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!
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 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.
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:
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.
And then the Actual Study HERE:
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.
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
Who the fuck prioritized efficiency over quality in their backyard garden?
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:
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.
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.
man, you're going to be really alarmed when you hear about community gardens and greenhouses...
the idea for most people isn't to completely replace all farming, but to reduce it, grow food instead of a lawn, have some fresh delicious non-gmo shit...
have something to fall back on when the nuclear apocalypse happens...industrial farming will never be as nutritious, delicious, or satisfying as home-grown...
p.s. working with soil has natural antidepressant properties...
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.
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.
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/
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?
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.
Should my yard just be grass?
Definitely not!
Why shouldn't I plant something I can eat in it?
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.
I don’t understand why anyone would argue against a garden.
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.
if they measure everything as a minimization problem with respect to cost efficience and yield.
Well to be fair, that 3rd home in the Hamptons and a bigger yacht are not going to pay for themselves.
It may be true for 'soldier' plants. However there are thousands of plant species that can't be both efficiently mass produced and shipped while still being of good quality. So you get a bad produce, very costly produce or both.
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.
Also, if you never tasted cherry tomatoes straight from the plant you don't what you are missing, and how shity is the produce in the market.
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.
Yea, I had Basil im some apartments. The current one has no sun at-all. Basil needs some. But when I bought plants my father guided me how to split them. Gifted my friends, don't need more then one.
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.
Okay but how does this feed 8 Billion People?
We don't have a stable way to feed 8 billion people. The dependency on monoculture will cause many people to die under a changing climate.
Self gardening may:
- Increase food stability
- Increase access to nutrients rich food, GR while saving many, reduced food quality
- Be fucking tasty and cheap
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.
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
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.
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.
some farmers
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.
'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:
- 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.
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.
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)
We grow the vast majority of our own veggies, eggs and chicken. Our kids hate store bought food, it's even hard to go to restaurants. We sell a little bit from an on site farm stand to help pay for supplies mostly. Our seeds were $600 this year though. It's a rather large and diverse garden.
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
It's not only cost ineffetive but also less environmental option.
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!
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.
Appreciate the link to the paper. Will be an interesting read.
But at first glance here's a wee problem with the study: It takes the worst practices of urban farms and compares them with the best practices of industrial farms. It is not comparing "home grown produce" from the OP, where some of the principle offenders - not using materials for a long time - may, in fact, be used for a long time. It also doesn't study small-scale non-urban farms. Which to me IS a decentralization but by people who know what they are doing.
One example is composting, where it correctly surmises that people who don't know how to compost correctly.... wait for it now, don't compost correctly and produce higher GHGs.
And you are mischaracterizing the results and omitting a key finding: "However, some UA crops (for example, tomatoes) and sites (for example, 25% of individually managed gardens) outperform conventional agriculture. "
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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."
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
Then why even bring quality up in the first place?
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.
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.
There are associated costs to even small homegrown crops. Unless you're planting them randomly in the wilderness and hoping for the best.
I have some land prepared for a garden. It was pretty well laid out by the previous owner of the property. I'll have some costs in getting it going, since the last guy used it mainly for flowers, so I want to put in some raised beds and something to keep the animals away from my food, beyond that, it's all planting and waiting. It rains sufficiently here so no need for irrigation, and there's plenty of sun. The soil is pretty decent too.
Direct financial costs will be minimal, year over year, and then it's just the indirect cost of my time to tend to it as it grows.
Just got my bill from the sun today. I guess it takes time to snail mail over 93M miles.
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.
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.
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!
Ironically Jerusalem artichokes
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!
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.
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
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
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
CHAZ was such a bizarre fever dream
@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.
