And for the inevitable “it’s too expensive” and related comments:
Find the markets where you are buying directly from the farmers, not aggregators/resellers.
Shop around and buy things that are less in demand. You can ask what’s not selling and try to negotiate a little and if you go right at the end, say 15-30 minutes before vendors have to pack up, you will find lots of bargains.
Build relationships with growers. You will get better deals and freebees.
It’s the same situation as when you grow a pear in Argentina, send it to Malaysia and back to usa.
Boats are simply too big
A local farmer doing restocking trips, buying and transporting, you on trips buying the stuff needed to make those sweet iron and vitamin deficient mini tomatoes, soil, fertilizer, etc, consume lots of energy. Which might seem like a little but multiply that effort by the proposed method of “everyone planting and harvesting their own shit” and you soon see that it was kinder to mother earth and the climate to just transport shit over a cargo ship burning 400 trucks worth of fuel in one trip and transporting the equivalent of 9000 trucks, than you doing the 400 trucks worth of fuel trips and transporting, well 400 trucks worth of goods
It’s basically about scale. Shipping container ships run at low speed and maximize fuel efficiency.
When you drive, most of the fuel is used propelling the car forward, backwards, upwards and downwards. You make up a small amount of the stuff moved. You also change speeds. You come to full stops, take turns, maybe even go the wrong way. All of that is “wasted” energy that goes to the polluting impact of your vitamin deficient mini tomatoes.
However, a ships engine mostly works way more in per portion to move product across the oceans. Importantly once it maps out it’s routes and hits speed, it doesn’t deviate. Once the ship is up to speed getting it to keep going forward isn’t very hard.
It’s almost (because of need if preexisting infrastructure) the same with rail. The ability to carry a ton of stuff and maintain the same course and speed saves so much fuel, lowering the carbon footprint of any transported goods to your place to something miniscule you could never actually achieve by your own machinations
That’s why they pollute more. That’s right your homegrown tomatoes are more polluting than those of a mega corporation
It depends how you measure it, and what counts as ‘polluting’. Does broad-scale habitat destruction count? Because there’s a lot more of that in industrial agriculture. Also yields are prioritised over quality, so you’re literally not comparing apples with apples if you’re getting local heirloom varieties from nearby orchards, compared with apples grown in the PNW for the broader market and kept chilled until ready for sale. These are generalisations of course and there are staple crops that are much more efficient when produced with broadacre cropping.
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.
Pour 2 cl Helbing (caraway liquor ) into a shot glass. Place 1 solid slice of Mettwurst or Blood sausage on the glass and top with a thick dollop of remoulade (or spicy mustard).
Depending on your preference: eat the sausage first and then drink or drink first and then eat the sausage.
Does Bar mean the whole Pub, or does bar mean only the “Barkeepers workbench”? If the latter is the case, I may know of something worse. There once was a “Bar” called “Clochard” where people said you had to drink a beer made up of all the leftover sips you could find on the tables around you to enjoy the full “Clochard-experience”
Apparently it’s basically the contents of the bar mat with a garnish of rag drippings. And I assume it’s just from the bar but honestly who cares, it’s disgusting either way and will likely get you sick. I doubt anyone orders this seriously, it’s probably just a novelty or maybe a particularly gruesome dare.
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).
Aragón conducted a study on farm productivity of more than 4,000 farming households in Uganda over a five-year period. The study considered farm productivity based on land, labour and tools as well as yields per unit area of cultivated land. His findings suggested that even though yields were higher for smaller farms, farm productivity was actually higher for larger farms. Similar research in Peru, Tanzania and Bangladesh supported these findings.
What explains these divergent findings? Answering this question is important given its consequential policy implications. If small farms are indeed more productive, then policies that encourage small landholdings (such as land redistribution) could increase aggregate productivity (see the discussion in Collier and Dercon, 2014).
We argue that these divergent results reflect the limitation of using yields as a measure of productivity. Our contribution is to show that, in many empirical applications, yields are not informative of the size-productivity relationship, and can lead to qualitatively different insights. Our findings cast doubts on the interpretation of the inverse yield-size relationship as evidence that small farms are more productive, and stress the need to revisit the existing empirical evidence.
Meaning the author is advocating for more scrutiny against the claim and against land redistribution as a policy stance with the intention of increasing productivity.
First, farmers have small scale operations (the average cultivated area is 2.3 hectares).
The definition of “small family farms” in this case is on average more than 5 acres, which would absolutely be under the umbrella of subsidized industrial agriculture in developed nations.
Yeah, that's why I included "per unit of land." It is in practice a little more complex, and a lot of times the smaller farms are more labor-intensive.
My opinion is that modern farming is efficient enough that we can very obviously sustain the farmer, and sell the food at a reasonable price, and it all works -- the only reason this is even complicated at all and we have to talk about optimizing for labor (certainly in 1st-world farms) is that we're trying to support a bloodsucking managerial class that demands six-figure salaries for doing fuck-all, and subsistence wages for the farmers and less than that for farmworkers, and stockholder dividends, and people making fortunes from international trade; and if we just fixed all that bullshit then the issue would be land productivity and everything would be fine.
But yes, in terms of labor productivity it's a little more complex, and none of the above system I listed is likely to change anytime soon, so that's fair.
My god it’s like they’re deliberately trying to make their paper unintelligible to other humans. If I am reading this paper correctly, it is in line with other research on the topic, by indicating that smaller farms tend to have higher yields due to greater labor inputs. While I’m sure an economist would think this puts the issue to rest, being able to feed more people on a smaller land area might still be beneficial even if it requires more labor. Economists often assume that the economy represents the ideal allocation of resources, but I reject this assumption.
By the way, 5 acres is minuscule compared to conventional agriculture, at least in the US. So these aren’t backyard gardens but they are likely quite different from agribusiness as well.
If you think 5 acres on average isn’t subsidized or industrialized then I challenge you to try it out of your own pocket: fertilize with shovels, till with a hoe, water and pest control without anything but hand pumps or windmills, reap the harvest with a scythe.
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?
We live like this because this is how we live. We don’t use mechanized equipment by choice. We farm it so we don’t have to work as well. We do work but not like others. Seasonally mostly or odd jobs and only if we have to. We do the rest because it’s just normal life for us.
We have 250 acres total. A large portion is woodlot. Animals are all small because about 6-7 years ago I had cancer that paralyzed me for a while. Kinda messed me up. I just grow food now. Anyone seeing our income would consider us extremely poor. We aren’t really, we just spend our money differently than most. Our house and land are paid for as is our vehicle. We aren’t preppers this is just how we live.
I still disagree that 5 acres is possible without machinery in this day and age. We spend a literal month broadforking alone to get mixed veg in our garden and greenhouse for a family of five with a very small amount for sale. Adding grains and large animals would not be physically possible without mechanical equipment of some kind even if I was a whole person.
I don’t know why you’re assuming small farms need to be worked with medieval technology—that’s not what I’m saying at all. What I am saying is that 5 acre farms are far smaller than typical for modern agribusiness, and the differences in management are enormous. And I’ve actually worked on a farm that was 8 acres and we did much (though not all) of the labor by hand.
The average US farm is just under 500 acres. It’s totally different to grow food on that scale.
I have no idea how this comment relates to what I was saying or what you are trying to communicate. I believe I do understand why industrialized farming is industrialized. Do you?
Industrialized farming is industrialized by definition as it involves the use of Machinery and Automation such as large vehicles. I’m sitting here in awe and disbelief at how stupid a person could be as to lecture others on this topic while not knowing why “[I’m] assuming small farms need to be worked with medieval technology” to be considered outside of the scope of Industrialized.
Every single comment you’ve made here has shown such a profound misunderstanding of what we’re discussing that it’s difficult to even understand where your thinking went wrong. While I probably could educate you, I lack the patience to deal with your consistently insulting and arrogant attitude. Please just read this conversation again and think twice before chiming in when you have such a poor level of understanding. You are likely to gain more from online interactions with a minimal level of politeness and humility.
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.
Is probably true. However, one should question their world view if they measure everything as a minimization problem with respect to cost efficience and yield.
I get what you mean. Our system produces a ridiculous amount of quantity, which should be great! But in the context of where it’s firmly placed within existing socioeconomics, stupid things happen like “destroying all the product to keep the value from crashing” and the “distribution problem” that feeding the poor isn’t profitable.
Maybe industrial agriculture wouldn’t be so terrible if food production for the human race didn’t operate on the same metrics as handbags or funkopops. =\
I agree that commodifying food, especially locking nutrition behind class walls is barbaric. I also get that the current iteration of industrial farming is scary (don’t get me wrong, it sucks shit) and that “small scale farming solutions just haven’t been tried!” but clearly small scale farming is a long term fantasy that would take many decades of work and public acceptance, not even to mention the process of decommodifying the agriculture industry. All I’m saying is that if I’m playing in the same space, the method that would be the most environmentally friendly and efficient (not in an economic sense) is large scale industrial farms.
The other concern I have about small-scale farming I had, arose because I had this notion about “What if we could eliminate food deserts that are literally in the desert through household hydroponics?”
It sounded like such an awesome idea. Federated food! What a revolution!
But I also found out there’s a ton that can go very wrong when you have no idea where food came from or how it is grown.
It’s also my experienced opinion that a not-small percentage of the human population in this metropolis range from clinically insane to dangerously ignorant.
Industrial farming sucks in a lot of ways, but I’m also glad the (horribly underfunded) FDA and USDA exists.
Perhaps pushes for education in this field could go a long way? It seems outside of farming communities, food production is very much thought of as “farmers’ work.” and not much else.
Surplusable farming is literally the basis on which all civilization is built
Like the whole point of the way things work for us now is that you don’t have to be a farmer or a hunter or a gatherer to be able to have access to a consistent source of food.
People romanticize about the idealic agrarian past but human civilization was literally invented over how back breakingly difficult that kind of work is for people who aren’t built for it.
This is also a major point of livestock. If you have more produce than you can eat, feed the excess to some animals and they will keep those calories fresh and delicious over the winter.
Adding on to that, its not just the surplus produce. Its all the rest of the produce that’s unusable by us humans.
When we grow something like corn, we’re only growing it for the kernels that we can consume. We can’t physiologically make use of the stalks, stems and leaves, but an animal like the goat? They’ll chew up anything green and turn that into usable calories we humans can make use of.
Doesn’t even need to be green, just any sort of plant or really any sort of organic matter. Eating goats that have lived off of old trash is probably not the best idea though
Which neatly raises the point of how modern large monoculture does a lot less of that kind of use of agricultural products unusuable by humans.
Absolutelly, the whole of a cow slaughtered in a slaughterhouse is famously used (down to the hoves) and nothing thrown out, however you don’t see goats being raised on the unusable parts of a corn plant (whilst wheat straw is actually used as feed, for corn the silage for cattle made from it uses the whole plant including kernels not just the left-over unusable by humans parts).
This is one of the things I find funny about modern day self sufficient communes. Subsistence farming is awful, industrialized farming is less awful, but still far more work than most are willing to ever do.
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.
Modern farming techniques consider sustainability, the larger problem is countries using traditional methods that are extremely harmful like burning forests.
Yeah sure. They consider sustainability in that the current generation of poisons they use haven’t been proven unsustainable YET. When they are proven unsustainable, they’ll move to the next generation, that hasn’t been proven YET…
Also systemically annihilating everything except that one crop you want to grow makes your farmland an ecological desert, that doesn’t sound very sustainable either.
Unless you’re of the conviction that farmland shouldn’t be in any way part of nature, and we should concentrate on just growing crops there and every other kind of life there should be discouraged, and by doing that as dense as possible we keep more space for actual nature.
Though i think farming that leaves meaningful room for (some) nature to coexist with it doesn’t do that much worse in yield to make the modern ‘kill everything’ approach worth it. But we’ll see what the future brings i guess.
But just being like ‘modern farming techniques consider sustainability’ seems pretty naive to me…
The industrial farming of corn in the US requires using hybrid corn strains to reach the yields it has, which in turn requires the use of fertilizers because the natural soils is incapable of sustaining the density of corn plants that hybrid varieties achive.
Those fertilizers in turn are mainly made from Oil, which is a non-renewable resource, making the whole thing unsustainable. It’s is possible to make the fertilizers sustainably, it’s just much more expensive so that’s not done.
The US is so deeply involved (including outright military invasions) in the Middle East from where most of the oil comes because in the US oil it’s not just a critical resource for Transportation and Energy, it’s also a critical resource for Food because it’s so incredibly dependent on corn (which is estimated to add up directly and indirectly to more than 70% of the human food chain there)
PS: There is a book called The Omnivore’s Dilemma which is a great read on this.
Fertilizers are made from Amonia which in turn is made using the Haber-Bosch process which requires fossil fuels to provide the necessary energy and as reactants (see this related article).
There is also “natural” fertilizer made from organic mass left over from other activities which would otherwise go to waste, but that’s insufficient for large scale intensive farming (composting is fine for your community garden or even for supplementing low intensity agriculture, but not for the intensive industrial farming growing things like hybrid corn).
Finally, the use of techniques like crop rotation which lets letting fields lie fallow so that natural nitrate fixation occurs and the soil recovers do not make the soil rich enough in nitrates to support hybrid corn growing because, as I mentioned, the plant density is too high to be supported by natural soil alone without further addition of fertilizers.
Fertilizers are made from Amonia which in turn is made using the Haber-Bosch process which requires fossil fuels to provide the necessary energy and as reactants
That’s exactly what I said! Fertilizer is not made from oil. The factory is powered by oil. Just like your home where you garden is powered by oil.
Natural Gas - which is not renewable - is a reactant and Oil is still involved indirectly as a means to generate the power needed for the process. This can be replaced but is more expensive.
That said, it’s unclear to me if Oil is somehow used at the chemical plant to generate said energy (for example, to reach the necessary temperatures) or if it’s even more indirect than that and it’s just fuelling Power Generation plants which in turn provide electricity used in the heating, pressure generation and subsequent cooling for that process, in which case it could be replaced by something renewable.
If it is the latter case I have to agree that it’s not quite as bad in the renewable sense as I thought.
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.
Every day, but I try not to look at it too hard because people tell me I should be starving and suffering from crippling migranes instead of having a body that looks like that.
You shall never see the light of God. To the outer darkness you shall be banished for the wickedness thou hast wrought upon the earth. Get thee behind me, foul creature.
I am honestly unsure which brands would actually pay for making disgusting shitposts containing their products but if you have any leads I’d be happy to take their money.
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