You mean, compared to what goes to the market for people?
I don’t eat much of not industrial agriculture products, even local farms only produce fruits, and I would say they are also industrial (not sure where is the line)
More than three-quarters of global agricultural land is used for livestock, despite meat and dairy making up a much smaller share of the world’s protein and calories. […] However, only half of the world’s croplands are used to grow crops that are consumed by humans directly. We use a lot of land to grow crops for biofuels and other industrial products, and an even bigger share is used to feed livestock.
I see, 25% is still not too little, I expected this to be less than 10% based on how you phrased the first comment. But you’re right, it’s possible to greatly reduce strain on land
As per the article two thirds of that 'agricultural land' is graze-lands, so like a 12.5% of that agricultural land is actually farmland dedicated to feed livestock.
Not only that. But our agriculture is so centered around animals that we also have a huge surplus of manure (the animals’ feces, horn shavings, basically anything left of them) that we then use on all kinds of plant crops. It is so baked into the system that it will be a long way before we can really get a animal-free agriculture…
This is certainly true for our modern agriculture today. But is this really true for any possible industrial agriculture? Couldn’t we also have a plant based industrial agriculture leaving domesticated animals out of the equation altogether? Sure, we are a far way off from that. But I think it would be achievable and that we should aim for it.
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!
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.
Have you tasted store bought vegetables? Farmers market may be grown, may be store bought. I have 2 4x2ft planters full of veggies, out $200 this year setting it up. Next year just the price of seeds.
Seeds and amendments. You gotta add more nutrients to the soil or else your yields will start to suffer. Although, there’s a lot of permaculture ways to add nutrients for free.
Unless you live somewhere with 0 soil quality or literally never do any work to fertilize it’s not that much extra cost to fertilize and keep soil doing well
Run a compost heap and you’re practically going to supply yourself with everything needed for free if you can scale it enough (which is like, 2 2x4 beds and remembering to dump organic food remnants too)
Oh for sure. You don’t need much. I just recently watched a cool video about tossing all your weeds in a couple of small water barrels to make liquid fertilizer. It doesn’t take a lot.
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 dunno, if they used maple deep-browned beans and we knew they were in there before hand that could be really good, I think. Surprise plain beans might make me immediately eject the contents of my stomach, on contact, just to make sure that nothing could make it down there.
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.
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.
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