@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).
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.
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.
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 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,
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 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.
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.
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
And people wonder why I will never go to Boston. Actually that’s a lie; nobody ever wonders that as I’m from Chicago; we have standards. Like never going east standards.
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.
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.
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
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.
and who will till the soil, weed, fight pests, harvest, etc.
In the case of a home garden, the homeowners, just like it’s expected for a homeowner to care for all the other plants on their property.
In the case of an allotment/community garden, community members would provide the labor. That’s how they currently work.
I mean I get it. I’m a rich white person with a lot of leisure time and I own property where I can have a garden… but turns out not everyone has this stuff.
I’m confused what the problem is - just because you know some people that wouldn’t benefit from a home garden subsidy, doesn’t make it a bad idea, if it encourages more people to grow food at home. It’s not a one-size-fits-all solution to be sure, but it is a solution that would work for some, with little to no downside that I can conceive of.
Also the whole “you need a lot of land if you want to garden” thing is kind of a myth. You can do a surprising amount in containers, with vertical systems, or even indoors with grow lights or hydroponics these days.
Edit to address your edit:
Gardening is great. But jerking myself off and generalizing and saying everyone else should be doing what i have the luxury to do… just makes me a smug self-righteous ass. People buy food from stores because it’s convenient and fast.
I don’t think anyone’s saying “everyone should garden”, just “more people should garden”. The original suggestion we’re discussing was to subsidize gardening, which would help reduce the barrier to entry and make it a more attractive option. Option being the keyword there - subsidizing something doesn’t mean everyone has to do it, and it certainly isn’t an attempt to belittle or shame anyone that can’t or doesn’t want to garden.
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.
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: www.studentfarms.berkeley.edu
Please do! I am just starting with some gardening and haven’t much experience yet.
Uh oh.
Well I’ll just mention one thing… just. one. thing. Ok, no, let me do my top beginner mistakes, which seem to all be not understanding what plants need.
Over-watering. For example, tomatoes (and solanaceae in general) like periodic deep watering and shouldn’t be overly moist. I always starve them for water until they start to get a little crispy (literally they look like shit) and do my weekly-ish harvesting the day before watering.
Not hardening-off starts. Don’t plant those peppers in the ground without having them gradually outside over a few days, ending in being out overnight for a day or three.
Not understanding soil and air temperatures. It’s super helpful to know the daytime highs and nightime lows and ideally soil temps as well. Some plants just really won’t grow well when it’s too hot (lettuce) or too cold (tomatoes, cukes, etc)
Growing starts in your living room window because it “gets lots of sun”. If your plants are leggy and weak it’s because they get sun for part of the day and it shifts around too much.
Assuming you have to nuke every living thing anywhere near your veggies. 95% of all insects are beneficials and if you do not provide habitat for them and/or you use copious pesticides, you are killing more good things than bad. On my last farm we used no pesticides, organic-approved or otherwise. This works if you have pathways of (ideally natives) for beneficials to thrive in. The classic example is flea beetles - they thrive in barren hot soil while the beneficials that would eat them avoid that. So plant your arugula near some grasses (like right up against it) and you will not likely have a flea beetle problem.
What are the solutions to #4? Had that problem this year. Something killed about a 1/4 of my tomato and pepper starts because they were still really small when it was time to plant them outdoors (guessing snails or cutworms; I have a lot of both).
What are the solutions to #4? Had that problem this year.
Cutworms and similar (I have armyworms) are very annoying. Standard advice is tilling and keeping things clear of weeds but that has the effect of removing habitat for beneficials. My approach is mechanical removal, which I’ve found very effective: go out when said critters are active, usually at night, and pick them off. It’s labor intensive but you only need to do it 1-2 times. For many worms, they’ll bury themselves just under the soil surface during the day so if you lightly till with a hand trowl or something in about a 4-6" circle around the plant you can often find them. I also just over-plant, expecting to lose some - we also have gophers here who take about a 10% tythe on nearly everything. Some folks use cardboard collars around the base of peppers and tomatoes but I didn’t find that effective and it was a pain.
Obviously the bigger and stronger the plants are the greater the more damage they can take and still survive. Often really small solanaceae are still susceptible to damping off (too much moisture) or may just not be big enough to withstand the shock of transplanting.
So… a cheap and very effective solution to the “living room window” problem is a mini greenhouse or cold frame of some kind, if you have the space. The idea being to give your starts a more ideal growing environment to strengthen them as much as possible before going in the ground.
Even just a simple 2’x4’ cold frame made from scrap wood and recycled glass or plexiglass (or better, double walled greenhouse panels) can help the starts make the transition better. You can still start things inside when it’s too cold and be careful to move them around to get maximum sun, but then move it to the cold frame as soon as night time temperatures support it and then let the starts mature in there - they will do much better in the heat and light. I use a passive solar greenhouse made from an old Costco barn frame and covered in proper greenhouse plastic (about $130). I have these dark grey barrels (55 gallon food grade barrels used by factories to hold things like syrups - $15 each) that are filled with water and heat up during the day. This provides enough thermal mass that I can start things even when daytime highs are in the 30s. You can replicate this on a smaller scale in a cold frame with even just a few gallons of water.
Other options include season extension methods like row covers (Remay or Agribon). The idea being to even out temperature extremes as much as to protect from frost. A simple hoop made from metal conduit will last way longer than PVC and can be stuck in the ground better. Heavy row covers like AG-50 will get you a lot of frost protection and even if it’s not freezing at night many starts will appreciate the higher nighttime temps. Just be sure to ventilate during the day as it can get too hot. For smaller areas an old blanket or even sheet will help retain some heat. Or alternatively, a small plastic container that you put over the start, usually just at night… like a yoghurt container or bottle of some kind.
I use this last method quite a bit for things like watermelons where I’ve got 8’ spacing and Agribon is just not efficient. I made little “hats” out of wire and scraps of Agribon and cover the mounds (I direct seed) until they germinate and get their true leaves. I have to do this because I grow heirloom varieties that take forever and my season is relatively short.
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!
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.
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.
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