But it doesn’t need to have a better overall yeld or lower price. It can work as a complementary production, to bring variety, resiliency, and protect local crops and pollinators.
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.
A third of all food goes uneaten in the USA, at the CONSUMER AND RETAIL LEVEL. It’s not going to waste on the farm, nor would that change from gardening on your own.
Right, the yields of the industrialized farms are what go to waste. You dont need a level of productivity that gets bottlenecked at what I’ll definely broadly and loosely as ‘distribution’–from a garden.
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…
This Pretty outdated (from 2007) and I position it in more pop sci than hard science. But from my own perspective, gardening makes me chill out for sure.
I would be cautious of statements like these. Because this way it is easy to get lost in your own idealization of community gardening. I mean, I agree that we should do more community gardening and that it would probably benefit most people.
But how do you know that industrial farming won’t ever be as nutritious/delicious as homegrown? How would you fall back on your own garden in case of a nuclear catastrophe? Wouldn’t your soil just be as contaminated? What are your arguments against GMO crops apart from all the obvious economic reasons? Wouldn’t be some genetic mutations be really good actually? I mean the food we eat is already heavily bred and mutated, even most homegrown stuff. Try eating a wild carrot or wild apple. Also, the article you shared regarding the antidepressant properties of soil makes some same mistakes. It is overly idealistic. The actual underlying study is much less ambitious and I’m not sure you can really claim that "working with soil has natural antidepressant properties ".
I love cooking and don’t really like eating out. But if a canteen/cafeteria is run well, it can sure cook much larger quantities of food that are just as delicious and nutritious. It just scales better. I would argue the same is true for agriculture. (Although we definitely would need to change agriculture by a lot!)
But how do you know that industrial farming won’t ever be as nutritious/delicious as homegrown?
that’s just the nature of the beast. crops aren’t rotated, the soil is artificially bolstered with junk fertilizers and pesticides.
things are harvested before they’re ripe, and then ripen on the semi-truck…
it’s just not nearly as good…
go try some home grown, organic, actually fresh food.
How would you fall back on your own garden in case of a nuclear catastrophe? Wouldn’t your soil just be as contaminated?
sea lion, it doesn’t have to be nuclear… it’s obviously better to have a garden in any catastrophe… in recent memory, shortages from covid…
if it were nuclear, no i’m hypothetically staying where i am because it wasn’t contaminated… ffs
What are your arguments against GMO crops apart from all the obvious economic reasons?
Roundup/ glyophosphate causes cancer. We were stopped from even allowing “gmo free” from food labels for years… i’m not going to explain any further than that, go ahead and type other lists of tangential questions with no intention of actual conversation, sea lion.
Wouldn’t be some genetic mutations be really good actually?
this stupid strawman again? yeah, duh, i’m not against the evolution of crops… i’m against genetically modifying them to be immune to Glyophosphate, the spraying crops with that, then giving farmers and consumers cancer…
like the things that have actually happened with GMO’s, healthwise…
choice is important… how about long term knowledge? we know a tomato doesn’t cause cancer… some random new chemical? we don’t know and can’t control that, and i don’t want to be Monsanto’s lab rat…
mean the food we eat is already heavily bred and mutated, even most homegrown stuff. Try eating a wild carrot or wild apple.
no fucking shit, you disingenuous bastard…
no fucking shit… fuck your stupid strawmen, YOU KNOW i’m not talking about any and all genetic mutations… that’s the dumbest, paid for, corporate argument i’ve every heard…
and i’ve heard that trash repeated over and over again as if that’s related…
and it’s not
Also, the article you shared regarding the antidepressant properties of soil makes some same mistakes. It is overly idealistic.
awfully vague counter claim, sea lion… and there are many such studies on this. but even if not directly, everyone that gardens can attest that there are mental health benefits
Wow there, you assume I was arguing in bad faith but I was just genuinely curious to discuss this. No need in being so rude.
I think you still got a lot mixed up here. When I was talking about GMO plants I didn’t talk about all the awful practices of today’s capitalist corporations. But GMO in itself could be great for feeding many people in a world after capitalism. Glyphosat and other pesticides are really not the same as GMO. Do you actually know what GMO means and how it works? I’m not necessarily a fan of GMO and think we should be very cautious with it. But just dismissing it as obviously evil without understanding what it means is wrong imo.
Similarly I think it is not really clear what we discuss when er talk about industrial agriculture. In my mind it is solely the production of agricultural crops at a large scale and by means of employing machines. It seems like you think of it like our modern capitalist agriculture. This thread was originally about how to feed huge populations of people and I think we will need industrial agriculture. However, what we understand today under industrial agriculture is just one way of doing it. I obviously know that today’s conventionally farmed crops and monocultures are really bad for biodiversity and the environment. And I sure want to see then gone just like you. But even organic farming relies a lot on industrial agriculture. And I don’t think it is really true that homegrown crops in small community gardens are necessarily more nutritious or delicious than organically+industrially farmed crops.
And this was my overall point. Just because you feel like something tastes/looks better doesn’t mean it is actually better. That’s what I mean by idealization. I don’t think we get that far just claiming some practices are evil and others are good.
I’m gardening myself and sure it does help me with my mental health. But that is because I can choose to work in the garden whenever I feel like it. But if I had to work on a farm because we need all the people working the fields, it would certainly not improve but rather deteriorate my mental and physical health. But still, this has nothing to do with your claim that soil bacteria actually function as natural antidepressants.
And please seek help with your anger issues if you haven’t already. It is totally off to call someone “disingenuous bastard” if they just try to start a debate. (Just to be sure: I don’t mean this in a passive-aggressive way.)
How northern are we talking? Our tomatoes didn’t so well last year in Northern Ohio, but the summer before i was absolutely drowning in cherry tomatoes!
Absolutely you can compete my dude. Just not if you’re doing it commercially. If you have the space you can grow everything you need and save a ton of money.
The problem is everyone can’t do that. It doesn’t scale. To feed 8 billion you need the big ag machine. But you, yourself, if you want to focus your time and effort on digging in the soil instead of being a corporate cog, can absolutely support your needs for very cheap.
Assuming it used all the same tools and techniques, making only minor replacements of tractors for voluntary domestic labor … I don’t see why it couldn’t reach averages in a similar magnitude. Given them larger plots where they could use industrial tools and they should produce about the same on average.
Eother way there attempts more self sufficiency are to be commended… So the I’m not sure of the point of the post really.
If we had a socialist style of market economy like Vietnam we’d produce more crops.
Also in a correctly valued economy we wouldn’t have to subsidize farming.
I feel like there are helpful and harmful fantasies, and villainizing the foundation of all modern life in favor of unrealistic self-sustenance is leaning harmful.
We have the means to all enjoy good produce for minimal costs, we don’t need to change to a worse system that costs us more.
Honestly, you don’t have to do much to villainize some aspects of industrial farming. It’s mostly only possible due to the haber-bosch nitrogenation process, which was invented by the same guy who invented chemical warfare, and the process itself uses lots of petrochemicals and dumps a lot of nitrogen into the natural environment. That’s not even getting into the use of migrant workers, or the patenting of dna over some crops, and the food monopolies that exist in some countries.
I also don’t think it’s a case of “there can be only one system”… And I don’t run into a lot of people saying that.
For myself, this isn’t one of the more pressing issues in the world. I don’t really think people have enough land to be able to be self-sufficient, but gardening is a nice hobby.
Food markets vary from nation to nation, and have political aspects I’m fairly disinterested in, so can’t really comment on that.
Counterpoint: if you, personally, can save some dollars so you’re mainly spending on the things you can’t grow, that’s hardly a bad thing. Also, working with soil is known to be good for you. Exposes you to soil bacteria that are known to boost mood.
And it sounds corny as fuck and I didn’t really take it seriously until I did it, but homegrown produce can be so incredibly much better than what you get off an industrial farm.
Just let people participate in feeding themselves and be happy, fuck.
The problems of quality with mass agriculture corn that has enough might to have lobbying power to influence regulatory policy aren’t solved by growing your own corn that you can regulate and control the cultivar and farming methods?
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.
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.
This only true in places that aren’t environmentally supportive of agriculture. My family never had to buy vegetables. Granted we had about 2 acres of farmable land. We didn’t sell produce, we harvested and froze until we needed it
Edit: Initial start up is definitely not as cost effective as buying from the grocery, but once you’re able to harvest your own seeds, it’s not that expensive to sustain your production
You can have both and it doesn’t need to compete with industrial farming or meet some business model. It just needs to meet your needs and/or goals.
Gardening lets you grow the stuff you want how you want and eat it fresh without taking days and trucks on a highway to get it to you.
I’m thankful for the conveniences of modern agriculture but if gardening didn’t have any positive impact why did they push victory gardens so much in WW2?
It feels good, teaches valuable skills, makes your neighborhood more resiliant and gives you healthy things you want to eat. It’s more than simply therapeutic.
The more you grow and eat at home, the less the food industry needs to burn fuel to ship. I know you folks in the US hate doing anything to help out with the world, but if you took the saying of be the change you want to see, imagine the tens of millions of acres being wasted on lawns being put to environmental and nutritional use. Imagine instead of putting leaves into plastic bags to get shipped to a landfill, or burning, houses normalized having compost piles. You get to put waste paper and cardboard in there too instead of bagging it.
I challenge all of yall to grow beans this season. They grow fast, they grow easy, theyre pretty nutritionally complete, they fertilize your soil themselves. Make use of your land.
What a bullshit blanket rude comment. Lots of folks in the US are working hard to affect change at their personal and local level. You should edit your comment because it’s nationalistic and disparaging.
Don’t leave out Australia and Canada, since Australia is worse and Canada is next on the list after the USA.
Go ahead and tell everybody how Australia, USA, and Canada are such bad countries.
Meanwhile, with the freedom afforded to me as a land owner in the USA I work from home, harvest solar energy with solar panels to run my electronics, and am growing my own produce and eggs in a backyard farm. As an individual I’m probably doing more for the environment than most people reading this whole Lemmy post.
A. Do a carbon footprint analysis of your life, if it’s above 2,5 tons coe/year you’re a net burden on the planet. My country is as well, although considerably lower than the US.
B. It is possible for you to be a paragon of environmentalism and still live in a country with inefficient systems for water, infrastructure, zoning, industry and food production. Not to mention live in a culture of unsustainable lifestyle. Many Chinese or Indian persons are simply too poor to have a major impact on the environment, but their national industrial practices drive up the average pollution to levels comparable to the US (although still lower). Most US people aren’t as poor, and also have shitty industry standards, and also the means to change that without losing your standing internationally.
C. Multiple countries are shitty, in fact most of the non-developing world countries are a net burden.
D. As opposed to the other countries at the top, the US has had the economy, data, and access to resources to be able to something about it for generations, whereas most have had half the time and considerable need of modernising.
E. The US is much larger than the other countries, and could with quite simple measures make great impact and help pressure other great polluters.
Yup we should normalize gardening and canning. It’s a thing my grandparents knew. Their families survived times of world wars, dust bowls and the great depression. They probably didn’t have much choice in the moment but even when times got better they kept up a wonderful little garden. Kid me didn’t get why they didn’t just buy the things they needed.
I love the conveniences of modern farming and I use it every day. But like all big industialized systems they can be fragile. Covid was a huge problem for a lot of indistries and thankfully farming wasn’t really one of them. But if it was countless people would have struggled.
I’m not really a prepper or anything crazy but I don’t want to forget the lessons learned just a few decades ago- gardening is great and worth the effort.
It makes sense for it to be the same as solar power: just because most of energy generation is done in big facilities and even some kinds of solar generation (such as solar concentrators) can only be done in large facilities, doesn’t make having some solar panels providing part of one’s needs (or even all of one’s needs for some of the time) less cost effective in Economic terms or a good thing in Ecologic terms.
So it makes sense to grow some of one’s food, but maybe not go as far as raise one’s own beef or even aim for food self sufficiency, both for personal financial reasons and health reasons. That it’s also good in Ecological terms (can lower the use of things like pesticides and definitelly reduces transportation needs) is just icing on the cake.
Imagine instead of putting leaves into plastic bags to get shipped to a landfill, or burning, houses normalized having compost piles.
I appreciate your argument but there’s no need to throw in a strawman. Leaves in plastic bags have been illegal in most US states for decades. Yard waste must be in paper bags.
100% granted. In the 100 square feet of my property I set aside for vegetable gardening in my spare time, I cannot grow as much food as a full time professional farmer can in a given 100 square feet of a multi-acre field.
I can, however, produce more food than the non-native species of turf grass that used to grow there.
Sometimes. You cannot go to a store and buy the freshest, most mouth watering and delicious fruits because they cannot handle being shipped even locally.
A warm, juicy peach right off the tree is an amazing experience.
Also, you know 100% of what what was and what wasn’t done to your stuff.
That said, I don’t have the time or will to grow all my own veggies that I like daily.
I can, however make enough other stuff that’s saleable so I can afford fresh veg year round.
I mean the government could open up facilities for cooking meals or processing food for cold storage that would otherwise be thrown out, and regulate both farming and grocery stores so that anything that would get wasted instead goes to feed homeless people or something. Its a massive yeah right though. All industrial farming has done on this side of this rock is pump us full of ready roundup and microplastics, crush small independent grocers, drive up water and other resource consumption, and people are still going hungry regularly. Corporate america will never let people be happy and healthy without wealth divisions on this continent, and likely as much of the others as can be influenced.
Judging by the median quality of life (rat race, anybody) and the obesity epidemic (and related diseases), neither “happy” nor “healthy” seem to be objectives and it looks a lot more like it’s just “alive and energized enough to work”.
Industrial Food (and that includes the Intensive Farming and Cattle Rearing side) in the US is particularly bad at the healthy part, and even in countries with better food regulations the industrial stuff (and again that includes the products of intensive farming and livestock ranching) is still significantly worse in that sense than the non-industrial kind but at least they don’t shove corn so hard that it adds up to over 70% of the human food chain directly and indirectly like in the US.
Not that I’m saying that the World can sustain this big a population without intensive farming. I’m just disputing that the modern version of it even tries to have “happy” or “healthy” as objectives, much less have succeeded in achieving either.
Some things are ridiculously easy to grow in some places and we should for exactly that reason. It’s like drinking bottled water when you have an amazing spring in your backyard of great tasting clean water.
Neither does industrial farming? We grow more than enough food to feed the world every year, but don’t because that’s not the point of industrial farming. The point of increasing the amount of industrial level farming every year is to increase the profit margins of large agriculture conglomerates.
Agree, but also do plant something that you’ll use just a small amount from time to time, like herbs, spices, scallion, chive, and so on. Thing that you’ll want it fresh but you can never use it all before it compost. Don’t even need a garden, just plant it in pot.
I have screwpine leaf, lemon grass, coriander, and scallion in my garden, and i can harvest the onion when i need it.
lemmy.today
Oldest