that always stands out is that the claims of "X won't feed Y" never come with substantive data and always have to side-step the original premise. At best they come with personal anecdotes that tend to be amusingly irrelevant.
In fact the logic of my basic premise - that small farms can and do feed people efficiently - is rather simple and well-supported by the data. For posterity let me work through a representative scenario.
I'll use the example of the smallest small farm I know to kind of show the boundaries of the problem. It's a real farm near me - out of respect I won't give it's real name but let's call it Fox Farm. You can find examples like this all over.
This farm is just under 2.5 acres, but that includes the house, a barn and a greenhouse so probably 2 acres in production. It's well positioned near a town of about 5,000, has good soil, is right on a busy road and has easy access to lots of manure from several cattle operations within a mile or two. Fox Farm's owner has been farming for about 12 years and has really mastered hand-scale operations - his only "large" equipment is a walk-behind tractor with a rotary plow. He runs the whole thing with just him and his wife.
Fox Farm sells direct via their small farm stand and at up to three farmer's markets. The last time we spoke about it they were earning a decent living - their "take home" was around $55k after all expenses. At that time total revenue was a bit over $100k annually. You may say, oh that's not much but (a) their revenue and margins get better every year; (b) they are quite happy with this and are able to raise a family and save for the future; (c) that's not a production problem it's a selling problem due to the town size and the fact that most markets operate only part of the year.
How many people do they feed? They have about 150 regular customers, but we can do some quick math: You could use the $100k figure and divide it by the annual grocery budget per person to get a representative figure - so $100000 / $3865 (California average) yields just under 25 individuals. That's of course if they got 100% of their food from this one farm.
So in rough terms you could say that a single 2 acre farm can entirely feed 25 people and provide a decent living to the farmer as well. Now I can tell you from my experience on 15 acres that as you scale a bit more you gain (and lose) some efficiencies but probably it's about 10-15% more per acre every time you double in size but that gain diminishes a lot past about 20 acres for a bunch of management reasons but mainly because of your ability to actually sell it all. Selling produce is way way harder than growing it.
I know for a fact that small farms work because I have not only my personal experience but the experience of several farms around me. If you don't believe me go see for yourself. Seek out the nearest three farms under 100 acres in your area and ask them. I feel I have to point this out even though it should be obvious: your garden is not very productive relative to something run by a professional farmer. Not only will we get way bigger yields for any one crop but at this scale we'll get multiple crops out of the same patch of dirt in a season using carefully planned rotations. As just one example, I will plant peas (nitrogen fixers!) using T-posts and a simple trellis. When the peas are done the tomatoes go in and use the same post-and-weave trellising. This is partly why you should never think of small farms in terms of acreage but rather in terms of revenue.
@FiniteBanjo it is true, but what no one has directly mentioned yet is, that home grown provides a high bar on what industrial agriculture can ask for as a price. If it gets so expensive that growing your own is more cost effective for yourself, you don't need to pay for overpriced products. That's a possible competition, obviously only for those that are fortunate enough to have the fitting and needed resources to grow(being poor is expensive).
And yet industrialized subsidised agricultural continues to fail to feed millions while homegrown continues to feed more and more.
Imagine thinking that the billions of people on earth aren't sustained by industrial agriculture.
Technically? They are being killed by it. Not to be toooo reductionist or anything...
Imagine believing an industry that's heavily subsidised is supporting anyone.