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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
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 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.
Bro I think you are vastly overestimating the produce yield of a homegrown tomato plant let alone 6
exactly.
i’ve been gardening for years. it’s a supplement. for like 1-2months i get nice produce that can feed a few people for a few weeks. but that’s it. i maybe produce 20lbs of produce in a year if i’m lucky. that’s over a dozen or two plants. i have a good sized garden of about 100 sq ft.
not to mention the weather any year could totally f you. one year we had three months of drought, so i got like 2lbs of tomatoes that year.
turns out i still buy like 95% of my produce from the grocery store… because it’s available year round and it’s hard to grow variety well unless you have multiple beds with differing soil and sun conditions.
most folks grow tomoatoes and cukes because they are easy and produce abundantly. but i am not going to live on tomatoes and cukes 365 days a year.
the space needed to grow squashes, berries, etc. is way way higher. you need a lot of land. and they are very low yield. a ten foot watermelon vine produces like maybe 1-2 melons per year and takes up 20 sq ft of garden space. a squash vine might produce 4-6 decent squash, etc. and a lot of veggies and plants are non complimentary, meaning they choke each other out if grown in proximity.
the only person i know who has a varied and big garden is an engineer who has spend five figures producing dozens of beds, water systems, and etc. and he still gets a shitty yield some years due to weather and he struggles constantly with rabbits, groundhogs stealing his crop. he has a whole trap and kill system for them even now. because the critters know he is the place to go for the tasty plants. most home gardening grow a few tomato plants and make some tomato sauce and throw a dinner party and that’s the extent of their home gardening.
it’s way more complex and difficult than some ‘hrr drr just bring back victory gardens’ nonsense. you’re average person isn’t going to be building a 1000sq ft veggie garden with fencing and dealing with all the part time job of labor and upkeep that it requires.
I’m curious if you have numbers on that or you are just assuming low yields.
I happen to know exactly how much a tomato plant grows because over 20 years of commercial farming I kept records. It varies a lot by variety and season and even how we are responding to market needs but in general I tend to get about 800-1400 lbs per 200 ft row for indeterminate tomatoes over the season. A farmer I know at lower elevation gets a lot more but they have a longer season, better soil and, crucially, water a lot more than we do – my method cuts yield but increases quality. We use a 2 ft spacing for F1 varieties so that’s about 100 plants (more like 95, but whatevs) so let’s call it 8 pounds per plant = 48 lbs of tomatoes. Again, this is quite generalized and it’s often way more. I also happen to know that’s going to be on the very low end of home garden yields because people tell me this shit. Also, for cherry tomatoes you can get probably 60-70% more since they are very prolific.
Bro we talking about a home garden here, where do you have that much space? and above all, time to do all that in your home? Not even counting the knowledge needed, fertilizer and soil and the fact that 90% of people starting this will drop it at the second week, it is still overestimating how much they will harvest at the end.
I’m not your “bro”.
I’m using examples from commercial small-scale farms because that shows what’s possible when done correctly and by competent people, even at hand scale. I know many home gardeners who are extremely competent and frankly using the example of incompetent home gardeners or those who “drop it at the second week” compared to competent industrial farmers is completely disingenuous and wholly illogical.
the fact that 90% of people starting this will drop it at the second week,
[citation needed]
Sure pal
They might just be in a better climate than you! I had far more delicious sun-ripened tomatoes over the summer than I could eat. More than six plants to be fair, but most self-seeded anyway.
Two tomato plants far exceeded what we needed. We sacrificed the remainder to the possums and birds.
Right congratulations, you had 2 extra low iron and vitamin deficient mini tomatoes
The harvest was too much, presumably not too much for the entire year.
Who the fuck prioritized efficiency over quality in their backyard garden?
The Billions of human beings who rely on agriculture to live.
I think the imperative phrase here is backyard garden. They aren’t referring to a 40 acre field of wheat and potatoes, they probably are thinking a 10’x10’ raised bed.
Edit: operative not imperative
Yes but both in the comments and the post I’m comparing low yield home gardens to large yield industrialized farming. If anybody is trying to derail the conversation away from the topic of the discussion then that is on them, not me.
I’d urge you to consider what “yield” is and means and how “yield” plays out over the whole length of the industrialized food chain.
The classic example from a producer’s perspective is that commodity level production has to be sorted and doesn’t get equal value for everything produced. So you may only get top dollar for 25-50% of what you grew and far less - possibly even zero - for the rest. Incredibly, it really is sometimes cost-effective to let the produce rot in the field if prices don’t support a profit.
Then farther down the chain you have increasing losses and waste. By some estimates that’s as much as nearly 40% of all food produced. See also here.
These factors only very rarely are brought up in these discussions in part because folks have very narrow conceptions of what “yield” means.
There is no alternative. None.
There is no alternative. None.
There are always alternatives.
What exactly does homegrown produce mean for you?
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. "
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.
$270 includes everything like Keurig coffee pods, ground beef, and laundry detergent- not just vegetables.
That’s fair, but the comment above said that they “spend 40 a week on all my groceries at most.”
That’s cool, I wanted to point out that saying cheap and then a price point without reference isn’t really helpful because price varies so much.
Also, 270 per week per person!?!? What the fuck, that can’t be true, that’s more than what I extrapolated it would cost me in the European expensive countries when I visited and went to random grocery stores. As always, the american dream seems to be a scam fetish xD.
I spend 1/3rd of that on all of my groceries combined per month. If I was spending that much per week I would be over 1000$ 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.
no, food costs that much
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.
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.
corn
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.
But for now my PLA 3D printer filament is still cheap! Yay? =\ lol…why is everything so broken…
why is everything so broken…
Greed
Those fertilizers in turn are mainly made from Oil,
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.
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.
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…
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.
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.
Is that Canadian toonies?
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).
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.
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.
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.
We do all by hand on a 1/2 acre of mixed veg. We feed our family of five and sell our extras. All the work is done by two adults. 5 acres would be insane and we are hard workers. I can’t imagine that size without a tractor.
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.
Two people. No mechanical equipment. Even with using animals in order to maintain all that space. Then add harvesting and threshing grains by hand along with those animals. Good luck. Our entire working space is an acre with fruit and nut trees and chickens for meat and eggs. The workload is immense and if our lifestyle was similar to most (day jobs) there is no earthly way we could manage what we have let alone 5 acres. We have been doing this for decades and have systems in place to help us as much as possible and it just would not be physically possible. Just garden prep for us alone takes months at a half acre and simple maintenance and picking is a daily chore all season long. We start planting in February and grow until Oct/Nov. We don’t vacation in those months at all and we have seasonal jobs so we can put as much time as possible into food. Oh and we don’t get paid to grow food because we consume the vast majority of it ourselves so we need those real jobs too. Where are you finding all the time and money?
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 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/
Don’t get me started or I will go on about this in extreme nerdy detail from personal experience.
Please do! I am just starting with some gardening and haven’t much experience yet.
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.
Do you fertilizer your garden with your own shit?
- Don’t throw mud. Behave like an intellectual and remember the human.
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.”
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
“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.”
counterpoint: industrial agriculture exists mostly to sustain animal products
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.
There are associated costs to even small homegrown crops
But do you know what they are? How much precisely?
There is no precise answer to the associated costs. It’ll be different for every circumstance. There are just too many variables and factors to consider.
If you have plenty of time, happen to already have good soil and climate, have all the necessary tools on hand, and are just lucky, don’t have to pay for electricity or water, and so on, the financial cost can be essentially 0 (or close to it).
The more you have to overcome your situation, the more you want to make the cultivation easier, the more you want to maximize yields, and so on – generally that’s going to incur more financial cost.
There could be upfront costs like installing automated watering systems, amending your soil if it’s not up to par, building raised beds, building fencing or installing edging. Plus, any tools you don’t already have, which might include shovels, snips, wire, a spade, and so on. Even if you’re growing on a balcony you might have to buy pots and potting soil, invest in some shade cloth, put down some saucers to protect your downstairs neighbors from getting dripped on. Those are just a small sample of potential upfront costs.
Ongoing / annual costs might include things like fertilizers, pesticides, compost/mulch, replacements for any of the upfront stuff that breaks, and even things like cost of water (which is hopefully negligible but not always).
So, if money is the only “associated cost” here, then it could basically be nothing, but it also wouldn’t be entirely unusual to spend a couple hundred dollars (USD and US costs, I can’t speak for the entire world) and some folks even spend thousands.
There is no precise answer to the associated costs. It’ll be different for every circumstance.
So in other words it could be anywhere from zero to “a lot”.
There are just too many variables and factors to consider.
Which makes it very hard to say that “associated costs” are prohibitive in growing one’s own food.
I thought you were sincerely asking a question and I was answering sincerely as best I could. If you would like a more precise answer for your specific situation, then I’m afraid I can’t really help there, at least not without a lot more information and a lot more time investment on my side.
I appreciate your effort in that, but I was actually replying to the OP to make the point that “there are associated costs” is not a valid criticism of home gardening.
It seems like there would more effective and direct ways (with less farce and fallacy) than asking a loaded question that people might see as a sincere request for information and an opportunity to spark a bit of interest.
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.
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…
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.
Alright, I’d like to retroactively change my statement to have the amendment: “Except for Weed. You can easily be self-sustaining on weed.”
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.
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; © 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.
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.
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
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.
