I don’t understand why anyone would argue against a garden. Should my yard just be grass? Why shouldn’t I plant something I can eat in it? It doesn’t matter if it’s less efficient than industrial farming, it’s basically unused land to start with.
That’s because nobody is arguing that. The argument is against people saying that industrial farming is evil and should be stopped, which is a bit of a past time hobby around here.
Monoculture is terrible for the ecosystem. Fertilizer runoff causes algal blooms and dead zones in the ocean. Multinational agricultural conglomerates force developing world farmers to purchase their GMO seeds sue them for copyright infingement if they try to use their seed stock in the next season. Rainforests are being burned down to make room for pastures of methane emitting cattle and monocultured palm oil plantations. The Haber-Bosch process is responsible for 5% of global greenhouse gas emissions. Should I go on? At what point am I supposed to like this?
Fix the system, make a new system, buy discerningly. Have a garden if you can and advocate for more of them if you want. Fight against monoculture, irresponsible fertilizer and pesticide use, copyright abuse, and more. None of that is an irreplacable part of growing food at a large and efficient scale.
By the way, I’m curious about the Haber-Bosch figure. Isn’t that the process that allows us to easily make fertilizer, and greatly increase productivity? It seems like that 5% is doing much more heavy lifting than, for example, the ~20% from cow burps.
Right, those are all irreplacable parts of global capitalism and its ruling oligarchy.
Haber Bosch is basically just squeezing nitrogen and oxygen together with a catalyst to make ammonia. To generate high pressures you need energy which you get by burning hydrocarbons. Legumes and bacteria can also do this, which is why crop rotation and letting fields lie fallow has been done for centuries. But you can’t let your field lie fallow if you have to compete with other firms who are burning coal to make fertilizer…
They worked out four-crop rotation during the agrarian revolution in the 18th century, they haven’t let fields lie fallow since they worked out how to rejuvenate the soil with crops like turnips that could become horse feed…
Pre-Columbian Meso-Americans were already exploiting nitrogen fixing bacteria with the milpa (corn, beans, squash). Anyway the point is if your yield is dependent on how much fertilizer you produce industrially then the sky is the limit for how much coal to burn.
I think at the point where you have food on the table. Without haver, you wouldn’t have food on your table and you’d die from hunger
Nobody is claiming it’s perfect, nobody is claiming things cannot or should not be improved.
The point is that these systems are there because like it or not, they work. Haber works, you are alive, ain’t you? Now from here on we must improve.
Rotate crops more often, cut the stranglehold from agriculture conglomerates, lower the world population by lowering birth rates, be super 8+ billion and rising is just too much for this world to handle… Things like that.
Either way, tonight you can eat, maybe be at least a little grateful for that?
Haber will obviously continue to be used and work but as long as there’s a fossil fuel price to make it happen expect more extreme storms, fires, droughts, floods, ocean acidification, and possibly methane clathrate release triggering a runaway greenhouse effect like during the Paleocene-Eocene thermal maximum.
it’s no different than the yahoos who they they would run the govt better. then they try and give up because it’s ‘too hard’. this is basically the same as soveign citizen BS, but with vegetables instead of guns.
but we can’t let a complex reality get in the way of our well-intention delusions of smugness. because apparently if every citizen isn’t providing themselve wiht their own fruits and vegetables… it’s their complicity with corporations… or something.
Because a terrifyingly large percentage of soil is very polluted, and really isn’t suitable for growing food. If you eat a lot of homegrown food, getting the soil tested for (at least) heavy metals is probably a good idea, especially if you have little kids or pregnant people.
Honestly, there are no good home tests for heavy metals, and there definitely aren’t any for everything else.
If you eat mostly home-grown food, you can Google around for labs that do testing near you. You should be prepared for something near a 100 dollar bill though, for heavy metal tests. If you eat a 15 homegrown tomatoes and some herbs a year, then I personally wouldn’t bother testing.
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.
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.
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.
The thing about it is that I’m keeping the benefit of the cost effectiveness myself instead of some farmers and taking heads elsewhere. It’s more efficient per dollar for ME.
I’m saving money for myself with my own efforts? It’s specifically to exclude external economics.
and here:
The thing about it is that I’m keeping the benefit of the cost effectiveness myself
By using your own efforts you retain more of the value for yourself. When you work for others you get paid only a fraction of the value you produce. Ie, your time is more valuable than you are getting paid for.
You think I can just go to my workplace and sit on the clock whenever I want? No. There are hours when I cannot be at work. Those hours are not equivalent to work hours.
Also, WTF are you smoking? These arguments are nothing alike.
Your time is not free. In fact it’s incredibly valuable. So why are you giving it away to corporations for pennies on the dollar? You could be getting 100% of the value of your time when you garden.
May I ask a favor? Make a distinction between small-scale direct-to-consumer farmers (ie the kind that sell at farmer’s markets) and large-scale commodity farmers and the huge agricorps that own them.
Why would I make that distinction when the point of it is that I’m saving money for myself with my own efforts? It’s specifically to exclude external economics.
Because (a) you say it in a way that comes across as derogatory. Unless you grow 100% of your food you need a farmer in there somewhere to live; (b) because the closer you get to the farmer (ie buy from small-scale farms) the more value you retain.
Maybe in utopistic communist fantasy where goverment farms grew me the produce I need, but in current capitalist world home grown is way cheaper to me than store bought.
Yeah like look up organopónicos in Cuba. Thanks to the collapse of the import market that fuelled industrial agriculture and government support of local growers, a good chunk of food in the country now comes from ecology-sound urban agriculture.
“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.”
lemmy.today
Hot