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This Pretty outdated (from 2007) and I position it in more pop sci than hard science.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.
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.
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.
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.
If my home was on several acres of fertile land and I had modern machinery to cultivate it, I could reach pretty good production levels. But then I’d have way too much that would simply go to waste. If I had a small garden just big enough to sustain my needs, I would have no waste and not need as much land or resources to cultivate it.
The quality and variety of what produce you can eat will be much higher, though. There's a lot of cultivars that don't make financial sense at scale but are wonderful to eat.
Although I have certainly mentioned that 40+ acres are required to sustain a family agriculturally I believe that it is still worth it to grow food and herb and spices where one can. Just don’t expect it to change the direction of inflation.
That is true. But the cost of getting quality garden beds together from the soil without yard-fill toxic contaminants, the wood or metal for the beds, and the produce starts and seeds, the water, and the labor can make it a loss financially. That said it is a great hobby and does yield very satisfying results.
Yeah, with sufficient unthoughtfulness, refusing to do research, and with poor enough planning, you can fuck up literally anything? I’m not sure what your point is. I didn’t say it was suitable for everybody, or that it magically cannot fail, or that it will always be worth it in all circumstances (if your soil’s contaminated, yes, you will want to be careful about how you garden and your costs will likely be higher), or that gardening, unlike anything else, is a good fit for everybody’s brain and that every single person can do it effectively.
I just think it’s kinda dumb to go after home gardening as somehow not useful or valuable just because it’s not a complete, viable replacement for industrial agriculture. It’s a completely stupid false dichotomy.
Basically you need to think about how to do it cost-effectively and sanely. Just like anything else you do (you do think about that, right?)
You know you don’t need “beds” made of wood and metal to grow plants, right? You’d be shocked to know that most plants just grow right in the ground. Raised beds offer some benefits for sure, but are completely unnecessary for most home gardens.
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.
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.
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.
Some stuff you can def grow yourself easily and not have to buy at the store. I don’t have to buy tomato’s all summer just from a few plants. Never buy herbs. But yeah sustenance farming I am not. Support local farmers!
That’s cool, I wanted to point out that saying cheap and then a price point without reference isn’t really helpful because price varies so much.
Also, 270 per week per person!?!? What the fuck, that can’t be true, that’s more than what I extrapolated it would cost me in the European expensive countries when I visited and went to random grocery stores. As always, the american dream seems to be a scam fetish xD.
I spend 1/3rd of that on all of my groceries combined per month. If I was spending that much per week I would be over 1000$ in debt after a single month. Is the average person really that rich? And what food are they buying that they need to spend that much?
This is baffling to me as a poor person.
I’m thinking that price is per household not person. I hope that’s the case. But I’m seriously impressed that you can swing $90/mo for food. That’s amazing.
I live in a quite expensive Spanish area and we usually spend 50ish for 2 people’s worth of food. We do go out or order food on the weekend sometimes but being vegetarian we don’t spend more than 15€ on produce a week at most so 40 a week sounds a lot.
American grocery store produce is really expensive now. $40 for a week of veggies would be a good deal in my area. Plus you’re supporting local agriculture.
It’s not you who said I should assume, it was them who didn’t specify, implying we should asume, sorry if I made you think otherwise. Canadians and Australians afaik aso use dollars, just not USD.
In any case, this was quite the small complaint I had, so I’ll just drop it haha. Have a great day.
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