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!
Local farm has a dirt cheap produce subscription. $40 a week for locally grown produce!
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.
Also the fact that one bad year in your tiny part of the world means you and everyone you know die slow agonizing deaths. Fun!
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.
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.
The issue is that the current farming techniques are not sustainable.
The fertilizers and pesticides used are burning the land, polluting the underground water pools and killing a bunch of animals and insects.
The agriculture needs to change to something sustainable.
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).
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.
This article about the study:
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.
And then the Actual Study HERE:
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.
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.
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.
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.
counterpoint: industrial agriculture exists mostly to sustain animal products
That's a really good counterpoint.
Who the fuck prioritized efficiency over quality in their backyard garden?
My handmade solid maple and walnut furniture will never reach the yield or cost-effectiveness as IKEA. I guess I’ll just have to burn my shop down
You are missing the point.
It's not about your shop. It's about everyone making their own furniture... which doesn't scale and isn't feasible.
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.
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.
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
home gardening requires time and land.
It's largely a privilege for those who have both. not a solution for the economically depressed who have neither.
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.
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: https://www.studentfarms.berkeley.edu/
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.
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 think it's less about ruthless efficiency and more about which system will enable even the poorest in society to have nutritious food.
It may be true for 'soldier' plants. However there are thousands of plant species that can't be both efficiently mass produced and shipped while still being of good quality. So you get a bad produce, very costly produce or both.
I can't afford fresh Basil leaves, I maintained a plant in my kitchen in some of the apartments I lived in. The current one doesn't have enough sun. It took 10 minutes of work to arrange and emptying left over water.
Also, if you never tasted cherry tomatoes straight from the plant you don't what you are missing, and how shity is the produce in the market.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
'Cost effectives' when not counting all the costs of monoculturing all the things. Or transport.
Most "cost effective" things are only that if you don't count Negative Externalities.
The obvious example is fossil fuels.
Yeah sure, if everybody else is enduring and/or paying for the bad side effects of the way somebody conducts an economic activity, it's "cost effective" for those doing that activity that way.
Went to a local farmers' market over the weekend. Everything was very good, y'all should give it a try
And for the inevitable "it's too expensive" and related comments:
no shit you can't compete with something subsidized lol, how is that an impressive argument?
just.. subsidize the homegrown produce if you want it to be competitive? big brain moment
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.
He's not the Messiah, he's a very naughty boy!
It's better to encourage native fauna by planting native flora than plant a vegetable garden that you give up on after 2 months and then gets overrun with foreign weeds.
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!
You're getting a lot of hate here, but you're not entirely wrong. Cost aside, home gardens are massively more carbon intensive than modern industrial agricultural methods. Community gardens are generally better.
https://phys.org/news/2024-01-food-urban-agriculture-carbon-footprint.html
That said, gardens do still offer a ton of other benefits, both for your mental health and your taste buds. But let's not completely decentralize our agricultural system.
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