> buying food which was produced and delivered close to you by large, complex and very inefficient industries.
Hmm. I wouldn't use the word `inefficient` so heavily. They are really good at bringing you some kind of products, not the home grown quality kind though.
> This system spends incredible amounts of resources (time, energy, labor) which you can save by simply growing your own food.
No, growing two potatoes only or a bunch of tomatoes take up time blah blah scale blah blah time money salary blah blah.
I am hooked anyway, I always wanted to try to grow something and if filling up an ikea bag with dirt and some seeds is enough to watch green stuff grow I'll be happy to try that as an hobby !
The industry is absolutely inefficient when you consider what inputs required: pesticides, seed, machinery, fossil fuels for planting/harvesting/transport, massive government subsidies -- not to mention the depletion of the soils that come along with it. It is not even monetarily efficient: take for example the dumping of millions of gallons of milk to match quotas this past year. It's far from efficient.
I would not consider something that requires so much input to be "more efficient at feeding a person". It is however a system that is efficient at feeding mass amounts of people -- if you ignore the inputs.
We created Permapeople alongside the principles of permaculture. The efficiency you can create by designing systems that require few outside inputs is unmatched! While the output is not as far-reaching as industrial production, in the hands of enough local folks, growing in their yards, this maximized efficiency of land could technically provide a LOT of food.
PS: growing potatoes is probably easier than you think. One could grow potatoes with very little time and no monetary input.
> The industry is absolutely inefficient when you consider what inputs required: pesticides, seed, machinery, fossil fuels for planting/harvesting/transport, massive government subsidies -- not to mention the depletion of the soils that come along with it. It is not even monetarily efficient: take for example the dumping of millions of gallons of milk to match quotas this past year. It's far from efficient.
> I would not consider something that requires so much input to be "more efficient at feeding a person". It is however a system that is efficient at feeding mass amounts of people -- if you ignore the inputs.
I do agree but at the end of the day all that matters to most people regarding food is the price in the supermarket aisles.
I have fun memories of my SO digging up her father's potatoes and getting back from the garden with 5 of them “damn, that took a lot of muscle to get them out of the ground”. They were really good though. Gertrude Betrand's stuff.
> You need to get a job to make money so that you can spend that money on buying food which was produced and delivered close to you by large, complex and very inefficient industries. This system spends incredible amounts of resources (time, energy, labor) which you can save by simply growing your own food.
Are you sure about that? Intuitively I would expect commercially-produced food is far more efficient than everyone growing tiny amounts on a balcony.
I regularly feed my family of 4 with delights from the garden.
Its a lot of fun to get things working, and then when you do: the plants do all the work.
No, doing it the first few times on a balcony - this won't be efficient. But, going through a few seasons and tweaking your plant code a couple iterations, maybe refactoring (the soil) a couple times: this will get you a long way towards highly productive gardening.
Start with a good compost, get your seeds started earlier in the season than you might think (window seedboxes), get things in the soil, pay attention to the plants, use your local resources, and most of all .. love what you do. All gardening can be rewarding.
Even if its not efficient at first. The more you do it, however, the better things get. Also: make that compost awesome.
I'm pretty sure it's still not going to be more efficient. It's fun, it's healthy, you know what you eat, it's a hobby etc, that are perfectly valid reasons to do it. "It's more efficient than buying food" isn't one of them, unless you don't count the hours you work on it.
That is a very good argument. I think we should try to make a distinction between efficiency as the energy put into the system (the system would be producing food) and the energy we get, in one hand, and the efficiency in using the resources of the planet. Food from the supermarket is extremely efficient. It required a definite amount of energy in order to supply all your neighbourhood with potatoes, for example. It was just a truck and just one part of the production of a farm. We received a good amount of energy from the one we used.
But that energy comes most probably from fossil fuels. If we can be more efficient in the delivery of this energy, we can improve what is called the aggregate efficiency.
We can deliver from sources close to us, demanding a bit more energy to deliver 1 ton of potatoes but being able to source this energy from renewable sources. We can do that because the delivery is shorter and closer to us. No need to ship freight or carry the potatoes in a truck for 1500km.
Cheaper fuel also means cheaper prices.
Another way to beat the energy aggregate cost would be that if the produce is micro farmed, either by yourself or by a local entity, is that you can use less fertilizer as the soil is not run to exhaustion. Less weedkiller as you can pluck the weeds yourself. Being in a controlled environment also means less plagues, or if a crop plague comes, less pesticide used. Fertilizers, pesticides, weed killers... All that comes from fossil fuels.
> Fertilizers, pesticides, weed killers... All that comes from fossil fuels.
Totally, but all of that also allows us not to have 30-50% of the population working in farming. If you have enough money and enough time, you can absolutely live with a smaller foot print by producing your own food, but it's not something that scales well. And I'd argue that you probably have skills that would serve humanity better if you applied them to larger problems than plucking weeds, that is: you could have a much larger impact on saving humanity/the planet/the universe/your soul by not producing the food yourself and spending the time you save on other things.
Depends what you're growing for what purpose. A basil plant which lives on your windowsill and regrows the leaves you pick to add to sauces with essentially zero labour is certainly more efficient than buying a plastic bag too-full of perishable leaves for 80% of the plant cost from the supermarket every time. The commercial farm is more efficient at growing leaves at scale, but that doesn't necessarily translate into a lower-cost more environmentally-friendly product for consumers not needing a large volume of leaves and paying store markup. On the other hand, people are going to need a lot of balcony space to grow a year's supply of potatoes and spend a lot of time turning them into fries.
> A basil plant which lives on your windowsill and regrows the leaves you pick to add to sauces with essentially zero labour is certainly more efficient than buying a plastic bag too-full of perishable leaves for 80% of the plant cost from the supermarket every time.
... until you get thrips, spend hours investigating the best natural remedies and buy jugs of neem oil to start mixing natural pesticides, and end up having to throw out the thrip-infested basils (which is half of them by now). Then you spend a few more hours investigating why you now have fungus gnats all over the house, and start looking into alternative soil media, hydro, and semi-hydro, and you start filling up the odd corners of your house with various liquid fertilizers, and you spend a few hundred on grow lights because you live an an apartment with no balcony and your windows don't get enough light.
Source: started growing herbs over the summer
Still a fun hobby though! I wouldn't give it up for anything, but if I valued my gardening time at a pay rate equal to my work time, I've spent thousands upon thousands of dollars for probably < $100 worth of food
Good advice, for those with a windowsill in a suburban home I guess. A lightless window looking out on the well inside a 20-story apartment building - less practical.
I have plenty of room, and enjoy fresh basil all summer (and pesto all winter!) but I understand I'm the exception.
Tried growing potatoes several times - fail. They rot in the ground, or the voles eat them before I can get at them, or they just don't produce. Sigh. Back to the grocery store.
This is absolutely not for everyone. It's for everyone who wants to grow their own. Commercially produced food is not all that efficient when you consider all the inputs: fuel, machinery, millions of dollars for operation costs, seed -- and outputs: mass amounts of methane, co2, soil depletion.
The principles we employ at Permapeople take into account all of these things, and promote the growing of ones own food without excessive inputs, and positive outputs (food, compost, more living soil for the next generation).
Bringing food production into the hands of people who WANT to participate is what this is about.
Thank you for sharing that quote. It's not the first time I've seen this line of thinking. It's economically naive. I'll explain why.
Let's imagine everyone decided to grow their own garden like the author suggests. What does one need to start a garden? The common items are shovels, timber, soil, hoses, wires, fertilizer, knee pads, gloves, pots, pesticide, and many other things. Obtaining these items requires physically driving to one's hardware store. Most people drive SUVs. This means there is a sudden influx of people driving their gas guzzling machines to obtain these basic items. We also have to consider the reality that multiple trips will be made. People commonly forget to purchase basic things, need to make returns, or realize they are short on supply (such as soil) and need to purchase more. Now consider other realities. Most people don't know how to grow. Even fewer people know how to grow a plant to its maximum potential. It takes many seasons for individuals to learn the best techniques. Think about the wasted resources spent on this. Now think about the excess waste commonly found in gardens by those who finally learn how to grow. I see this all the time. Gardens filled with oversupply of produce. More than what even their friends want to take home. Consider the yield of produce in respect to time, labor, cost of materials, and CO2 emissions. For every shovel, glove, hose, pot, etc. purchased, for every car drive made, and for every supply chain used to produce these goods, is only put to work on a small plot of land in one's backyard. They are not used to their full potential. This is both a waste of resources and an unnecessary increase in CO2 emissions. If these same resources were used on an actual farm, then they will be used for larger portions of land which will in turn yield more produce. In effect, the costs are being spread across the land, thus making them more effective.
I'd like to explain this in the opposite perspective. The absurdity seems to become much more apparent this way. The author says that these industries are inefficient as appose to simply growing in one's backyard. If it truly were more efficient, then wouldn't it be most effective if industries simply adopted this? They are looking to save money after all. Instead of purchasing one giant tractor, why not revert to shovels and an army of physical labor? Instead of hauling supplies on a few semi-trucks, why not dispatch an army of SUVs? Instead of having one massive farm that spans hundreds of acres, why not break it up into thousands of 500 sq/ft "mini gardens", each of which has its own dedicated set of shovels, hoses, gloves, knee pads, etc. And for every "mini garden", instead of growing being dictated by farm owners with many generations of growing experience, they will be grown by individuals who hardly have any experience at all.
> I got hooked on growing food for my family and me. It is really magical if you think of how much you spare our planet with growing your own food: You need to get a job to make money so that you can spend that money on buying food which was produced and delivered close to you by large, complex and very inefficient industries. This system spends incredible amounts of resources (time, energy, labor) which you can save by simply growing your own food.
I mean, I know what the author is getting at here, but that's...really not true at all as written. Comparative advantage is a thing. And also, large agribusiness and monocropping and industrial farms exist because they are stupidly efficient. They have a lot of drawbacks and problems, but efficiency is never one of them; if anything they're too efficient. In the past we used far more land per person to grow food, and spent far more of incomes on food. That's still the norm in some countries.
If we're trying to minimise resource usage and maximise efficiency, it's obviously better to have people focus on app development, doctoring, food production, clothing production, etc., and trade, than everyone split their time between all of these. I'm going to spend a lot more time, energy, and labour growing my food than an industrial farm would, much like the workers there would spend more time trying to debug a malfunctioning cache invalidation scheme than I would.
Of course, all of that is irrelevant. It's a cool project and a cool idea; I wish them every success. It's just that the intro wildly misses the mark in terms of describing the advantage. People want to grow plants, it's a fun hobby, growing your own food is fun, this is great. Efficiency shouldn't be our only goal in life, it's totally fine to grow some potatoes, and I bet they're delicious.
...you're just not saving the planet. Which is fine!
>...you're just not saving the planet. Which is fine!
Every baby step away from industrialization is a step towards sustainability. Capitalism doesn't support long term health of the planet, so we must do it ourselves.
Sustainability is beyond a hobby, it's a lifestyle. It's a lifestyle that rejects the norm of capitalism.
The author, like myself, and others who incorporate permaculture design principles, advocates for decentralizing our food system for resiliency, regenerative growth, stronger hyperlocal communities, development of a better sense of place, and a sense of purpose.
There are a lot of angry young people in this generation who felt lied to about their job prospects, or careers. They were told the mark of an adult was someone who can move out of the parent’s basement abd support yourself. Yet unless you can get an entry level job at least $60k a year in the US, you are already swimming against the current. A college degree is no guarantee of success.
That wealth gap is growing, and the pandemic made the reality stark. The recession is effectively over for people with high income, but for those without, it continued to be a huge struggle.
So some get bitter. Some get political, or even radicalized. Some want things to go back to how things used to be — in the 90s even. Others are now seeking solutions with universal basic income.
The thing with permaculture design and its decentralized food system is that it can address some of that wealth inequality. If the methods were expanded to cover the remaining basic needs at the foundational layer of Maslow’s Heirarchy of Needs, then that would work a lot better than universal basic income.
But one of the greatest characteristics of permaculture design is that it is decentralized. It does not require collective action. It can be framed as a hobby to get started. People who are implementing this doesn’t require that you change your views or beliefs, or that you get on board.
>There are a lot of angry young people in this generation who felt lied to about their job prospects, or careers. They were told the mark of an adult was someone who can move out of the parent’s basement abd support yourself. Yet unless you can get an entry level job at least $60k a year in the US, you are already swimming against the current. A college degree is no guarantee of success.
I understand this anger, and I have 3 young people as my own kids who feel this to varying degrees.
But ...
Until about a year ago, the median household income in the USA was about $56k/yr. That means that a substantial chunk of the country has "moved out the parent's basement and supports themselves" on less than $60k/yr.
The problem as I see it is that the basics of "moving out of the basement" got confused with "being able to live in the most expensive real estate markets in the world", presumably because they also just happen to be really cool places to live and have lots of economic opportunity. The conflation of these two is therefore understandable, and is a reflection of our failure as a nation and as a society to ensure the economic opportunity and high quality of living are widely distributed (in terms of both demographics and geography). Our culture has also lied to our young people about what life for most people looks like. Movies, shows, social media filled with impressions not just edited but only representative (!) of the lives of the most priviledged people in society. A massively expanded set of components of the concept of what "middle class" means.
The basics remain however: if you're just starting out in your working career, then the most expensive real estate in the US is off-limits to you unless you've gone into a line of work with outsize income. That still leaves most of the country available and very-to-somewhat affordable, albeit with reduced opportunities for satisfying or very renumerative work. But also much better chances of a much larger garden in which to try out permaculture !
Are you suggesting that people growing food for themselves could somehow serve the same function as basic income?
Will we need carbon taxes for that?
Because, we have labour intensive crops rotting in the fields, when prices are low, because harvesting costs too much (when prices on strawberries is low; or migrant workers aren't available).
I'd like to see math where growing your own crops out performs a job at seven eleven.
Note. I think it can be a great stress relief and a great hobby. But the economics of it, seems sketchy even if we had aggressive carbon taxing (you can't build a garden without materials).
> Every baby step away from industrialization is a step towards sustainability.
That's just plain wrong. Industrialization as it exists currently is bad because its optimizing for profit. If environmental costs were factored in (short and longterm), then we'd arrive at a sustainable balance. A carbon tax is a good first measure.
If we were, as you suggest, to revert from industrialization back to artisanship and manual labor we would produce a fraction of what we do now. That's senseless. Would you wish for every household to have to produce their own food, raise and butcher and skin their own animals, hand-mine their stones and construct their homes, carve out their own furniture, sew their own clothes...? Our living standards would plummet. The fact is that industrialization multiplies efficiency.
We can arrive at a post-scarcity society whilst also being long term sustainable, even with current global populations. It's just a matter of optimizing for it (and not just immediate profit).
FYI, if I suggested anything at all it was that industrialization under capitalism is bad, and more people living a sustainable lifestyle will show that there's a way to survive without industrial capitalism. It's a baby step that shows people that it's possible. Not the end goal.
A baby step away from industrialization will allow people to connect with the world around them. So many people are disconnected from what non-processed food even looks, smells, or tastes like. Showing people that we don't have to eat the perfectly red, plump and tasteless tomato in exchange for a tasty, delicious, non-perfect tomato that they grew themselves helps show them that the world they've been conditioned to exist in isn't the only one available.
I agree with the premise of your position, but it is a bit of an exaggeration to say that everyone would be responsible for every task in society. Even in pre-industrial times people specialized. Towns had tanners, butchers, blacksmiths, farmers, carpenters, etc.
I think what the contrast between this idea and the parent demonstrates the need for balance between the two extremes. We need to use the best parts of industrialization for efficiency and prosperity, but also lower consumption where it isn't necessary. Don't sew your own clothes, but repair them when they tear.
>Every baby step away from industrialization is a step towards sustainability.
I don't think that industrialization, the act of exploiting the scale of a demand for a specific item to produce it en masse is inherently unsustainable. In fact, I'd counter such an argument with the following hyperbole - every baby step away from industrialization is one more unfed baby. Efficient food production is what keeps a lot of people, of all sorts mind you, able to eat. Quite literally. Obviously, the food industry is notorious for it's wasteful practices, and that just means that there's room to grow. I sincerely wish you to read about the absurdities of food shortages in the USSR and re-evaluate your opinion on industrial food production.
And speaking of sustainability, what does this term even mean in this context?
I'm not sure it's about moving away from industrialized food production as it's about bringing the power (and it's extremely powerful) of food production back to a local level for those who choose to participate.
> Every baby step away from industrialization is a step towards sustainability.
This seems to be at the core of many of my acquaintance's "principles", for lack of a better term.
But it seems counter-intuitive to me: doesn't industrialization allow for:
* better efficiency (larger scale)
* higher technology, allowing more efficient techniques, again
?
At some point, you can't have each of us working on a small 1-family farm if we still want to be able to have, e.g. computers, high quality medicine, travels, etc.
Is "industrialization" the enemy here or is it growth and generalized overconsumption?
You tell me! How are we doing as an industrial society?
From my perspective I see slavery and persecution of underprivileged people and pillaging of the Earth's natural resources in order to sustain an upper class lifestyle for a small percentage of the total population.
And trust me, I am very comfortable due to industrialization, but I also know that it's because we make a lot of other people uncomfortable.
> in order to sustain an upper class lifestyle for a small percentage of the total population.
But this seems to agree with industrialization itself not being the problem, but the way we make use of the "industrially produced" resources we have, no?
> You tell me! How are we doing as an industrial society?
Pretty great. Before the industrial revolution the number of people with a comfortable life was a tiny % of the world population. Now, half of the world is middle class or wealthier[1], living a more comfortable life than the kings of the past. Industrialization has been a blessing for humanity.
Deindustrialization is a step towards sustainability, but not for the obvious reasons. It would drastically reduce the size of the worldwide human population through childhood deaths, disease, and shorter lifespans due to accidents. While that may be better for the planet, it would be a very hard sell for most people. Our natural instinct is to optimize for the opposite. It's not like our industrial society was created by aliens.
The development of industrialization and being treated as a cog in a machine isn’t our natural instinct. The ideas of averages and seeing workers as another part of a machine came from people who were paid by factory owners to come up with better ways to control and maximize outputs. After a generation or two, kids grow up thinking that’s the way it is supposed to be. A lot of what we got used to with industrialization and feel we cannot live without comes from conditioning and a failure to mindfully examine the lens in which we view the world.
What is this lost paradise taken away from us by industrialisation? Subsistence farming? You don't have to theorise if that was enjoyable lifestyle - just take a look on any developing nation and people that are more than eager to ditch that. Or do you propose we escape further back and live our lives as hunter-gatherers?
That is a really common response I get. I’m not coming from the frame that the past is better than the present, or that the past was somehow a paradise. I am also not coming from the frame that the present is better than the past, or that the future is better than the present, or that just because we got to industrialization, that it is necessarily the best we can do.
I am talking about a different way of seeing and relating to the world that is not the same as way of seeing of the world that lead us to our current industrialization. That, while this frame does share some of the way of seeing from the past, it does not mean that it is the same. That this way of seeing considers people as whole beings, and ecologies that are not separate from people. That humans have a particular role in ecologies that includes their ability to reason, develop technologies, and cultivate the land.
The kind of seeing that lead us to industrialization have been extent since the rise of civilizations and the separation of labor.
I know a lot of people from developing nations seek out to become more like the modern world. I also see people from the modern world having lost some part of themselves, who they are, their sense of place and belonging, and desperately seek out remedies for it. I see people joke about “First World Problems”, but for me, those are symptoms of a much deeper psychological malaise. So they seek out the jungles of Peru for psychedelics. Go to India to find a guru. Search for social justice at home. Cling to traditional values as they watch the rest of the world erode. Or just resign to the grind and hope you are lucky enough to win the social lottery.
I’m looking at a way of seeing that is not what had come before. It is not an escape. It taps into the tremendous power of human creativity, but one self-directed in a way that makes meaningful contributions to the world and society. I think that includes growing at least some of the food yourself, as that changes the participant’s psychology and relationship with the world and people around them, as well as building a decentralized food system. Not everyone is going to do that full time. But not everyone who can contribute something meaningful (art, music, etc) are able to do so now with the current systems in place.
> large agribusiness and monocropping and industrial farms exist because they are stupidly efficient
They are stupidly efficient within the framework of capitalism, where they receive government subsidies and externalise many costs. In the framework of ecology and permaculture they are absolutely not efficient.
When we give our labour to the corporations, building apps and contributing to clothing production, we are facilitating and exacerbating this inefficiency. Clothing is an extremely wasteful industry for example. If we take that labour away from these pursuits and instead put it into feeding ourselves and regrowing our ecosystems, we are doing double the good.
You ever heard of economies of scale? Big businesses are inherently more efficient in many industries because of this. A good example as it relates to farming is the ability to use larger pieces of heavy equipment across more land- rather than the alternative, many smaller tractors, that independent farmers would each own.
Also- the ability to specialize. There are lots of different jobs on a farm- on smaller farms you see fewer laborers doing more jobs. On a larger farm- you can specialize labor and increase productivity in that manner.
Again, efficient in what context? Yes, it's absolutely amazing how fast we produce obscene amounts of t-shirts to sell to everyone. And those t-shirts last a few wears and wash cycles and then you need another. So you need to grow more cotton, produce more dye, extract more labour from poor Bangladeshi mothers and their children, so you can get more dollars per year from all the t-shirts etc. That sounds to me like it's really efficient at making a few people really rich, really efficiently using up lots of land and resources and peoples' time to make shit I don't really need. All I want is a few t-shirts and trousers that last and to let everyone spend more time doing fun things like playing games and making art. But we really aren't good at doing that, are we?
I understand that it's foolish for all of us to start growing our own rice and potatoes -- and yes, I think that's because of "economies of scale" and the benefits of specialisation -- I wouldn't really advocate for that radical a shift. But there is certainly something that is more sensible than the insanity of overconsumption and waste that we are engaging in right now, and that applies to the food industry too.
Economies of scale in food production are really complicated. Yes, to first order, you can make more food with bigger machines over larger land masses, but at what cost? And for how long? We can already see a lot of fallout from overuse of land, overuse of synthetic fertilisers, destruction of ecodiversity. This is not to mention that agribusiness has massive crop losses calculated into the cost, crop losses that occur exactly because of the monocultural practices. Permaculture is harder to scale because it is more complex, it takes local ecosystem dynamics and microclimates into account and works with them to be more productive per acre and less destructive in the long term. So it's actually more efficient in many ways.
While everyone talking about specialisation and scale sure may feel that they are smarter than the person asking for a return to a more "simple" approach, I really believe they are the ones offering the more simplistic and erroneous solutions...
You could make a good analogy with "technical debt". Climate change and irreversible environmental damage (e.g. corral reef death) is like the technical debt of industrialisation finally rearing its head because we didn't account for it while scaling. It turns out we should have scaled our food production etc. in a more sustainable way so now we will be paying the price. With a LOT of interest.
I think you're confusing multiple separate issues here. Efficiency in production and total amount of production are separate concerns. You don't aim to lower total production numbers by decreasing the efficiency of production.
It sounds like you're unhappy with how much we produce. Not the point of the conversation. Looks like you're just shoe-horning your political agenda into a conversation which is barely tangential.
The bare minimum amount of food we could produce without starving is still more than enough to need very large farms to capture economies of scale.
I don't think I am confused but maybe I wasn't clear enough for you. It's not just the quantity but the methods of production and the negative side effects of those methods. Just because we can scale output with these methods doesn't make them efficient in every sense. When you have to kill whole populations of birds and bats and other important participants of an ecosystem, across massive geographic regions, even if it's just to grow enough to keep from starving, then you are introducing a lot of problems that have so far gone unaccounted for. In fact, they will eventually lead to extreme decreases in production as the land withers.
This is not a matter of shoe-horning an agenda, this is just the consequences of our trajectory as a society which are generally recognised by any relevant experts (but also pretty obvious to anyone who takes the time to think it through). I don't know why you seem to be unwilling to account for these factors and rather stick to your simplistic argument of "production efficiency by any means = good". It would seem that you are actually the one who is clinging to a political agenda, whether you are aware of it or not.
> People want to grow plants, it's a fun hobby, growing your own food is fun, this is great.
True, and don't expect to be able to sustain yourself to any meaningful extent on food grown on your balcony. You could likely eat all of the potatoes you grow on a balcony over a yearlong period in a week. The most practical use of small spaces for gardening, IMHO, is to grow your own herbs.
You can trade the excess potatoes with other people in the apartment building or in the neighborhood. It builds a stronger local community than it would if everyone were to buy from a grocery store.
That is not the only thing you can plant on a balcony. Taking canopy layers into account increases the available amount you can grow. It is practical to raise quail for eggs or meat in an apartment. Mushrooms can be cultivated in a kitchen cabinet.
>It is practical to raise quail for eggs or meat in an apartment.
Having raised quail, I just absolutely cannot fathom having them in an apartment. They're loud, they smell, and they really, really like flying around. If you raised quail in an apartment, I'm betting it would be in semi-inhumane small cage conditions.
As someone who has not bought food at a grocery store (outside of citrus and other fruits we cannot grow locally due to climate and my absolute fear of scurvy) for the last 5 years, and someone who has cultivated this specific lifestyle for the last 20, I genuinely do not see a way for an apartment of folks to provide for themselves. Nor do I see a functional way for a city neighborhood to do so.
It takes so much space just to feed our family of 3 for the year, and that's with trading goods that we cannot or do not want to raise ourselves.
I agree that it builds a stronger local community and all that. But OP's premise is still accurate - this is an unrealistic expectation of people growing their own self-supporting food. The space just isn't there - in urban areas.
The domesticated quail raised for food feels safer when they are in a confined space. Unlike chickens, it is more inhumane if you let them free range. You build the coop area so that it is short enough that they don’t jump when startled. I am not sure there is much to be done about them being loud.
As far as going close to 100% growing your own food, that’s a pretty amazing accomplishment. I acknowledge that it is impractical for everyone to do with at this time.
However, there are cases where people had to do this and found ways to do it:
It is accurate that quail should need be free-range, yes. That's just a good way to lose all of your quail.
But, they do need a flight pen, for humane husbandry. They naturally like to run around and peck things. They need space to do that. Anyone who justifies cage raised quail because they like confined space is just trying to justify a bad decision.
>It just might be that we won’t really try until we are forced to by some kind of collapse scenario or another.
This is 100% what I believe the case will be. We won't try anything, at scale, until forced to. The reason I live the way I do is to prepare for (what I believe to be) the inevitable change/shift in the world in the next 3-5 decades.
That being said - mega-cities, and a majority of humans living in cities is a relatively new phenomena. I am not sure our current structure lends itself to 'local' living - that's my argument above. It takes a crap-load of space to feed a family.
I’m not knocking your experience and observation, but I wonder if there is some missing piece of information here. The woman who was interviewed on that podcast raised quail on both a farm and privately in her own space. She did try to let the quail free range first, and that was a disaster. She tried to make the coop area more open, and they became too nervous to lay. She eventually created a space that lets them feel safer from predators. She was also talking about a specific breed of domesticated quail. I don’t think she was trying to justify anything. Are we talking about the same things here?
Maybe the missing information is just how big of a cage we are talking about. What are you envisioning when you say that? Are you saying that, if a cage is made to allow them to do that, it would still be too big for a typical sized apartment?
I used to live somewhere where I can see wild quail running around the house every day. I remembered that they liked to hide in shrubs and overhanging trees. The mother might peak out and then run out from one cover to another, with a string of chicks following right a long. I rarely remember them flying out in the open.
Yes. They need an enclosed, short space in which to feel safe in order to lay eggs. To be happy and well-raised animals, they need a 'flight pen' which is a soft netted topped pen for literal flight. They are birds, and they do need to exercise that ability. Further, their flight pen allows for them to exercise their natural pecking and 'hunting'.
You could absolutely keep them in a small cage. And they would be inhumanely raised creatures.
>Maybe the missing information is just how big of a cage we are talking about.
Small cage. Large flight pen. If the flight pen is a thing, then yes, it's too large for an apartment.
> This is 100% what I believe the case will be. We won't try anything, at scale, until forced to. The reason I live the way I do is to prepare for (what I believe to be) the inevitable change/shift in the world in the next 3-5 decades.
> That being said - mega-cities, and a majority of humans living in cities is a relatively new phenomena. I am not sure our current structure lends itself to 'local' living - that's my argument above. It takes a crap-load of space to feed a family.
It seems you have thought this out a lot more than I have and have the practical experience to boot.
I too also think there is a good chance for a change/shift in the world around the time frame you are talking about. I’ve seen people talk about different collapse scenarios, including some of the weirder ones. It is less about preparing it for myself so much as preparing it for my unborn son and any of his siblings that follow after.
Granted, in some of the post-collapse scenarios I’ve seen, the mega-cities are likely to be shell. I live in Phoenix. I see a lot of space that could be used for growing ... but there is not a lot of water out here. This summer, I started relandscaping my yard to capture the monsoon rains, but they didn’t really come this year. It was effectively a drought. Phoenix is not built as a city that could survive without A/C, let alone much of the areas are distant from the canals. The Salt River that runs through here is dried up. For longer-term, I’m looking at moving the family to Northern Arizona, where we’d have a better shot.
I’m also thinking that the scale at which to grow food is probably going to be at a village size. It would require a different family structure too. The one tech I think that would really need to survive is the internet, though perhaps not in the form that it is now (with control of the internet aggregated into a small handful of players). I think the presence of the internet is what will make the difference between regressing back to horticulture, to something that helps us move forward. But whatever that “forward” is, it won’t be the familiar status quo.
It may take a crap-load of space to feed a family ... I think though, encouraging people to try to feed something of themselves can help them prepare in some way if there is a collapse; and if there isn’t one, I think it would help a lot. One of the things that growing at least some of your own food enables (even if you can’t grow all of it in an apartment), is that it links you into the food cycle. It seeds a sense of agency for the person. It starts the development of personal self-reliance, even if it is not completely self-reliant, or that it is impossible for megacities to support. In this way, it gives a little bit of capability and confidence that, someone can realistically assess their chances while they are still living in a megacity. And who knows, such a person might come up with some creative ways to do so, even if others decide that they need to build their life elsewhere.
Except, even the specific breed of quail for meat still needs time to run and scratch and 'be a quail'.
It's more akin to goats than cows. They're domesticated, absolutely. But they still want to get up to something; they're not content to sit in a box and eat all day.
I've been interested in permaculture and sustainability for a while, and also self-sufficiency, or at least local food production.
There's an old book called "Five acres and independence" which I think is a reference to the amount of land you need to sustain a family. I don't know anything about the subject, really, but I just jumped off that number.
I'm not in America, but we can use it as an example to do calculation. It's probably approximate to a misleading degree, but since I'm a software developer with a degree in an unrelated field making internet comments, that doesn't put me off:
According to Wikipedia, the US is 3,796,742 square miles. Wolfram Alpha says that's 2.43 billion acres. Using Wikipedia's stated 2019 estimate of 328,239,523 people, that's 7.5 acres per person. So under forty acres for each family of five, roughly. So if we say 5 acres is a good number, in the US you're at 8x the amount of land needed for everyone to live off the land at a small scale. Is 1/8th of the US even arable land? What about all the other stuff we'd need, like factories, mines, schools, the cold fusion powered mag-lev network etc.? Will that fit in the rest? Maybe the occasional forest would be nice?
And then of course we need to consider that the US is no. 145 out of some 200 countries for population density. For the European Union, we arrive at 2.3 acres per person, so you'd need to distribute people evenly over roughly half of the land for each five-person family to have a five acre farm. For Africa, 5.8 acres per person.
But maybe that starting number is too high or too low. I just thought it was an interesting thought experiment.
To add to this, folks like this family claim (or were when that video[1] was done) to harvest 6,000 lbs of food a year from a 1/10th of an acre and still have enough left over to sell to local chefs to the tune of about $20,000.
The more I read about this the more I started doubting all the doom about sustainability. Granted, I think they were vegetarian (still had live birds for eggs) but.. I think the combination of pooling together ancient techniques with modern technology could provide better results than the "if GMO & Roundup are eliminated the WORLD WILL STARVE" type of propaganda that, the more I read up about things like Agent Orange and, well, propaganda, the more I want to hear from people like the Dervais kids (RIP Jules) and less from people who have never farmed before or maybe grew some herbs one year.
What excess potatoes? A 4sqm field of potatoes over a season can be finished in less than four weeks. What apartment has room for enough area to grow excess potatoes?
Industrialization of food production has allowed the density and population of cities to grow. If you specialize in something other than food growing, and rely on the food distribution system to provide your food resources, living in an apartment is efficient (from an economic standpoint, not from an ecological one)
> You can trade the excess potatoes with other people in the apartment building or in the neighborhood.
Honestly, that sounds like a lawsuit waiting to happen, unfortunately. Just one person getting sick, even if it wasn't from your potato, could ruin a good time.
Thanks for your comment! I think it doesn't need to be that black and white. Even if you cannot sustain yourself 100%, you can make a contribution to your environment and the people around you and on top having something nice to eat! :)
Chilli is another useful thing to grow, which 1 tree can produce much more than you (and relatives) will eat in a year.
Saying that as the chilli tree at a friends place is always covered in chilli's ready to pick, even if we strip it bare and return a few weeks later. It's an overachiever. ;)
I grow tomatoes and some herbs on my balcony. It’s fun and they taste better, but it is clearly orders of magnitude less efficient than basically any alternative. I pay about $10 for supplies and many hours worth of labor to produce maybe $40 worth of produce.
Well thanks to that hyper-efficiency lot of people are going to be jobless. And giving people various routes to purpose is a good thing. I feel we will/should see many more such projects.
... because the efficiency at which products are produced and value is extracted is not the only way to live and relate to the world.
An alternative is to invert value extraction to value contribution, linked into intrinsic motivation rather than extrinsic motivation. A purpose-driven life feels more fulfilling than being treated as a cog in a value extraction machine. Maximizing value extraction ends up squeezing the life out of people.
> Well thanks to that hyper-efficiency lot of people are going to be jobless.
This is false. It's the same argument behind the Luddite handloom weavers who burned mills and factory machinery. It leads to labor arguments like saying we should stop using bulldozers and require workers to use spoons instead to create more jobs.
But in fact jobs come from people with resources who decide that they want to reshape the world in some way, often to gather more resources. That impulse to change the world has never been scarce and likely never will be as long as there are people.
Yes I agree ambitious people obsessed with their empire building aren't going to stop being born. And yes I agree their empires will generate jobs.
But they will be increasingly crappy and mindless as people are used to fill in the gaps that Automation and AI cant.
You can see that playing out in Amazon warehouses as workers try to keep pace with robots and get injured, or in Zuckerbergs content moderation farms as the mods suffer brain damage from what the AI systems miss.
So expect lot of people to say no thanks. And if those people don't find any other purpose expect them to start burning things down. In that context, orgs that provide routes to purpose are doing a good thing.
I work in process automation. There are thousands of issues and bugs in our systems that require mindless human activity to work around. Eg- Where our voice rec models fail we have hundreds of people sitting the whole day listening to boring snippets of context less conversation and correcting it. Most hate that work. Where robots malfunction on the line some guy has to just wheel in a new machine and push 2 button. That's all he does. That's what I mean by ppl being used to fill in the gaps. They do it for a few years and end up having no great qualification after the bugs get fixed so they getoved to the next crappy filler job. There is no great dignity to it or satisfaction. And they end up laughing at Obama's speeches abt reskilling cause they know the reality and end up voting for Trump.
> It's the same argument behind the Luddite handloom weavers who burned mills and factory machinery. It leads to labor arguments...
The Luddite labor unrest arose from a very real decrease in living standards for many, many people which lasted for decades. Rural/semi-rural artisans lost out to factories staffed by smaller numbers of children who could be paid far less than adults. Many had no choice but to move to cities to fight for whatever jobs they could, and the squalid conditions and extreme labor surplus inspired communist thought.
So yes, this in many ways is the same argument, but I think it would be unwise to dismiss the 'labor arguments,' because while the industrial revolution in Britain did eventually raise everyone's living standards, it took about a century and the social unrest during that time (in Britain and other industrializing nations) provoked far-reaching, unintended consequences.
If you are interested in this subject, The Technology Trap by Frey has an interesting comparison between the first and second industrial revolutions and the ongoing labor shifts in the modern era.
> I mean, I know what the author is getting at here, but that's...really not true at all as written.
It's also possible that you are both correct, depending on the context.
Can a single person be more efficient in their backyard than an industrial farmer in Nebraska farming potatoes? No. Can they grow vegetables more sustainably than an industrial farmer? Yes.
Can a farmer in Kosovo get better efficiency per square foot in a greenhouse than a vegetable farmer in open fields in Nebraska? Yes. [1] Can a farmer in a rural area with no roads or modern infrastructure apply the methods used in Kosovo? No.
Can a farmer using traditional practices add topsoil, improve soil health, create better products, all without the downsides of splitting cattle and cropping into separate industrial processes? Yes. [2] Can they do it without any modern farm equipment? No way.
Eliminating all modern industrial processes is not the answer, nor is turning everyone into a laborer with only hand tools. Huge farms can produce potatoes and micro farms can produce vegetables. We need sustainable planning with sensible automation, customized for variables including access to infrastructure, climate, and local demand for products.
> large agribusiness and monocropping and industrial farms exist because they are stupidly efficient
This is not necessarily the case, considering the vast portion of cropland in the midwest is shipped to concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs). CAFOs are toxic for the animals that live there. Their manure, which would be cheap fertilizer at a smaller scale on a farm, is toxic. The chemical inputs that are now required back at the cropland are usually toxic. The fuel needed to get all of these resources to their destination is toxic. The topsoil gets thinner every year. The climate gets more unpredictable every year. If you consider time outside the scale of the financial quarter, this is not efficient or sustainable.
One major problem is that the tools pushed by equipment manufacturers are targeted for a certain market, usually massive industrial farms. Until recently, ideas like no-till, cover crops, and traditional rotation of cattle and chickens were scoffed at by agricultural schools and by the self interest of corporations who want to lock people in to a certain style of production.
Thankfully, farmers are incredibly resourceful, and they are tired of getting pushed into a corner by self-terminating seeds and endless inputs pushing them to bankruptcy. They're sharing ideas and coming up with new solutions, often based on the knowledge of hundreds of generations of farmers before them. What they need from us is the political will to subsidize sustainable farming instead of the strictly industrial practices that are carbon inefficient, pollute our water systems, and lead to things like vast acres of manure pools in poor rural areas.
We have the technology, the labor, the land to produce food sustainably that is somewhere between monocropping/CAFO and backyard organic.
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On a more general note, sweeping generalities and false dichotomies are destroying our politics and our ability to solve problems. I am not pointing fingers here -- I'm as guilty as anyone. I would love to see more targeted constructive criticism, or even better, a statement of goals instead a statement of problems of "the other side".
The word "efficiency" looks to be a bit misused here based on what people normally consider when seeing the word, but I can see where the author is coming from. Pumping the ground with herbicides, pesticides and fossil fueled based fertilizers are very efficient methods to produce a lot of food in a short time in small amount of space, but from a system/planet perspective it might not be that very efficient at maintaining the environment long term.
That said, industrial farms that do not use destructive methods for farming are going to be much more effective than what an individual can do in terms of growing their own food. As such, are more optimal strategy in terms of personal efficiency would be to focus on their own strengths like app development, doctoring and so on, and then use the revenue from that to buy exclusively from farms that are long term efficient for the planet. I would claim that growing your own food is a bit of a middle ground.
Monoculture methods may be more economically efficient, but they're far more wasteful ecologically in a number of ways, including both basic output of food per the amount of space used/energy inputed and in terms of nutrient input requirements and effects on soil.
Monoculture is only "efficient" because it's economically convenient and benefits from dead simple logistics and easy automation.
Industrialized farming is only so efficient because we sacrifice everything from ecological sustainability to taste to get that efficiency. Their comparative advantage is economical efficiency, which does far more damage than small scale agriculture. They are not ecologically efficient, which is what people mean when they talk about "saving the planet." (Medium to long term they're not economically efficient either - see the entire history of modern agriculture).
Trading human labor for machine labor and increasing density (land use efficiency) is what got us into this mess in the first place. With integrative pest control, crop rotation, and composting a small farm can get well within the ballpark of industrialized farming without contributing further to our planet's decline (source: eight acres). Yes, it's "inefficient" by some arbitrary measure that makes no sense now that we're past 400 PPM.
If anyone thinks we can survive the coming few centuries without some significant strategic deindustrialization or that any small group of people or issues will "save the planet", they're deluding themselves. Growing your own food, when done correctly on a few acres (especially if you grow your own meat), is one of the best ways to contribute now. We just have to throw away the efficiency metrics that got us here in the first place - it's our labor or the planet.
Another thought: 60-70 years ago almost every household in the US had their own chicken or rabbits.
I assume also way more people were growing their own food.
I think it is really bad that all that vanished and is one part in why our food system is currently so vulnerable: Having huge centralized industries makes it much more easy to wipe out whole harvest through pests or diseases. Let alone if there are production errors and products need to be called back etc. This is a price no one calculated in the so called "efficiency".
Centralized industry also makes it much easier to enforce regulations which control disease, and it justifies expensive research on things like pest and research prevention that wouldn't be economically feasible to generate returns on at smaller scales.
Here's a good question- do you think that food-born illness is more or less common in countries that have more centralized their food production?
>do you think that food-born illness is more or less common in countries that have more centralized their food production?
Tricky one to answer, since each country has a lot of counfounding factors (e.g. Use of pathogen-bearing 'night soil' as fertilizer, availability of refrigeration in warm and humid climates, potable water availability). Best measure IMO would be each country taken individually pre- and post-centralization of agriculture.
What those figures seem to show (taking primarily the CDC figures for USA) is less frequent outbreaks, but greater spread when they occur, overall the number of impacted individuals looks similar if not slightly lower. This makes sense - centralized production and wide distribution means a single instance of contamination, though much lower in likelihood to occur, will reach out and touch more people than it otherwise would have when it occurs.
> Industrialized farming is only so efficient because we sacrifice everything from ecological sustainability to taste to get that efficiency.
It gets worse. The fiscal payoffs of those productivity gains went overwhelmingly to capital holders, and many negative externalities (like massive abuse of antibiotics) produced by the system help maintain a dysfunctional US healthcare system where the extractive value again overwhelmingly goes to capital holders. I'm a lowercase capital holder myself, so I'm empathetic to their interests, but this systems design screams fragility to me.
Unfortunately, I have no general prescriptives, only what I'm doing for my own situation.
You've really got to distinguish between different types of agriculture when discussing efficiency, and specify the metrics you are optimizing for. Row crops/grains, fruits, vegetables, and meat all have different growing conditions, footprints, and shipping concerns.
A tonne of wheat costs 0.05 tonnes of CO2 to ship from Kansas to New York, requires 0.6 acres to grow, and contains ~3,500,000 calories.
A tonne of tomatoes costs 0.3 tonnes of CO2 to ship from California to New York, requires 0.06 acres to grow, and contains ~180,000 calories.
The lowest-hanging fruit, so to speak, in food production is reducing beef production to pasture-raised beef on lands that can be sustainably ranched but are not suitable for other forms of agriculture. After that comes producing more (of some types of) vegetables locally, particularly ones that are mostly water and consumed for nutrients rather than calories, and eating fresh foods in-season.
Any plan that tries to get rid of grains or other staples produced on massive scales in monoculture fields in the parts of countries best suited for them runs afoul of the "we need to produce enough food for 10 billion people for at least the next two centuries" constraint of agricultural planning.
> Industrialized farming is only so efficient because we sacrifice everything from ecological sustainability to taste to get that efficiency.
Agreed. That's a point I touched on with my comment about industrial farming being, if anything, too efficient. There's concerns about water use, fertiliser use, carbon emissions, biodiversity, monocropping. Industrial farming is about the most efficient use of resources possible (ignoring any negative externalities; if it's not priced in - like, eg, the potential harm of fertiliser runoff to marine life - it's ignored).
> They are not ecologically efficient
....well, no. That's just not true. Subject to the caveats above about exernalities (and the fix there would be better regulation, carbon taxes, etc.), industrial farming is about being efficient with everything. Yes, in many ways small scale agriculture is just as efficient; in others it's significantly less efficient. But there is no way it's more efficient. And keep in mind one of the most important ecological resources is land, and industrial farming is very land efficient. (Unused land is critical for regulating carbon, among other things. We need forests! There's a reason people get so wound up about Brazil.)
Example: Organic farming (which is, these days, generally highly industrialised, but still a step closer to what you have in mind, I imagine) yields less food per acre - or to put it another way, uses more land per unit of food. Studies have shown a 20-40% gap between organic and conventional farming in practice. Worse, they show that the carbon footprint is the same; the lower carbon intensity is fully cancelled out by the lower efficiency. (See, eg, https://www.acsh.org/news/2017/05/26/organic-farms-use-more-...)
> Yes, it's "inefficient" by some arbitrary measure that makes no sense now that we're past 400 PPM.
No, it's just inefficient. And it's inefficient that is more important in a high carbon world. The planet is not going to be saved by cutting down forests so we can grow food less efficiently. Even if we really, really wish it would be. You can't say "but carbon" and then push a solution that isn't any lower carbon.
If we really care about the environment, we're talking about a shift to largely vegetarian diets, with the bulk of our calories grown in dense, super efficient ways. There's X billion people, we need Y trillion calories per day, how can we achieve this with the least amount of land, water, fertiliser, carbon, and labour? That probably looks a lot like massive industrial farms in places with good climates and spare water, being shipped to places with lots of people and little land and water.
Thanks for your comment!
I don't agree and think if there would be a way to calculate the true costs on the environment of large scale agriculture, it would not look good. There is a lot of things we miss when thinking about that: soil depletion, which recent research shows is a huge factor for climate change. And there is so much more.
One general thing I want to add:
Any large scale industry can theoretically be the most efficient and optimal for the environment but these days none of them is. Why is that? I think because there is no incentive to do that and there is no price on environmental costs.
> soil depletion, which recent research shows is a huge factor for climate change
Soil depletion is neither created by industrial agriculture, nor solved by small scale agriculture. If you grow a bunch of wheat, it leaches nitrogen out of the ground. Your options are:
1. Let it sit fallow while it naturally regenerates, meaning you need 2-3 times more land as you rotate through the fields, meaning you need to cut down a lot of forests and put them to the plow.
2. Add nitrogen based fertilisers. The only viable way to generate them produces a lot of carbon, and the runoff has its own ecological toll.
It's been a huge factor in human development for ever; you either need to use a stupid amount of land, or you add your own nitrogen. Neither option is great; neither option really changes based on the scale you're doing it at.
> Any large scale industry can theoretically be the most efficient and optimal for the environment but these days none of them is.
I mean....aren't they? The issue is scale. Australia produced something in excess of 500 million tonnes of coal last year, mostly exported to Japan and South Korea. What is the most "optimal for the environment" way to extract 500 million tonnes of coal and ship it around the globe so it can be burnt for power?
I would suggest that there is no way to do that, but that's not an indictment of the industrial scale of the process. If you managed to mine that much coal via small batch artisanal hand mining, it'd be just as bad for the environment. Probably worse; you'd need a much larger labour force, meaning even more food and water trucked out to the mines.
If you take a giant factory that's doing something bad for the environment, and split it up into 1000 small factories that are still doing something bad for the environment, you're not obviously winning.
> there is no price on environmental costs.
Quite true, but that works at every scale. The giant agribusiness has no reason not to over-apply fertiliser to their fields other than the cost of the fertiliser (they don't pay for the damage to marine life when it washes into the river). But the small hobbyist gardener has no reason not too either. The same incentives apply at every level.
If anything, there's less incentive to be efficient at a small level, because it seems so small ("how much damage can ONE lawn do?" "how much carbon does ONE trip to the store in a car add?"), or because it's being done at a hobbyist level. A 40% tax on fertiliser (or whatever) would have enormous shockwaves on industrial agriculture; steps would be taken rapidly to reduce useage. A hobbyist growing tomatoes for his own use might not even notice, and thus, would not reduce usage.
>Add nitrogen based fertilisers. The only viable way to generate them produces a lot of carbon, and the runoff has its own ecological toll.
Since we're comparing industrial ag with human-scale stuff it's only fair to point out that simple human-scale means of achieving this is to literally pee in a container, let it sit for a few months, dilute it 10-20x with water, and apply to garden beds. This fertilizer has an NPK of 11-1-2. If you compost, peeing directly onto it will have a similar effect.
Also 'letting it sit fallow' is not really stating the option fairly. Nitrogen-fixing cover crops are an option and these can be cohabit with or grow in rotation with a main crop.
I think it's a mistake here to assert that small-scale gardening should mimic industral ag practice. Of course that would produce a fragmented solution that is less efficient and offers little to no benefit.
>A 40% tax on fertiliser (or whatever) would have enormous shockwaves on industrial agriculture; steps would be taken rapidly to reduce useage. A hobbyist growing tomatoes for his own use might not even notice, and thus, would not reduce usage.
I don't buy that argument. Not only is a small-scale farmer less likely to be heavily reliant on buying in fertilizer, a 40% increase in cost will be equally impactful as to a large scale operator, because their means are proportionally smaller.
>But the small hobbyist gardener has no reason not too either. The same incentives apply at every level.
Not true. Bob the farmer has a much closer societal link to joe the fisherman. If bob's practices impact on Joe's means of sustenance, not only are they on an equal footing to discuss the matter but they can do by leaning over the fence. Big Ag talking to fisheries, by comparison, looks quite different and more abstracted, less neighbourly if you will. Likewise if the polluter is a large industry and the impacted parties are individuals, all the same problems of abstraction and drastically lowered leverage to boot.
There are many examples where this is not true, of course e.g. Damages done at a great distance between source and impact.
First, humans don't generate enough waste to fertilise the crops they need to survive; that's why the Haber-Bosch process was so incredibly revolutionary. Sure, nitrogen fixing crops are a thing; crop rotation, there's a lot of ways we've figured out to get more crops grown in less land, and they all have limitations and tradeoffs, and they're all a lot less efficient than just dropping some cheap fertiliser on it.
Second, no, small-scale agriculture should not blindly mimic industrial agriculture, but you also don't get any advantages just by being small. Pests want to eat your crops no matter who you are. And yes, of course a backyard veggie garden needs fertiliser.
And third, dfferent consumers have different elasticities of demand. Hobbyists doing something for fun often have high elasticities of demand. I mean, obviously; if you were maximally sensitive to price, you'd be buying whatever is on sale at Costco already. :) A friend of mine makes her own cold process soap; they're lovely and high quality, and she has a lot of fun doing it. Even ignoring her time, the cost per bar for her to make them is a couple orders of magnitude higher than store bought. You think she'd stop - or even notice - if one ingredient went up a few cents?
Finally:
> Bob the farmer has a much closer societal link to joe the fisherman.
I can't even begin to imagine how that might be true. We're talking about "hey, what if everyone grew their own potatoes instead of buying them; would that help the planet". But I mean....I don't know any fishermen. I don't even eat fish. And even if I did plant some potatoes in my back yard, I'm not going to suddenly meet a fisherman. And even if I did, I don't see why we'd assume they're an environmental chemist. Seems like he'd probably be pretty busy fishing, maintaining his boat, and (now) growing potatoes, so why would he even know that the fertiliser we're both putting on our potatoes is (eventually, in aggregate) harming the fish?
You seem to be envisioning a pleasant world, but none of it really meshes with my understanding of how our world works. But eh, I suppose my arguments sound equally unconvincing to you, so...
My grandparents had a WWII victory garden in their backyard in Queens, NY. Many other people did as well. It was a supplement to what was available in stores, and a way to have fresh produce at a time when food was scarce.
Industrial farming is a modern marvel — but it’s also heavily subsidized, and the negative externalities are going to be felt in years to come; land use change, fossil fuel for transportation, chemical fertilizer production.
To me, the biggest benefit of making a garden with your own hands is the perspective you gain. You see what goes into food production. You gain a sense of pragmatism as you weigh the trade offs in different forms of pest management, approaches like permaculture, etc.
It’s easy for people to speak from the sidelines — but gaining some real world experience helps people feel more directly connected to the process.
Just to pile on in re: efficiency and industrial production...
As others have pointed out, industrial agriculture is only efficient at producing industrial food and then only if many externalities are left unaccounted.
The industrial system cannot produce even one heirloom tomato. so what's the efficiency there, eh?
But I want to point out the crucial divide between soil-building and soil-depleting agricultures: if you integrate over a large enough time scale the former always beat the latter because soil-building system can keep going while soil-depleting systems are ultimately doomed.
So it doesn't matter that industrial agriculture has been more efficient for two hundred years or so if it eventually results in environmental devastation. All the billions of people who are alive today thanks to Haber & Bosch might also be doomed thanks to Haber & Bosch.
This assumes that people will substitute their home gardening time with app development, doctoring, clothing production, etc. When, by my observation, it will be spent in a non-productive fashion. Not to sound like a Protestant, but this sort of work is good for the soul.
Also, I don't want to be dependent on a monocultured, government-subsidized, efficient conglomerate agribusiness if it's operations contain externalities whose price we could partially avoid paying simply by having a tarp filled with dirt and some potatoes and skipping one Netflix show a few times per week.
“In the progress of the division of labour, the employment of the far greater part of those who live by labour, that is, of the great body of people, comes to be confined to a few very simple operations, frequently one or two. But the understandings of the greater part of men are necessarily formed by their ordinary employments. The man whose whole life is spent in performing a few simple operations, of which the effects too are, perhaps, always the same, or very nearly the same, has no occasion to exert his understanding,or to exercise his invention in finding out expedients for removing difficulties which never occur.
He naturally loses, therefore, the habit of such exertion, and generally becomes as stupid and ignorant as it is possible for a human creature to become. The torpor of his mind renders him, not only incapable of relishing or bearing a part in any rational conversation, but of conceiving any generous, noble, or tender sentiment, and consequently of forming any just judgement concerning many even of the ordinary duties of private life. Of the great extensive interests of his country he is altogether incapable of judging; and unless very particular pains have been taken to render him otherwise, he is equally incapable of defending his country in war.
The uniformity of his stationary life naturally corrupts the courage of his mind, and makes him regard with abhorrence the irregular, uncertain, and adventurous life of a soldier. It corrupts even the activity of his body, and renders him incapable of exerting his strength with vigour and perseverance, in any other employment than that to which he has been bred. His dexterity at his own particular trade seems, in this manner, to be acquired at the expense of his intellectual, social, and martial virtues.
But in every improved and civilized society this is the state into which the labouring poor, that is, the great body of the people, must necessarily fall, unless the government takes some pains to prevent it.”
Thank you for that quote, it's something I've been struggling with in my professional life for a while now. In moving to better-paid, senior, more specialist roles a kind of pervasive apathy sets in as less and less time spent could be linked to the real world in any kind of depth.
It's possible to shake the feeling somewhat if the work tempo is high and you can tie it to some overall notion of societal benefit. I also suspect it's responsible for the manifestation of desires to move back to the land, work with one's hands, and generally check out from contribution to society and the world at large. I suppose that instinct often gets channeled into day dreams of an eventual retirement.
I never heard of PCPartPicker but you are right, it is similar just for PC parts.
And you are right about the "garden builder": If I can get enough people to contribute data, then things liek this are possible:
Give me a plant combination/guild which works in my hardiness zone, soil type and light conditions.
I imagine that people also can add some kind of rating or anything else to tell others how this combination worked for them and then you could get things like: "people with your soil type in your area are mostly successful with growing X,Y,Z together"
Sounds like a fun idea. And there would be a large community overlap with https://farmbot.io - something I have wanted to do but not yet pulled the trigger on. Instead we limped in with an aero garden right behind the kitchen sink.
So where ever you find “farmbot people” you will likely find a receptive ear.
See below for how “efficient”could use some clarification with regards to what type of efficiency you mean.
Thanks for your comment!
I didn't know farmbot until now but I will see if I can reach out to them. It would be cool if everyone who uses a farmbot would report back into the database how it went for them so others can learn and compare their yields.
I've programmed for a while and also took up gardening a few years ago.
There aren't many amazing resources and I think there is definitely room for a community/product like this. (I was considering building one my oneself)
What I think has to be nailed is that you want to see tips from other users that garden under the same conditions as you. (Good filtering features)
Take a tomato for example;
- which breed?
- what zone? (climate/seasons)
- how much sun per day hits your garden?
- what kind of soil? (Sand, clay etc)
- what pests?
- what style of garden bed did you use?
- how often do you fertilize? (And with what)
Now the tricky part is that all those variables affect each other so someone's advice should have all of those questions attached and answered. E.g. someone says I use a lot of mulch to grow good tomatoes (when in fact it's probably because it doesn't rain much where that person lives and the mulch maintains moisture) (someone with a lot of water might benefit from a lot less mulch)
Hobbyist / permaculture people treat gardening more like an art (I'd say big ag farmers treat it more like science)
I'd love to see something for the hobbyist, and optimising home growers through simple tips would be valuable. (Home growers can't use ag-science easily)
===
I grow my own vegetables in a yard and it's pretty much a joke when it comes to production. You get one harvest per year for most things, and the more you grow, the more pest you get. You need an avid gardener in your house, or a couple decently committed ones.
(I actually like just eating vegetables seasonally because I subscribe to the idea that plants are generally toxic and you shouldn't eat the same ones every day of the year e.g. kale or beans)
If you want to get into gardening, start with potatoes, they are low in toxins, and good for carbs. Best of all, you can just dig a hole, put a potatoe in and grow a plant. (The store so much energy in their bulb that they are almost impossible to not sprout) (I also just plant potatoes from the supermarket if they go green and had no problems with it)
We've taken all these points into account with our database, with a free-form style key:value input. Please feel free to contribute! We could use your help!
You're very on-point when it comes to the variance in growing conditions - this is something we definitely wanted to address. I live in a zone 7b (in Northern Canada) - but it's coastal and mild: good luck growing what they do in North Carolina -- another 7b!
Definitely second your recommendation to start with potatoes. They are one of my personal favourites. I grow them pretty much all year long here. As soon as I get a few sprouting in the cupboard, I'll prepare a fresh pot of (home-mixed) soil and plant them in a bucket. This way, I get a bucket of potatoes every month. They store well if you cure them, and require almost no care.
Another one of my low-maintenance favourites are strawberries and chives. I grow them together, and they keep producing babies, so they make for an easy filler for empty space to keep the soil alive for the next planting.
I posted this 2 hours ago and went back to work.
Didn't expect this to happen!
The sign up is broken right now and I have no idea why but if you are interested, sign up for the newsletter in the meantime and I will get back to you as soon as it is fixed!
Thanks again,
ben
PS: Will answer all your comments as soon as I can!
Thanks! I am happy for anyone to join in and help building it, it is a community-driven (wiki-like) database, so feel free to sign up and start adding/editing plants!
Microclimates make a big difference. I live in the desert, so first I need to find what works in my area in general, and then I need to talk to people near me to further tweak what works. I've been kicking around the idea for a few years of building a community where you could see what has worked for other people in your area, mapping out a location for each piece of information. One reason I never pursued it (other than time and energy) was the privacy worries of sharing locations... but if you are already building this out, it may be worth considering.
Thanks for your comment and you 100% right. This is very close to what I experienced. If you could just see what others do in your area, what worked for them and what not, would spare you a lot of time. Until now everyone is doing trial and error by themselves.
I think the privacy concern is very valid, but this is a solvable problem, for example only showing fuzzy vicinities or anonymize in another way. Happy to hear your thoughts on this one!
Hey, similar interest here. I'm a programmer, my wife is a (proffessionnal) vegetable grower.
At first glance I can tell the site is really helpful, but here are things I'd like to see too, in addition to other comments :
- where does the data come from ?
- more specific about different cultivars
- i18n. I think most permaculture websites are very focused on english-speaking people at the moment. Being open to other language would definetly be an edge. (Related : you can refer to the latin name of the plant which is usually common accross language)
About the planting & planning software, there is a very good open source one [1] used by proffessionals here in France. So maybe you could partner with it instead of trying to reinvent the wheel !
That said, congratulation for your work so far, all the best for the rest !
And I agree 100% with you.
This is a community-driven (wiki-style) database, so we are happy of anyone to contribute.
I am a native German speaker and added some German names but definitely would need help fro the french names.
This is partly one reason why I started the website: All the info you find is very specific for the US, mostly California and doesn't help much anywhere else.
Also all plants recommended are native to the US and not to other areas.
The idea is, if a lot of people contribute, we can get to a state where you can see what others grow successfully on your area.
> "Related : you can refer to the latin name of the plant which is usually common accross language"
that might be true of romance languages and close analogues (even then, its veracity is dubious), and ignores the billions of people who have other cultural roots (e.g., africans, asians). americans, for instance, generally wouldn't know the latin names for plants.
This article is missing the one key datapoint that would allow me to evaluate whether or not I can grow my own food.
How many cubic feet of soil, at what depth, do I need in order to stop purchasing food plants from the store, year-round?
This needs to be clearly stated and addressed if people are going to be convinced to grow their own food. Yes, it's impossible to select a perfect answer for all climates, but it's absolutely possible to select an approximate answer for all estimates.
To make this more accessible, I made up four arbitrary tiers that approximately separate "basil in a pot" from "an apple tree":
Tier 3: Buried foods — potatoes, carrots, beets, etc.
Tier 4: Large plants — fruit trees, tea bushes, artichokes, squash, etc.
^ These are grouped by my mental approximation of difficulty level, lowest to highest — not by taxonomic distinction. Please don't derail with arguments about "fruit or vegetable". They're all food plants, Brant. One strawberry plant is about the size of a head of lettuce, and they both have easy root systems, so they're both in tier 2.
> How many cubic feet of soil, at what depth, do I need in order to stop purchasing food plants from the store, year-round.
While this is a pipe-dream of many gardeners, it's not necessarily realistic. You would need at least a hyper-efficient acre of land (which would take a few years to design) to provide for a family and neighbours. I think it's a lot easier than we've been lead to believe. You can do it for free (or very cheap) and with very little "quality" inputs.
I appreciate your input with this list! We will definitely take it into account.
The beauty of plants is their ability to adapt. Obviously you need depth of soil for root crops, but herbs will grow in a yogurt container, and strawberries will grow in 4 inches of sand.
Regarding your list, there's an important distinction to make here. While you don't want to argue about "fruit or vegetable" - one of the limiting factors in your list is actually growth habits of said plant. For instance strawberries will grow perennially, and thus will grow in sand with a handful of woodchips, or forest soil or compost -- whereas lettuce, will require a nutrient-rich soil with relative shelter from rain and sun.
One of the principles we chase in permaculture is efficiency, via "stacking of functions": For example, I would grow many of things in your list together, in a way that would require only a large pot of soil, top-dressed throughout the year with whatever biomass waste you have on hand (grass clippings, leaves, etc).
I'd plant a dwarf fruit tree in a large pot, surround with a rosemary shrub, plant the outer layer with strawberry and thyme to act as a ground-cover. This would require very little in regards to skill or input. The plants themselves carry the difficult tasks, such as pest control and mulch (keeping the moisture in the soil), by mimicking natural niches.
Now, depending how much soil/space you have at your disposal will directly affect your output. That would be a concern for aspiring farmers -- not necessarily your backyard gardener!
Okay, so, for #4 "no grocery shopping" you'd need an acre and maximum efficiency. Noted!
I think there's a really interesting pair of problems here:
1) What's my microclimate? How much soil can I maintain with my available time?
2) What crops can I grow and maintain with my available time?
I hope the framework I sketched out helps you consider those pair of questions. I don't know enough about soil to separate the tiers by 'ease of use', so to speak, but clearly you do and so the idea will be much better off with you than I :)
>How many cubic feet of soil, at what depth, do I need in order to stop purchasing food plants from the store, year-round?
Nobody can provide that evaluation for you without quite a bit more data. Your latitude will make a huge difference to the answer. Your altitude will make quite a bit of difference to the answer. The amount of available water will make a large difference to the answer. Those 3 alone (and notice that none of them are equivalent to "climate" though they all play a role in determining that) mean that the answers will vary across a huge range. There's also the nature of the soil in question, another far from trivial issue.
You can get some answers, however, from "How to Grow More Vegetables Than You Ever Thought Possible on Less Land Than You Can Imagine" by John Jeavons. Some of the answers can be very encouraging, some not so much. I did a weekend course with Jeavons a couple of decades ago in which he pointed out that a typical single olive tree will not even produce 1 cup of olive oil. The scale on which humanity now produces food is sometimes hard to imagine.
There are so many permaculture websites. I get it, I'm a techie who has taken a course and designed my site. I maintained a blog for a while, kept chickens, and grew some of my own food.
But what permaculture really needs is the economics to line up and the wider culture to change. The main permaculture profession seems to be teaching. There just doesn't seem to be a plethora of jobs that are directly related to permaculture.
I love it as a design system and it definitely has opened up my eyes, but permaculture doesn't need yet another website.
Thanks for your comment!
I think you make a really good point and this is part of my initial idea (and probably came too short in my blogpost): To make permaculture successful, we need to make people economically successful with it beyond teaching and giving workshops.
I tried other forums and websites and couldn't find many people who make a living out of permaculture.
On the other side permaculture is designed to not be part of any "economic thinking": One basic principle is lowering your inputs, so I get when people use permaculture to actually get out of any economic thinking.
Fair points. I have been out of the game for a while so not sure what is currently out there, but a search for "permaculture network" turns up 3-4 viable candidates.
I didn't mean to rain on your parade, too much, but wanted to drive home that information sharing is nice, but creating permaculture businesses is more important. It's the same thing as a CSA directory (I ran one for about 10 years). The CSA directory is nice and scalable and easy, and helpful to end users, but the crux of the economic system is the CSA farm, actually delivering value to others.
To make an analogy, permaculture has too many directories and not enough farms.
If you haven't, I'd suggest listening to Scott Mann/The Permaculture Podcast, as he has lots of inspiring stories about people making a living from permaculture: https://www.thepermaculturepodcast.com/
What do the both of you think of the WWOOF [1] orgs? It seems like this is one of the better directories, if specifically just for organic farms. I'm really new to this, though.
I definitely think it needs a good database of available plants as every permaculture books and resource I've read so far assumed I already knew about plants.
This is to lower the bar from "passionate people ready to go the extra mile", to "interested by the principle but can't be bothered maybe I'll just plant tomatoes and feed them nitrogen".
Former permaculturist here - who at one point was working on this very idea, as it happens.
I think permaculture appeals to a lot of programmers, because it's almost like programming with plants. It presents itself as "these plants relate to each other and support each other and you can compose them into guilds that will provide you food with minimal maintenance!" It's complex system design.
The problem is that it's not actually based in hard science. We don't know if the nitrogen produced by nitrogen fixers is available to plants around them. It might only become available once those plants die back. The studies that support the idea of dynamic accumulators measured nutrient amounts in the leaves - not the nutrient amounts in the soil as the plants grew and died back. Most of the "companions" are based on folk tales, not research.
The whole permaculture design system is the classic "anecdote is not data" fallacy turned into a design system. It's based on individual observation, not careful data collection and experimentation. The criticisms of the reductionist approach that science often falls into are well taken, as are the criticisms of industry's failure to account for unintended consequences when applying science. But that doesn't mean the alternative is to go back to a pre-scientific approach of individual naturalists observing the world and making proclamations based on their observations. Which - having spent five years embedded in the permaculture community and philosophy - is exactly what permaculture is.
This failures of anecdotal observation means that permaculture in practice often boils down to the very thing it was meant to change: humans thinking they can engineer and control nature to fit their vision, instead of learning from nature and fitting their vision to the natural realities. Permaculture doesn't actually end up designing systems that work with nature most of the time, it designs novel ecosystems with non-native plants that could have massive unintended consequences.
There's a lot to be said for the core concept of farming in nature's image, and I think Mark Shepherd is potentially on to something. We do need to explore whether we could redesign our farm systems to be habitat and feed us at the same time. Food forestry as an idea is a really promising one.
But the suburbs need to go away if we're to live sustainably, not be turned into a bunch of experimental gardens. And any agroforestry system needs to be built to fit into the native ecosystem it is a part of, using native plants. And we need to base our approach to designing a permanent culture and regenerative agriculture in science and careful research, not individual observation.
I agree with you and this is partly why I started this platform: We need to get away from anecdotal, someone famous said it works, so it works kind of thinking to socially verified approach: If many people in my area with a similar soil type have grown this specific plant successfully then I have high chances too. But there is no such platform for that kind of info. YET!
The problem comes when that plant is non-native and not in that region. Why is it growing so well? Is it because it's unavailable to the insects and micro-organisms in that region, and thus not contributing to the natural environment any better than lawn?
A platform for sharing anecdotes is still providing anecdotes. What we need is research.
not sharing purely anecdotes but getting it verified by many others is almost as good as scientific research for growing plants in my opinion.
What do you think about Wikipedia? I think they did a great job of creating something which is not based on science but still has a high trust factor and usefulness for people.
Not who you're replying to, but I think the culture you build around contributing will determine whether or not these "anecdotes" are trustworthy or not.
It's probably pretty easy to fall into the trap of "we dont have many contributors, so any contributions are welcome", but what I'd _really_ like to see is a requirement that attempts are made to take measurements and pictures throughout the growth process.
> You need to get a job to make money so that you can spend that money on buying food
That is a good thing. I like my job and do not want to spend any time on having land and growing my own food. Better leave that to someone that likes to do that job. Everybody happy.
I've been investigating a few systems of agriculture.
- There's Small Plot INtensive (SPIN) which is specialized for market
production, emphasizing minimizing labor and maximizing market crops.
https://spinfarming.com/ (Be aware that these folks are selling their
system as a course, and this is a sales site not an info site. You can
get the details from reading carefully and watching the videos that
practitioners have made.)
- Then there's the "Grow Bioinstensive" method which is designed to
provide a complete diet in a small space while also building soil and
fertility. They have been dialing it in for forty years and now have a
turn-key system that is implemented and functioning all over the world.
http://growbiointensive.org/ (These folks are also selling their system,
but they also have e.g. manuals you can download for free. I find their
site curiously hard to use.)
- Permaculture (which could be called "applied ecology" with a kind of
hippie spin. I'm not a hippie but I'm sometimes mistaken for one.) and a
similar school (parallel evolution) called "Syntropic" Agriculture.
Both of these systems aim to mimic natural ecosystems to create "food
forests" that produce crops year-round without inputs (no fertilizer, no
irrigation.) The process takes 5-15 years or so but then is
self-sustaining and regenerative.
For Permaculture I find Toby Hemenway's (RIP) videos very good:
(FWIW, I find Gotsch's writing (in English) to be impenetrable, even
though I pretty much know what he's doing. Anyway, his results are
incontrovertable.)
I'm afraid I don't have a good link in re: Food Forests and eco-mimetic
agriculture yet. This "Plant Abundance" fellow'...
Wow, thank you so much for this list! It looks like you spend some time there and I would love to talk to you more! Please reach me at hello at permapeople.org if you want to chat more!
Cheers! Yeah, I'm all over this. I'll definitely reach out.
I first got into Permaculture from reading my parents' copy of the Next
Whole Earth Catalog ~25~30 years ago. (Yeah, I'm a California cliche. lol)
Right now I'm living in a small townhouse in San Francisco with a tiny
yard. Somehow the covid virus pushed me to do what I can in the space
available. I got some chicks and we're raising them and I've been
growing things in large containers.
I can't really grow a lot of vegetables, we're out by the ocean so we
don't get the warm climate typical of CA and it's the wrong season for annuals anyway.
It was foggy 50F this morning. So I've been concentrating on building rich soil (for when I eventually
get access to more land.)
I take wood chips that have been amended with chicken manure and feathers
and layer it with Kellogg's GROMULCH[1], about four or five layers, water it
well, then broadcast a dense seed mix (different mixes in different bins,
whatever I have on hand at the time.) I call it "layer cake".
The GROMULCH mycelium rapidly pervades the wood and converts it to an
almost chalky consistency. (The earth "akin to the vegetative" of the
hugelculture quote.[2]) Part of the idea here is to see how well various
plants' roots integrate with the mycelium. Another aspect is that the
seedlings are so dense that their roots will form a mat or fiberous layer
over the whole surface. The leaves will cover the soil quickly,
protecting it and creating a moist micro-climate.
Before long the bin will be all soil (instead of half wood chips and half
soil) and it will be enriched by the growth of the fungus and plants.
At that point, I put the bin in the chicken run and let them eat the
plants, then dump it out and cover it with more wood chips and let the
chickens kick and scratch it out. I'll store it there and rake it up for
building planting beds in the Spring. Eventually, I can use the material
itself to make layer cake instead of buying more GROMULCH from the store.
In one bin I added some starting-to-rot lettuce and some woody growth
trimmed off a hedge, in another it's just wood chips and GROMULCH. In a
third bin I added some nightcrawlers...
Meanwhile, I'm starting perennials like dwarf tamarillo and alpine
strawberries, again for when I have access to more land.
Enough about me.
In re: your project, first, congratulations! I think you've identified
two key pieces of the puzzle: a plant database and a specialized online
marketplace. (The garden log and planner is also awesome, just I
personally don't see it as as big of a barrier as the other two.) I
think we also need a marketplace for land (Airbnb for small plots of
garden/farm, eh? Hosh mentioned https://sharedearth.com but I didn't get
any response from the site when I tried it. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23887329
Hosh if you read this, sorry for not contacting you yet, I fully intend to...)
There are a few existing plant databases, mostly not as useful as they
could be, my advice there is to focus on standards and open data, don't
try to reinvent a wheel, rather engage and cooperate with the folks who
are already ahead of you.
Same thing with the specialized marketplace: there are e.g. online/digital
Farmer's Market systems and sites, but again, they don't seem as useful
to me as they might be. I'm thinking Craigslist+Etsy for handmade food
and food products, combined with scheduling and bidding features (e.g. I
am a chef and I want to plan out meals for my restaurant, the site should
help me pre-order ingredients. Or I am a grower and I want to pre-sell
my crops before I even sprout them... Eh?)
Great idea, lots of potential. Made some quick notes browsing the site itself:
Favicon would be nice.
Lists: How do you ensure quality public lists? Curation? Upvotes? Rigid rules?
Statistics on plants: In addition to "wants", and "haves", would it also be possible to implement a "satisfied"/"dissatisfied" stat for people who did/didn't have success with the plant in practice?
I think something like this would be particularly cool with users having the ability to update little case studies they performed with individual plants, lists and companions that would be linked to on their respective pages.
Companions: I love the idea of a list of "proven combinations". I see in the description you're claiming these combos work well. What I'd really like to see is an explanation for why each combination works well, if there is one, or at the very least a case study of someone else having used the combination effectively.
I guess mostly what I'm looking for, as someone new to permaculture, is a vote of confidence that the information you're providing is well-informed. That can come in the form of just more in-lined text explanations, links to data/research used as reasoning for your companions, or just inlined case studies from wiki contributers themselves.
I've got a buddy who is _far_ more into permaculture than I am. I'm gonna ask him to check it out later today. I'll respond here with any of his comments.
> It is really magical if you think of how much you spare our planet with growing your own food: You need to get a job to make money so that you can spend that money on buying food which was produced and delivered close to you by large, complex and very inefficient industries. This system spends incredible amounts of resources (time, energy, labor) which you can save by simply growing your own food.
It's not the first time I've seen this line of thinking. It's economically naive. I'll explain why.
Let's imagine everyone decided to grow their own garden like the author suggests. What does one need to start a garden? The common items are shovels, timber, soil, hoses, wires, fertilizer, knee pads, gloves, pots, pesticide, and many other things. Obtaining these items requires physically driving to one's hardware store. Most people drive SUVs. This means there is a sudden influx of people driving their gas guzzling machines to obtain these basic items. We also have to consider the reality that multiple trips will be made. People commonly forget to purchase basic things, need to make returns, or realize they are short on supply (such as soil) and need to purchase more. Now consider other realities. Most people don't know how to grow. Even fewer people know how to grow a plant to its maximum potential. It takes many seasons for individuals to learn the best techniques. Think about the wasted resources spent on this. Now think about the excess waste commonly found in gardens by those who finally learn how to grow. I see this all the time. Gardens filled with oversupply of produce. More than what even their friends want to take home. Consider the yield of produce in respect to time, labor, cost of materials, and CO2 emissions. For every shovel, glove, hose, pot, etc. purchased, for every car drive made, and for every supply chain used to produce these goods, is only put to work on a small plot of land in one's backyard. They are not used to their full potential. This is both a waste of resources and an unnecessary increase in CO2 emissions. If these same resources were used on an actual farm, then they will be used for larger portions of land which will in turn yield more produce. In effect, the costs are being spread across the land, thus making them more effective.
I'd like to explain this in the opposite perspective. The absurdity seems to become much more apparent this way. The author says that these industries are inefficient as appose to simply growing in one's backyard. If it truly were more efficient, then wouldn't it be most effective if industries simply adopted this? They are looking to save money after all. Instead of purchasing one giant tractor, why not revert to shovels and an army of physical labor? Instead of hauling supplies on a few semi-trucks, why not dispatch an army of SUVs? Instead of having one massive farm that spans hundreds of acres, why not break it up into thousands of 500 sq/ft "mini gardens", each of which has its own dedicated set of shovels, hoses, gloves, knee pads, etc. And for every "mini garden", instead of growing being dictated by farm owners with many generations of growing experience, they will be grown by individuals who hardly have any experience at all.
149 comments
[ 4.1 ms ] story [ 191 ms ] threadHmm. I wouldn't use the word `inefficient` so heavily. They are really good at bringing you some kind of products, not the home grown quality kind though.
> This system spends incredible amounts of resources (time, energy, labor) which you can save by simply growing your own food.
No, growing two potatoes only or a bunch of tomatoes take up time blah blah scale blah blah time money salary blah blah.
I am hooked anyway, I always wanted to try to grow something and if filling up an ikea bag with dirt and some seeds is enough to watch green stuff grow I'll be happy to try that as an hobby !
I would not consider something that requires so much input to be "more efficient at feeding a person". It is however a system that is efficient at feeding mass amounts of people -- if you ignore the inputs.
We created Permapeople alongside the principles of permaculture. The efficiency you can create by designing systems that require few outside inputs is unmatched! While the output is not as far-reaching as industrial production, in the hands of enough local folks, growing in their yards, this maximized efficiency of land could technically provide a LOT of food.
PS: growing potatoes is probably easier than you think. One could grow potatoes with very little time and no monetary input.
> I would not consider something that requires so much input to be "more efficient at feeding a person". It is however a system that is efficient at feeding mass amounts of people -- if you ignore the inputs.
I do agree but at the end of the day all that matters to most people regarding food is the price in the supermarket aisles.
I have fun memories of my SO digging up her father's potatoes and getting back from the garden with 5 of them “damn, that took a lot of muscle to get them out of the ground”. They were really good though. Gertrude Betrand's stuff.
Are you sure about that? Intuitively I would expect commercially-produced food is far more efficient than everyone growing tiny amounts on a balcony.
Its a lot of fun to get things working, and then when you do: the plants do all the work.
No, doing it the first few times on a balcony - this won't be efficient. But, going through a few seasons and tweaking your plant code a couple iterations, maybe refactoring (the soil) a couple times: this will get you a long way towards highly productive gardening.
Start with a good compost, get your seeds started earlier in the season than you might think (window seedboxes), get things in the soil, pay attention to the plants, use your local resources, and most of all .. love what you do. All gardening can be rewarding.
Even if its not efficient at first. The more you do it, however, the better things get. Also: make that compost awesome.
But that energy comes most probably from fossil fuels. If we can be more efficient in the delivery of this energy, we can improve what is called the aggregate efficiency.
We can deliver from sources close to us, demanding a bit more energy to deliver 1 ton of potatoes but being able to source this energy from renewable sources. We can do that because the delivery is shorter and closer to us. No need to ship freight or carry the potatoes in a truck for 1500km.
Cheaper fuel also means cheaper prices.
Another way to beat the energy aggregate cost would be that if the produce is micro farmed, either by yourself or by a local entity, is that you can use less fertilizer as the soil is not run to exhaustion. Less weedkiller as you can pluck the weeds yourself. Being in a controlled environment also means less plagues, or if a crop plague comes, less pesticide used. Fertilizers, pesticides, weed killers... All that comes from fossil fuels.
Totally, but all of that also allows us not to have 30-50% of the population working in farming. If you have enough money and enough time, you can absolutely live with a smaller foot print by producing your own food, but it's not something that scales well. And I'd argue that you probably have skills that would serve humanity better if you applied them to larger problems than plucking weeds, that is: you could have a much larger impact on saving humanity/the planet/the universe/your soul by not producing the food yourself and spending the time you save on other things.
... until you get thrips, spend hours investigating the best natural remedies and buy jugs of neem oil to start mixing natural pesticides, and end up having to throw out the thrip-infested basils (which is half of them by now). Then you spend a few more hours investigating why you now have fungus gnats all over the house, and start looking into alternative soil media, hydro, and semi-hydro, and you start filling up the odd corners of your house with various liquid fertilizers, and you spend a few hundred on grow lights because you live an an apartment with no balcony and your windows don't get enough light.
Source: started growing herbs over the summer
Still a fun hobby though! I wouldn't give it up for anything, but if I valued my gardening time at a pay rate equal to my work time, I've spent thousands upon thousands of dollars for probably < $100 worth of food
I have plenty of room, and enjoy fresh basil all summer (and pesto all winter!) but I understand I'm the exception.
Tried growing potatoes several times - fail. They rot in the ground, or the voles eat them before I can get at them, or they just don't produce. Sigh. Back to the grocery store.
The principles we employ at Permapeople take into account all of these things, and promote the growing of ones own food without excessive inputs, and positive outputs (food, compost, more living soil for the next generation).
Bringing food production into the hands of people who WANT to participate is what this is about.
Let's imagine everyone decided to grow their own garden like the author suggests. What does one need to start a garden? The common items are shovels, timber, soil, hoses, wires, fertilizer, knee pads, gloves, pots, pesticide, and many other things. Obtaining these items requires physically driving to one's hardware store. Most people drive SUVs. This means there is a sudden influx of people driving their gas guzzling machines to obtain these basic items. We also have to consider the reality that multiple trips will be made. People commonly forget to purchase basic things, need to make returns, or realize they are short on supply (such as soil) and need to purchase more. Now consider other realities. Most people don't know how to grow. Even fewer people know how to grow a plant to its maximum potential. It takes many seasons for individuals to learn the best techniques. Think about the wasted resources spent on this. Now think about the excess waste commonly found in gardens by those who finally learn how to grow. I see this all the time. Gardens filled with oversupply of produce. More than what even their friends want to take home. Consider the yield of produce in respect to time, labor, cost of materials, and CO2 emissions. For every shovel, glove, hose, pot, etc. purchased, for every car drive made, and for every supply chain used to produce these goods, is only put to work on a small plot of land in one's backyard. They are not used to their full potential. This is both a waste of resources and an unnecessary increase in CO2 emissions. If these same resources were used on an actual farm, then they will be used for larger portions of land which will in turn yield more produce. In effect, the costs are being spread across the land, thus making them more effective.
I'd like to explain this in the opposite perspective. The absurdity seems to become much more apparent this way. The author says that these industries are inefficient as appose to simply growing in one's backyard. If it truly were more efficient, then wouldn't it be most effective if industries simply adopted this? They are looking to save money after all. Instead of purchasing one giant tractor, why not revert to shovels and an army of physical labor? Instead of hauling supplies on a few semi-trucks, why not dispatch an army of SUVs? Instead of having one massive farm that spans hundreds of acres, why not break it up into thousands of 500 sq/ft "mini gardens", each of which has its own dedicated set of shovels, hoses, gloves, knee pads, etc. And for every "mini garden", instead of growing being dictated by farm owners with many generations of growing experience, they will be grown by individuals who hardly have any experience at all.
I mean, I know what the author is getting at here, but that's...really not true at all as written. Comparative advantage is a thing. And also, large agribusiness and monocropping and industrial farms exist because they are stupidly efficient. They have a lot of drawbacks and problems, but efficiency is never one of them; if anything they're too efficient. In the past we used far more land per person to grow food, and spent far more of incomes on food. That's still the norm in some countries.
If we're trying to minimise resource usage and maximise efficiency, it's obviously better to have people focus on app development, doctoring, food production, clothing production, etc., and trade, than everyone split their time between all of these. I'm going to spend a lot more time, energy, and labour growing my food than an industrial farm would, much like the workers there would spend more time trying to debug a malfunctioning cache invalidation scheme than I would.
Of course, all of that is irrelevant. It's a cool project and a cool idea; I wish them every success. It's just that the intro wildly misses the mark in terms of describing the advantage. People want to grow plants, it's a fun hobby, growing your own food is fun, this is great. Efficiency shouldn't be our only goal in life, it's totally fine to grow some potatoes, and I bet they're delicious.
...you're just not saving the planet. Which is fine!
Every baby step away from industrialization is a step towards sustainability. Capitalism doesn't support long term health of the planet, so we must do it ourselves.
Sustainability is beyond a hobby, it's a lifestyle. It's a lifestyle that rejects the norm of capitalism.
I think consensus is that capitalism with carbon taxing is a step towards sustainability.
A call for deindustrialization is so far fetched it's pointless.
Edit: I do not assume the author advocates deindustrialization, presumably author just wanted to write a nice intro, to a fun hobby :)
Can you show me who in this thread is calling for this?
> Can you show me who in this thread is calling for this?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24697463
There are a lot of angry young people in this generation who felt lied to about their job prospects, or careers. They were told the mark of an adult was someone who can move out of the parent’s basement abd support yourself. Yet unless you can get an entry level job at least $60k a year in the US, you are already swimming against the current. A college degree is no guarantee of success.
That wealth gap is growing, and the pandemic made the reality stark. The recession is effectively over for people with high income, but for those without, it continued to be a huge struggle.
So some get bitter. Some get political, or even radicalized. Some want things to go back to how things used to be — in the 90s even. Others are now seeking solutions with universal basic income.
The thing with permaculture design and its decentralized food system is that it can address some of that wealth inequality. If the methods were expanded to cover the remaining basic needs at the foundational layer of Maslow’s Heirarchy of Needs, then that would work a lot better than universal basic income.
But one of the greatest characteristics of permaculture design is that it is decentralized. It does not require collective action. It can be framed as a hobby to get started. People who are implementing this doesn’t require that you change your views or beliefs, or that you get on board.
I understand this anger, and I have 3 young people as my own kids who feel this to varying degrees.
But ...
Until about a year ago, the median household income in the USA was about $56k/yr. That means that a substantial chunk of the country has "moved out the parent's basement and supports themselves" on less than $60k/yr.
The problem as I see it is that the basics of "moving out of the basement" got confused with "being able to live in the most expensive real estate markets in the world", presumably because they also just happen to be really cool places to live and have lots of economic opportunity. The conflation of these two is therefore understandable, and is a reflection of our failure as a nation and as a society to ensure the economic opportunity and high quality of living are widely distributed (in terms of both demographics and geography). Our culture has also lied to our young people about what life for most people looks like. Movies, shows, social media filled with impressions not just edited but only representative (!) of the lives of the most priviledged people in society. A massively expanded set of components of the concept of what "middle class" means.
The basics remain however: if you're just starting out in your working career, then the most expensive real estate in the US is off-limits to you unless you've gone into a line of work with outsize income. That still leaves most of the country available and very-to-somewhat affordable, albeit with reduced opportunities for satisfying or very renumerative work. But also much better chances of a much larger garden in which to try out permaculture !
Will we need carbon taxes for that?
Because, we have labour intensive crops rotting in the fields, when prices are low, because harvesting costs too much (when prices on strawberries is low; or migrant workers aren't available).
I'd like to see math where growing your own crops out performs a job at seven eleven.
Note. I think it can be a great stress relief and a great hobby. But the economics of it, seems sketchy even if we had aggressive carbon taxing (you can't build a garden without materials).
That's just plain wrong. Industrialization as it exists currently is bad because its optimizing for profit. If environmental costs were factored in (short and longterm), then we'd arrive at a sustainable balance. A carbon tax is a good first measure.
If we were, as you suggest, to revert from industrialization back to artisanship and manual labor we would produce a fraction of what we do now. That's senseless. Would you wish for every household to have to produce their own food, raise and butcher and skin their own animals, hand-mine their stones and construct their homes, carve out their own furniture, sew their own clothes...? Our living standards would plummet. The fact is that industrialization multiplies efficiency.
We can arrive at a post-scarcity society whilst also being long term sustainable, even with current global populations. It's just a matter of optimizing for it (and not just immediate profit).
FYI, if I suggested anything at all it was that industrialization under capitalism is bad, and more people living a sustainable lifestyle will show that there's a way to survive without industrial capitalism. It's a baby step that shows people that it's possible. Not the end goal.
Here is exactly what you wrote above:
> Every baby step away from industrialization is a step towards sustainability.
It is hard to interpret it in any way except that this is the outcome you wish for.
A baby step away from industrialization will allow people to connect with the world around them. So many people are disconnected from what non-processed food even looks, smells, or tastes like. Showing people that we don't have to eat the perfectly red, plump and tasteless tomato in exchange for a tasty, delicious, non-perfect tomato that they grew themselves helps show them that the world they've been conditioned to exist in isn't the only one available.
I think what the contrast between this idea and the parent demonstrates the need for balance between the two extremes. We need to use the best parts of industrialization for efficiency and prosperity, but also lower consumption where it isn't necessary. Don't sew your own clothes, but repair them when they tear.
I don't think that industrialization, the act of exploiting the scale of a demand for a specific item to produce it en masse is inherently unsustainable. In fact, I'd counter such an argument with the following hyperbole - every baby step away from industrialization is one more unfed baby. Efficient food production is what keeps a lot of people, of all sorts mind you, able to eat. Quite literally. Obviously, the food industry is notorious for it's wasteful practices, and that just means that there's room to grow. I sincerely wish you to read about the absurdities of food shortages in the USSR and re-evaluate your opinion on industrial food production.
And speaking of sustainability, what does this term even mean in this context?
This seems to be at the core of many of my acquaintance's "principles", for lack of a better term. But it seems counter-intuitive to me: doesn't industrialization allow for:
* better efficiency (larger scale)
* higher technology, allowing more efficient techniques, again
?
At some point, you can't have each of us working on a small 1-family farm if we still want to be able to have, e.g. computers, high quality medicine, travels, etc.
Is "industrialization" the enemy here or is it growth and generalized overconsumption?
You tell me! How are we doing as an industrial society?
From my perspective I see slavery and persecution of underprivileged people and pillaging of the Earth's natural resources in order to sustain an upper class lifestyle for a small percentage of the total population.
And trust me, I am very comfortable due to industrialization, but I also know that it's because we make a lot of other people uncomfortable.
But this seems to agree with industrialization itself not being the problem, but the way we make use of the "industrially produced" resources we have, no?
Pretty great. Before the industrial revolution the number of people with a comfortable life was a tiny % of the world population. Now, half of the world is middle class or wealthier[1], living a more comfortable life than the kings of the past. Industrialization has been a blessing for humanity.
[1] https://www.brookings.edu/blog/future-development/2018/09/27...
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/world-population-in-extre...
I am talking about a different way of seeing and relating to the world that is not the same as way of seeing of the world that lead us to our current industrialization. That, while this frame does share some of the way of seeing from the past, it does not mean that it is the same. That this way of seeing considers people as whole beings, and ecologies that are not separate from people. That humans have a particular role in ecologies that includes their ability to reason, develop technologies, and cultivate the land.
The kind of seeing that lead us to industrialization have been extent since the rise of civilizations and the separation of labor.
I know a lot of people from developing nations seek out to become more like the modern world. I also see people from the modern world having lost some part of themselves, who they are, their sense of place and belonging, and desperately seek out remedies for it. I see people joke about “First World Problems”, but for me, those are symptoms of a much deeper psychological malaise. So they seek out the jungles of Peru for psychedelics. Go to India to find a guru. Search for social justice at home. Cling to traditional values as they watch the rest of the world erode. Or just resign to the grind and hope you are lucky enough to win the social lottery.
I’m looking at a way of seeing that is not what had come before. It is not an escape. It taps into the tremendous power of human creativity, but one self-directed in a way that makes meaningful contributions to the world and society. I think that includes growing at least some of the food yourself, as that changes the participant’s psychology and relationship with the world and people around them, as well as building a decentralized food system. Not everyone is going to do that full time. But not everyone who can contribute something meaningful (art, music, etc) are able to do so now with the current systems in place.
They are stupidly efficient within the framework of capitalism, where they receive government subsidies and externalise many costs. In the framework of ecology and permaculture they are absolutely not efficient.
When we give our labour to the corporations, building apps and contributing to clothing production, we are facilitating and exacerbating this inefficiency. Clothing is an extremely wasteful industry for example. If we take that labour away from these pursuits and instead put it into feeding ourselves and regrowing our ecosystems, we are doing double the good.
Also- the ability to specialize. There are lots of different jobs on a farm- on smaller farms you see fewer laborers doing more jobs. On a larger farm- you can specialize labor and increase productivity in that manner.
I understand that it's foolish for all of us to start growing our own rice and potatoes -- and yes, I think that's because of "economies of scale" and the benefits of specialisation -- I wouldn't really advocate for that radical a shift. But there is certainly something that is more sensible than the insanity of overconsumption and waste that we are engaging in right now, and that applies to the food industry too.
Economies of scale in food production are really complicated. Yes, to first order, you can make more food with bigger machines over larger land masses, but at what cost? And for how long? We can already see a lot of fallout from overuse of land, overuse of synthetic fertilisers, destruction of ecodiversity. This is not to mention that agribusiness has massive crop losses calculated into the cost, crop losses that occur exactly because of the monocultural practices. Permaculture is harder to scale because it is more complex, it takes local ecosystem dynamics and microclimates into account and works with them to be more productive per acre and less destructive in the long term. So it's actually more efficient in many ways.
While everyone talking about specialisation and scale sure may feel that they are smarter than the person asking for a return to a more "simple" approach, I really believe they are the ones offering the more simplistic and erroneous solutions...
You could make a good analogy with "technical debt". Climate change and irreversible environmental damage (e.g. corral reef death) is like the technical debt of industrialisation finally rearing its head because we didn't account for it while scaling. It turns out we should have scaled our food production etc. in a more sustainable way so now we will be paying the price. With a LOT of interest.
It sounds like you're unhappy with how much we produce. Not the point of the conversation. Looks like you're just shoe-horning your political agenda into a conversation which is barely tangential.
The bare minimum amount of food we could produce without starving is still more than enough to need very large farms to capture economies of scale.
This is not a matter of shoe-horning an agenda, this is just the consequences of our trajectory as a society which are generally recognised by any relevant experts (but also pretty obvious to anyone who takes the time to think it through). I don't know why you seem to be unwilling to account for these factors and rather stick to your simplistic argument of "production efficiency by any means = good". It would seem that you are actually the one who is clinging to a political agenda, whether you are aware of it or not.
True, and don't expect to be able to sustain yourself to any meaningful extent on food grown on your balcony. You could likely eat all of the potatoes you grow on a balcony over a yearlong period in a week. The most practical use of small spaces for gardening, IMHO, is to grow your own herbs.
That is not the only thing you can plant on a balcony. Taking canopy layers into account increases the available amount you can grow. It is practical to raise quail for eggs or meat in an apartment. Mushrooms can be cultivated in a kitchen cabinet.
Having raised quail, I just absolutely cannot fathom having them in an apartment. They're loud, they smell, and they really, really like flying around. If you raised quail in an apartment, I'm betting it would be in semi-inhumane small cage conditions.
As someone who has not bought food at a grocery store (outside of citrus and other fruits we cannot grow locally due to climate and my absolute fear of scurvy) for the last 5 years, and someone who has cultivated this specific lifestyle for the last 20, I genuinely do not see a way for an apartment of folks to provide for themselves. Nor do I see a functional way for a city neighborhood to do so.
It takes so much space just to feed our family of 3 for the year, and that's with trading goods that we cannot or do not want to raise ourselves.
I agree that it builds a stronger local community and all that. But OP's premise is still accurate - this is an unrealistic expectation of people growing their own self-supporting food. The space just isn't there - in urban areas.
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/permaculture-for-the-f...
As far as going close to 100% growing your own food, that’s a pretty amazing accomplishment. I acknowledge that it is impractical for everyone to do with at this time.
However, there are cases where people had to do this and found ways to do it:
https://www.architectural-review.com/essays/cubas-urban-farm...
It just might be that we won’t really try until we are forced to by some kind of collapse scenario or another.
But, they do need a flight pen, for humane husbandry. They naturally like to run around and peck things. They need space to do that. Anyone who justifies cage raised quail because they like confined space is just trying to justify a bad decision.
>It just might be that we won’t really try until we are forced to by some kind of collapse scenario or another.
This is 100% what I believe the case will be. We won't try anything, at scale, until forced to. The reason I live the way I do is to prepare for (what I believe to be) the inevitable change/shift in the world in the next 3-5 decades.
That being said - mega-cities, and a majority of humans living in cities is a relatively new phenomena. I am not sure our current structure lends itself to 'local' living - that's my argument above. It takes a crap-load of space to feed a family.
Maybe the missing information is just how big of a cage we are talking about. What are you envisioning when you say that? Are you saying that, if a cage is made to allow them to do that, it would still be too big for a typical sized apartment?
I used to live somewhere where I can see wild quail running around the house every day. I remembered that they liked to hide in shrubs and overhanging trees. The mother might peak out and then run out from one cover to another, with a string of chicks following right a long. I rarely remember them flying out in the open.
Yes. They need an enclosed, short space in which to feel safe in order to lay eggs. To be happy and well-raised animals, they need a 'flight pen' which is a soft netted topped pen for literal flight. They are birds, and they do need to exercise that ability. Further, their flight pen allows for them to exercise their natural pecking and 'hunting'.
You could absolutely keep them in a small cage. And they would be inhumanely raised creatures.
>Maybe the missing information is just how big of a cage we are talking about.
Small cage. Large flight pen. If the flight pen is a thing, then yes, it's too large for an apartment.
> That being said - mega-cities, and a majority of humans living in cities is a relatively new phenomena. I am not sure our current structure lends itself to 'local' living - that's my argument above. It takes a crap-load of space to feed a family.
It seems you have thought this out a lot more than I have and have the practical experience to boot.
I too also think there is a good chance for a change/shift in the world around the time frame you are talking about. I’ve seen people talk about different collapse scenarios, including some of the weirder ones. It is less about preparing it for myself so much as preparing it for my unborn son and any of his siblings that follow after.
Granted, in some of the post-collapse scenarios I’ve seen, the mega-cities are likely to be shell. I live in Phoenix. I see a lot of space that could be used for growing ... but there is not a lot of water out here. This summer, I started relandscaping my yard to capture the monsoon rains, but they didn’t really come this year. It was effectively a drought. Phoenix is not built as a city that could survive without A/C, let alone much of the areas are distant from the canals. The Salt River that runs through here is dried up. For longer-term, I’m looking at moving the family to Northern Arizona, where we’d have a better shot.
I’m also thinking that the scale at which to grow food is probably going to be at a village size. It would require a different family structure too. The one tech I think that would really need to survive is the internet, though perhaps not in the form that it is now (with control of the internet aggregated into a small handful of players). I think the presence of the internet is what will make the difference between regressing back to horticulture, to something that helps us move forward. But whatever that “forward” is, it won’t be the familiar status quo.
It may take a crap-load of space to feed a family ... I think though, encouraging people to try to feed something of themselves can help them prepare in some way if there is a collapse; and if there isn’t one, I think it would help a lot. One of the things that growing at least some of your own food enables (even if you can’t grow all of it in an apartment), is that it links you into the food cycle. It seeds a sense of agency for the person. It starts the development of personal self-reliance, even if it is not completely self-reliant, or that it is impossible for megacities to support. In this way, it gives a little bit of capability and confidence that, someone can realistically assess their chances while they are still living in a megacity. And who knows, such a person might come up with some creative ways to do so, even if others decide that they need to build their life elsewhere.
So, give them a false sense of security? ;)
It's more akin to goats than cows. They're domesticated, absolutely. But they still want to get up to something; they're not content to sit in a box and eat all day.
There's an old book called "Five acres and independence" which I think is a reference to the amount of land you need to sustain a family. I don't know anything about the subject, really, but I just jumped off that number.
I'm not in America, but we can use it as an example to do calculation. It's probably approximate to a misleading degree, but since I'm a software developer with a degree in an unrelated field making internet comments, that doesn't put me off:
According to Wikipedia, the US is 3,796,742 square miles. Wolfram Alpha says that's 2.43 billion acres. Using Wikipedia's stated 2019 estimate of 328,239,523 people, that's 7.5 acres per person. So under forty acres for each family of five, roughly. So if we say 5 acres is a good number, in the US you're at 8x the amount of land needed for everyone to live off the land at a small scale. Is 1/8th of the US even arable land? What about all the other stuff we'd need, like factories, mines, schools, the cold fusion powered mag-lev network etc.? Will that fit in the rest? Maybe the occasional forest would be nice?
And then of course we need to consider that the US is no. 145 out of some 200 countries for population density. For the European Union, we arrive at 2.3 acres per person, so you'd need to distribute people evenly over roughly half of the land for each five-person family to have a five acre farm. For Africa, 5.8 acres per person.
But maybe that starting number is too high or too low. I just thought it was an interesting thought experiment.
The more I read about this the more I started doubting all the doom about sustainability. Granted, I think they were vegetarian (still had live birds for eggs) but.. I think the combination of pooling together ancient techniques with modern technology could provide better results than the "if GMO & Roundup are eliminated the WORLD WILL STARVE" type of propaganda that, the more I read up about things like Agent Orange and, well, propaganda, the more I want to hear from people like the Dervais kids (RIP Jules) and less from people who have never farmed before or maybe grew some herbs one year.
1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NCmTJkZy0rM
Honestly, that sounds like a lawsuit waiting to happen, unfortunately. Just one person getting sick, even if it wasn't from your potato, could ruin a good time.
Saying that as the chilli tree at a friends place is always covered in chilli's ready to pick, even if we strip it bare and return a few weeks later. It's an overachiever. ;)
An alternative is to invert value extraction to value contribution, linked into intrinsic motivation rather than extrinsic motivation. A purpose-driven life feels more fulfilling than being treated as a cog in a value extraction machine. Maximizing value extraction ends up squeezing the life out of people.
This is false. It's the same argument behind the Luddite handloom weavers who burned mills and factory machinery. It leads to labor arguments like saying we should stop using bulldozers and require workers to use spoons instead to create more jobs.
But in fact jobs come from people with resources who decide that they want to reshape the world in some way, often to gather more resources. That impulse to change the world has never been scarce and likely never will be as long as there are people.
But they will be increasingly crappy and mindless as people are used to fill in the gaps that Automation and AI cant.
You can see that playing out in Amazon warehouses as workers try to keep pace with robots and get injured, or in Zuckerbergs content moderation farms as the mods suffer brain damage from what the AI systems miss.
So expect lot of people to say no thanks. And if those people don't find any other purpose expect them to start burning things down. In that context, orgs that provide routes to purpose are doing a good thing.
The less complexity, the more mindless it is. The less complexity, the easier it is to automate.
Unless you think cashier, burger flipper or product labeler is a top-job type thing.
I work in process automation. There are thousands of issues and bugs in our systems that require mindless human activity to work around. Eg- Where our voice rec models fail we have hundreds of people sitting the whole day listening to boring snippets of context less conversation and correcting it. Most hate that work. Where robots malfunction on the line some guy has to just wheel in a new machine and push 2 button. That's all he does. That's what I mean by ppl being used to fill in the gaps. They do it for a few years and end up having no great qualification after the bugs get fixed so they getoved to the next crappy filler job. There is no great dignity to it or satisfaction. And they end up laughing at Obama's speeches abt reskilling cause they know the reality and end up voting for Trump.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullshit_Jobs
The Luddite labor unrest arose from a very real decrease in living standards for many, many people which lasted for decades. Rural/semi-rural artisans lost out to factories staffed by smaller numbers of children who could be paid far less than adults. Many had no choice but to move to cities to fight for whatever jobs they could, and the squalid conditions and extreme labor surplus inspired communist thought.
So yes, this in many ways is the same argument, but I think it would be unwise to dismiss the 'labor arguments,' because while the industrial revolution in Britain did eventually raise everyone's living standards, it took about a century and the social unrest during that time (in Britain and other industrializing nations) provoked far-reaching, unintended consequences.
If you are interested in this subject, The Technology Trap by Frey has an interesting comparison between the first and second industrial revolutions and the ongoing labor shifts in the modern era.
It's also possible that you are both correct, depending on the context.
Can a single person be more efficient in their backyard than an industrial farmer in Nebraska farming potatoes? No. Can they grow vegetables more sustainably than an industrial farmer? Yes.
Can a farmer in Kosovo get better efficiency per square foot in a greenhouse than a vegetable farmer in open fields in Nebraska? Yes. [1] Can a farmer in a rural area with no roads or modern infrastructure apply the methods used in Kosovo? No.
Can a farmer using traditional practices add topsoil, improve soil health, create better products, all without the downsides of splitting cattle and cropping into separate industrial processes? Yes. [2] Can they do it without any modern farm equipment? No way.
Eliminating all modern industrial processes is not the answer, nor is turning everyone into a laborer with only hand tools. Huge farms can produce potatoes and micro farms can produce vegetables. We need sustainable planning with sensible automation, customized for variables including access to infrastructure, climate, and local demand for products.
> large agribusiness and monocropping and industrial farms exist because they are stupidly efficient
This is not necessarily the case, considering the vast portion of cropland in the midwest is shipped to concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs). CAFOs are toxic for the animals that live there. Their manure, which would be cheap fertilizer at a smaller scale on a farm, is toxic. The chemical inputs that are now required back at the cropland are usually toxic. The fuel needed to get all of these resources to their destination is toxic. The topsoil gets thinner every year. The climate gets more unpredictable every year. If you consider time outside the scale of the financial quarter, this is not efficient or sustainable.
One major problem is that the tools pushed by equipment manufacturers are targeted for a certain market, usually massive industrial farms. Until recently, ideas like no-till, cover crops, and traditional rotation of cattle and chickens were scoffed at by agricultural schools and by the self interest of corporations who want to lock people in to a certain style of production.
Thankfully, farmers are incredibly resourceful, and they are tired of getting pushed into a corner by self-terminating seeds and endless inputs pushing them to bankruptcy. They're sharing ideas and coming up with new solutions, often based on the knowledge of hundreds of generations of farmers before them. What they need from us is the political will to subsidize sustainable farming instead of the strictly industrial practices that are carbon inefficient, pollute our water systems, and lead to things like vast acres of manure pools in poor rural areas.
We have the technology, the labor, the land to produce food sustainably that is somewhere between monocropping/CAFO and backyard organic.
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On a more general note, sweeping generalities and false dichotomies are destroying our politics and our ability to solve problems. I am not pointing fingers here -- I'm as guilty as anyone. I would love to see more targeted constructive criticism, or even better, a statement of goals instead a statement of problems of "the other side".
[1] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/326836113_Evaluatin...
[2] http://www.renewablefarming.com/images/2015Images/2015PDF/Ga...
There is a lot of unpack in this topic and I hope to address this in later posts (this was my first one!).
I think the most important thing now is to write about what you said last: stating goals!
That said, industrial farms that do not use destructive methods for farming are going to be much more effective than what an individual can do in terms of growing their own food. As such, are more optimal strategy in terms of personal efficiency would be to focus on their own strengths like app development, doctoring and so on, and then use the revenue from that to buy exclusively from farms that are long term efficient for the planet. I would claim that growing your own food is a bit of a middle ground.
Monoculture is only "efficient" because it's economically convenient and benefits from dead simple logistics and easy automation.
Trading human labor for machine labor and increasing density (land use efficiency) is what got us into this mess in the first place. With integrative pest control, crop rotation, and composting a small farm can get well within the ballpark of industrialized farming without contributing further to our planet's decline (source: eight acres). Yes, it's "inefficient" by some arbitrary measure that makes no sense now that we're past 400 PPM.
If anyone thinks we can survive the coming few centuries without some significant strategic deindustrialization or that any small group of people or issues will "save the planet", they're deluding themselves. Growing your own food, when done correctly on a few acres (especially if you grow your own meat), is one of the best ways to contribute now. We just have to throw away the efficiency metrics that got us here in the first place - it's our labor or the planet.
Another thought: 60-70 years ago almost every household in the US had their own chicken or rabbits. I assume also way more people were growing their own food.
I think it is really bad that all that vanished and is one part in why our food system is currently so vulnerable: Having huge centralized industries makes it much more easy to wipe out whole harvest through pests or diseases. Let alone if there are production errors and products need to be called back etc. This is a price no one calculated in the so called "efficiency".
Here's a good question- do you think that food-born illness is more or less common in countries that have more centralized their food production?
Tricky one to answer, since each country has a lot of counfounding factors (e.g. Use of pathogen-bearing 'night soil' as fertilizer, availability of refrigeration in warm and humid climates, potable water availability). Best measure IMO would be each country taken individually pre- and post-centralization of agriculture.
What those figures seem to show (taking primarily the CDC figures for USA) is less frequent outbreaks, but greater spread when they occur, overall the number of impacted individuals looks similar if not slightly lower. This makes sense - centralized production and wide distribution means a single instance of contamination, though much lower in likelihood to occur, will reach out and touch more people than it otherwise would have when it occurs.
It gets worse. The fiscal payoffs of those productivity gains went overwhelmingly to capital holders, and many negative externalities (like massive abuse of antibiotics) produced by the system help maintain a dysfunctional US healthcare system where the extractive value again overwhelmingly goes to capital holders. I'm a lowercase capital holder myself, so I'm empathetic to their interests, but this systems design screams fragility to me.
Unfortunately, I have no general prescriptives, only what I'm doing for my own situation.
A tonne of wheat costs 0.05 tonnes of CO2 to ship from Kansas to New York, requires 0.6 acres to grow, and contains ~3,500,000 calories.
A tonne of tomatoes costs 0.3 tonnes of CO2 to ship from California to New York, requires 0.06 acres to grow, and contains ~180,000 calories.
The lowest-hanging fruit, so to speak, in food production is reducing beef production to pasture-raised beef on lands that can be sustainably ranched but are not suitable for other forms of agriculture. After that comes producing more (of some types of) vegetables locally, particularly ones that are mostly water and consumed for nutrients rather than calories, and eating fresh foods in-season.
Any plan that tries to get rid of grains or other staples produced on massive scales in monoculture fields in the parts of countries best suited for them runs afoul of the "we need to produce enough food for 10 billion people for at least the next two centuries" constraint of agricultural planning.
Agreed. That's a point I touched on with my comment about industrial farming being, if anything, too efficient. There's concerns about water use, fertiliser use, carbon emissions, biodiversity, monocropping. Industrial farming is about the most efficient use of resources possible (ignoring any negative externalities; if it's not priced in - like, eg, the potential harm of fertiliser runoff to marine life - it's ignored).
> They are not ecologically efficient
....well, no. That's just not true. Subject to the caveats above about exernalities (and the fix there would be better regulation, carbon taxes, etc.), industrial farming is about being efficient with everything. Yes, in many ways small scale agriculture is just as efficient; in others it's significantly less efficient. But there is no way it's more efficient. And keep in mind one of the most important ecological resources is land, and industrial farming is very land efficient. (Unused land is critical for regulating carbon, among other things. We need forests! There's a reason people get so wound up about Brazil.)
Example: Organic farming (which is, these days, generally highly industrialised, but still a step closer to what you have in mind, I imagine) yields less food per acre - or to put it another way, uses more land per unit of food. Studies have shown a 20-40% gap between organic and conventional farming in practice. Worse, they show that the carbon footprint is the same; the lower carbon intensity is fully cancelled out by the lower efficiency. (See, eg, https://www.acsh.org/news/2017/05/26/organic-farms-use-more-...)
> Yes, it's "inefficient" by some arbitrary measure that makes no sense now that we're past 400 PPM.
No, it's just inefficient. And it's inefficient that is more important in a high carbon world. The planet is not going to be saved by cutting down forests so we can grow food less efficiently. Even if we really, really wish it would be. You can't say "but carbon" and then push a solution that isn't any lower carbon.
If we really care about the environment, we're talking about a shift to largely vegetarian diets, with the bulk of our calories grown in dense, super efficient ways. There's X billion people, we need Y trillion calories per day, how can we achieve this with the least amount of land, water, fertiliser, carbon, and labour? That probably looks a lot like massive industrial farms in places with good climates and spare water, being shipped to places with lots of people and little land and water.
One general thing I want to add: Any large scale industry can theoretically be the most efficient and optimal for the environment but these days none of them is. Why is that? I think because there is no incentive to do that and there is no price on environmental costs.
Happy to hear your thoughts!
Soil depletion is neither created by industrial agriculture, nor solved by small scale agriculture. If you grow a bunch of wheat, it leaches nitrogen out of the ground. Your options are:
1. Let it sit fallow while it naturally regenerates, meaning you need 2-3 times more land as you rotate through the fields, meaning you need to cut down a lot of forests and put them to the plow.
2. Add nitrogen based fertilisers. The only viable way to generate them produces a lot of carbon, and the runoff has its own ecological toll.
It's been a huge factor in human development for ever; you either need to use a stupid amount of land, or you add your own nitrogen. Neither option is great; neither option really changes based on the scale you're doing it at.
> Any large scale industry can theoretically be the most efficient and optimal for the environment but these days none of them is.
I mean....aren't they? The issue is scale. Australia produced something in excess of 500 million tonnes of coal last year, mostly exported to Japan and South Korea. What is the most "optimal for the environment" way to extract 500 million tonnes of coal and ship it around the globe so it can be burnt for power?
I would suggest that there is no way to do that, but that's not an indictment of the industrial scale of the process. If you managed to mine that much coal via small batch artisanal hand mining, it'd be just as bad for the environment. Probably worse; you'd need a much larger labour force, meaning even more food and water trucked out to the mines.
If you take a giant factory that's doing something bad for the environment, and split it up into 1000 small factories that are still doing something bad for the environment, you're not obviously winning.
> there is no price on environmental costs.
Quite true, but that works at every scale. The giant agribusiness has no reason not to over-apply fertiliser to their fields other than the cost of the fertiliser (they don't pay for the damage to marine life when it washes into the river). But the small hobbyist gardener has no reason not too either. The same incentives apply at every level.
If anything, there's less incentive to be efficient at a small level, because it seems so small ("how much damage can ONE lawn do?" "how much carbon does ONE trip to the store in a car add?"), or because it's being done at a hobbyist level. A 40% tax on fertiliser (or whatever) would have enormous shockwaves on industrial agriculture; steps would be taken rapidly to reduce useage. A hobbyist growing tomatoes for his own use might not even notice, and thus, would not reduce usage.
Since we're comparing industrial ag with human-scale stuff it's only fair to point out that simple human-scale means of achieving this is to literally pee in a container, let it sit for a few months, dilute it 10-20x with water, and apply to garden beds. This fertilizer has an NPK of 11-1-2. If you compost, peeing directly onto it will have a similar effect.
Also 'letting it sit fallow' is not really stating the option fairly. Nitrogen-fixing cover crops are an option and these can be cohabit with or grow in rotation with a main crop.
I think it's a mistake here to assert that small-scale gardening should mimic industral ag practice. Of course that would produce a fragmented solution that is less efficient and offers little to no benefit.
>A 40% tax on fertiliser (or whatever) would have enormous shockwaves on industrial agriculture; steps would be taken rapidly to reduce useage. A hobbyist growing tomatoes for his own use might not even notice, and thus, would not reduce usage.
I don't buy that argument. Not only is a small-scale farmer less likely to be heavily reliant on buying in fertilizer, a 40% increase in cost will be equally impactful as to a large scale operator, because their means are proportionally smaller.
>But the small hobbyist gardener has no reason not too either. The same incentives apply at every level.
Not true. Bob the farmer has a much closer societal link to joe the fisherman. If bob's practices impact on Joe's means of sustenance, not only are they on an equal footing to discuss the matter but they can do by leaning over the fence. Big Ag talking to fisheries, by comparison, looks quite different and more abstracted, less neighbourly if you will. Likewise if the polluter is a large industry and the impacted parties are individuals, all the same problems of abstraction and drastically lowered leverage to boot.
There are many examples where this is not true, of course e.g. Damages done at a great distance between source and impact.
Second, no, small-scale agriculture should not blindly mimic industrial agriculture, but you also don't get any advantages just by being small. Pests want to eat your crops no matter who you are. And yes, of course a backyard veggie garden needs fertiliser.
And third, dfferent consumers have different elasticities of demand. Hobbyists doing something for fun often have high elasticities of demand. I mean, obviously; if you were maximally sensitive to price, you'd be buying whatever is on sale at Costco already. :) A friend of mine makes her own cold process soap; they're lovely and high quality, and she has a lot of fun doing it. Even ignoring her time, the cost per bar for her to make them is a couple orders of magnitude higher than store bought. You think she'd stop - or even notice - if one ingredient went up a few cents?
Finally:
> Bob the farmer has a much closer societal link to joe the fisherman.
I can't even begin to imagine how that might be true. We're talking about "hey, what if everyone grew their own potatoes instead of buying them; would that help the planet". But I mean....I don't know any fishermen. I don't even eat fish. And even if I did plant some potatoes in my back yard, I'm not going to suddenly meet a fisherman. And even if I did, I don't see why we'd assume they're an environmental chemist. Seems like he'd probably be pretty busy fishing, maintaining his boat, and (now) growing potatoes, so why would he even know that the fertiliser we're both putting on our potatoes is (eventually, in aggregate) harming the fish?
You seem to be envisioning a pleasant world, but none of it really meshes with my understanding of how our world works. But eh, I suppose my arguments sound equally unconvincing to you, so...
Industrial farming is a modern marvel — but it’s also heavily subsidized, and the negative externalities are going to be felt in years to come; land use change, fossil fuel for transportation, chemical fertilizer production.
To me, the biggest benefit of making a garden with your own hands is the perspective you gain. You see what goes into food production. You gain a sense of pragmatism as you weigh the trade offs in different forms of pest management, approaches like permaculture, etc.
It’s easy for people to speak from the sidelines — but gaining some real world experience helps people feel more directly connected to the process.
As others have pointed out, industrial agriculture is only efficient at producing industrial food and then only if many externalities are left unaccounted.
The industrial system cannot produce even one heirloom tomato. so what's the efficiency there, eh?
But I want to point out the crucial divide between soil-building and soil-depleting agricultures: if you integrate over a large enough time scale the former always beat the latter because soil-building system can keep going while soil-depleting systems are ultimately doomed.
So it doesn't matter that industrial agriculture has been more efficient for two hundred years or so if it eventually results in environmental devastation. All the billions of people who are alive today thanks to Haber & Bosch might also be doomed thanks to Haber & Bosch.
Also, I don't want to be dependent on a monocultured, government-subsidized, efficient conglomerate agribusiness if it's operations contain externalities whose price we could partially avoid paying simply by having a tarp filled with dirt and some potatoes and skipping one Netflix show a few times per week.
“In the progress of the division of labour, the employment of the far greater part of those who live by labour, that is, of the great body of people, comes to be confined to a few very simple operations, frequently one or two. But the understandings of the greater part of men are necessarily formed by their ordinary employments. The man whose whole life is spent in performing a few simple operations, of which the effects too are, perhaps, always the same, or very nearly the same, has no occasion to exert his understanding,or to exercise his invention in finding out expedients for removing difficulties which never occur.
He naturally loses, therefore, the habit of such exertion, and generally becomes as stupid and ignorant as it is possible for a human creature to become. The torpor of his mind renders him, not only incapable of relishing or bearing a part in any rational conversation, but of conceiving any generous, noble, or tender sentiment, and consequently of forming any just judgement concerning many even of the ordinary duties of private life. Of the great extensive interests of his country he is altogether incapable of judging; and unless very particular pains have been taken to render him otherwise, he is equally incapable of defending his country in war.
The uniformity of his stationary life naturally corrupts the courage of his mind, and makes him regard with abhorrence the irregular, uncertain, and adventurous life of a soldier. It corrupts even the activity of his body, and renders him incapable of exerting his strength with vigour and perseverance, in any other employment than that to which he has been bred. His dexterity at his own particular trade seems, in this manner, to be acquired at the expense of his intellectual, social, and martial virtues.
But in every improved and civilized society this is the state into which the labouring poor, that is, the great body of the people, must necessarily fall, unless the government takes some pains to prevent it.”
—Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations
https://www.pitt.edu/~syd/ASIND.html
It's possible to shake the feeling somewhat if the work tempo is high and you can tie it to some overall notion of societal benefit. I also suspect it's responsible for the manifestation of desires to move back to the land, work with one's hands, and generally check out from contribution to society and the world at large. I suppose that instinct often gets channeled into day dreams of an eventual retirement.
Similar commentary from Marx on Abstract Labour.
You already have "build guides" with those lists (just let people vote and comment on them maybe?).
Now you need to add a "Garden Builder" tool that accounts for geographic region (biome?) and plant compatibility?
And you are right about the "garden builder": If I can get enough people to contribute data, then things liek this are possible:
Give me a plant combination/guild which works in my hardiness zone, soil type and light conditions.
I imagine that people also can add some kind of rating or anything else to tell others how this combination worked for them and then you could get things like: "people with your soil type in your area are mostly successful with growing X,Y,Z together"
So where ever you find “farmbot people” you will likely find a receptive ear.
See below for how “efficient”could use some clarification with regards to what type of efficiency you mean.
There aren't many amazing resources and I think there is definitely room for a community/product like this. (I was considering building one my oneself)
What I think has to be nailed is that you want to see tips from other users that garden under the same conditions as you. (Good filtering features)
Take a tomato for example;
- which breed?
- what zone? (climate/seasons)
- how much sun per day hits your garden?
- what kind of soil? (Sand, clay etc)
- what pests?
- what style of garden bed did you use?
- how often do you fertilize? (And with what)
Now the tricky part is that all those variables affect each other so someone's advice should have all of those questions attached and answered. E.g. someone says I use a lot of mulch to grow good tomatoes (when in fact it's probably because it doesn't rain much where that person lives and the mulch maintains moisture) (someone with a lot of water might benefit from a lot less mulch)
Hobbyist / permaculture people treat gardening more like an art (I'd say big ag farmers treat it more like science)
I'd love to see something for the hobbyist, and optimising home growers through simple tips would be valuable. (Home growers can't use ag-science easily)
===
I grow my own vegetables in a yard and it's pretty much a joke when it comes to production. You get one harvest per year for most things, and the more you grow, the more pest you get. You need an avid gardener in your house, or a couple decently committed ones.
(I actually like just eating vegetables seasonally because I subscribe to the idea that plants are generally toxic and you shouldn't eat the same ones every day of the year e.g. kale or beans)
If you want to get into gardening, start with potatoes, they are low in toxins, and good for carbs. Best of all, you can just dig a hole, put a potatoe in and grow a plant. (The store so much energy in their bulb that they are almost impossible to not sprout) (I also just plant potatoes from the supermarket if they go green and had no problems with it)
We've taken all these points into account with our database, with a free-form style key:value input. Please feel free to contribute! We could use your help!
You're very on-point when it comes to the variance in growing conditions - this is something we definitely wanted to address. I live in a zone 7b (in Northern Canada) - but it's coastal and mild: good luck growing what they do in North Carolina -- another 7b!
Definitely second your recommendation to start with potatoes. They are one of my personal favourites. I grow them pretty much all year long here. As soon as I get a few sprouting in the cupboard, I'll prepare a fresh pot of (home-mixed) soil and plant them in a bucket. This way, I get a bucket of potatoes every month. They store well if you cure them, and require almost no care.
Another one of my low-maintenance favourites are strawberries and chives. I grow them together, and they keep producing babies, so they make for an easy filler for empty space to keep the soil alive for the next planting.
THANKS FOR ALL YOUR COMMENTS!
I posted this 2 hours ago and went back to work. Didn't expect this to happen!
The sign up is broken right now and I have no idea why but if you are interested, sign up for the newsletter in the meantime and I will get back to you as soon as it is fixed!
Thanks again, ben
PS: Will answer all your comments as soon as I can!
At first glance I can tell the site is really helpful, but here are things I'd like to see too, in addition to other comments : - where does the data come from ? - more specific about different cultivars - i18n. I think most permaculture websites are very focused on english-speaking people at the moment. Being open to other language would definetly be an edge. (Related : you can refer to the latin name of the plant which is usually common accross language)
About the planting & planning software, there is a very good open source one [1] used by proffessionals here in France. So maybe you could partner with it instead of trying to reinvent the wheel !
That said, congratulation for your work so far, all the best for the rest !
[1] : https://framagit.org/ah/qrop
And I agree 100% with you. This is a community-driven (wiki-style) database, so we are happy of anyone to contribute. I am a native German speaker and added some German names but definitely would need help fro the french names.
This is partly one reason why I started the website: All the info you find is very specific for the US, mostly California and doesn't help much anywhere else. Also all plants recommended are native to the US and not to other areas. The idea is, if a lot of people contribute, we can get to a state where you can see what others grow successfully on your area.
Love to hear your thoughts on this!
that might be true of romance languages and close analogues (even then, its veracity is dubious), and ignores the billions of people who have other cultural roots (e.g., africans, asians). americans, for instance, generally wouldn't know the latin names for plants.
How many cubic feet of soil, at what depth, do I need in order to stop purchasing food plants from the store, year-round?
This needs to be clearly stated and addressed if people are going to be convinced to grow their own food. Yes, it's impossible to select a perfect answer for all climates, but it's absolutely possible to select an approximate answer for all estimates.
To make this more accessible, I made up four arbitrary tiers that approximately separate "basil in a pot" from "an apple tree":
Tier 1: Herbs — basil, thyme, etc.
Tier 2: Greens — lettuce, dandelions, strawberries^
Tier 3: Buried foods — potatoes, carrots, beets, etc.
Tier 4: Large plants — fruit trees, tea bushes, artichokes, squash, etc.
^ These are grouped by my mental approximation of difficulty level, lowest to highest — not by taxonomic distinction. Please don't derail with arguments about "fruit or vegetable". They're all food plants, Brant. One strawberry plant is about the size of a head of lettuce, and they both have easy root systems, so they're both in tier 2.
> How many cubic feet of soil, at what depth, do I need in order to stop purchasing food plants from the store, year-round.
While this is a pipe-dream of many gardeners, it's not necessarily realistic. You would need at least a hyper-efficient acre of land (which would take a few years to design) to provide for a family and neighbours. I think it's a lot easier than we've been lead to believe. You can do it for free (or very cheap) and with very little "quality" inputs.
I appreciate your input with this list! We will definitely take it into account.
The beauty of plants is their ability to adapt. Obviously you need depth of soil for root crops, but herbs will grow in a yogurt container, and strawberries will grow in 4 inches of sand.
Regarding your list, there's an important distinction to make here. While you don't want to argue about "fruit or vegetable" - one of the limiting factors in your list is actually growth habits of said plant. For instance strawberries will grow perennially, and thus will grow in sand with a handful of woodchips, or forest soil or compost -- whereas lettuce, will require a nutrient-rich soil with relative shelter from rain and sun.
One of the principles we chase in permaculture is efficiency, via "stacking of functions": For example, I would grow many of things in your list together, in a way that would require only a large pot of soil, top-dressed throughout the year with whatever biomass waste you have on hand (grass clippings, leaves, etc).
I'd plant a dwarf fruit tree in a large pot, surround with a rosemary shrub, plant the outer layer with strawberry and thyme to act as a ground-cover. This would require very little in regards to skill or input. The plants themselves carry the difficult tasks, such as pest control and mulch (keeping the moisture in the soil), by mimicking natural niches.
Now, depending how much soil/space you have at your disposal will directly affect your output. That would be a concern for aspiring farmers -- not necessarily your backyard gardener!
I think there's a really interesting pair of problems here:
1) What's my microclimate? How much soil can I maintain with my available time?
2) What crops can I grow and maintain with my available time?
I hope the framework I sketched out helps you consider those pair of questions. I don't know enough about soil to separate the tiers by 'ease of use', so to speak, but clearly you do and so the idea will be much better off with you than I :)
Thanks for taking the time to reply.
Nobody can provide that evaluation for you without quite a bit more data. Your latitude will make a huge difference to the answer. Your altitude will make quite a bit of difference to the answer. The amount of available water will make a large difference to the answer. Those 3 alone (and notice that none of them are equivalent to "climate" though they all play a role in determining that) mean that the answers will vary across a huge range. There's also the nature of the soil in question, another far from trivial issue.
You can get some answers, however, from "How to Grow More Vegetables Than You Ever Thought Possible on Less Land Than You Can Imagine" by John Jeavons. Some of the answers can be very encouraging, some not so much. I did a weekend course with Jeavons a couple of decades ago in which he pointed out that a typical single olive tree will not even produce 1 cup of olive oil. The scale on which humanity now produces food is sometimes hard to imagine.
But what permaculture really needs is the economics to line up and the wider culture to change. The main permaculture profession seems to be teaching. There just doesn't seem to be a plethora of jobs that are directly related to permaculture.
I love it as a design system and it definitely has opened up my eyes, but permaculture doesn't need yet another website.
On the other side permaculture is designed to not be part of any "economic thinking": One basic principle is lowering your inputs, so I get when people use permaculture to actually get out of any economic thinking.
Happy to hear your thoughts!
I didn't mean to rain on your parade, too much, but wanted to drive home that information sharing is nice, but creating permaculture businesses is more important. It's the same thing as a CSA directory (I ran one for about 10 years). The CSA directory is nice and scalable and easy, and helpful to end users, but the crux of the economic system is the CSA farm, actually delivering value to others.
To make an analogy, permaculture has too many directories and not enough farms.
If you haven't, I'd suggest listening to Scott Mann/The Permaculture Podcast, as he has lots of inspiring stories about people making a living from permaculture: https://www.thepermaculturepodcast.com/
1: http://wwoofusa.org
This is to lower the bar from "passionate people ready to go the extra mile", to "interested by the principle but can't be bothered maybe I'll just plant tomatoes and feed them nitrogen".
One search for "plant database" on google turned up a number of other options.
Have you checked out any of those?
I think permaculture appeals to a lot of programmers, because it's almost like programming with plants. It presents itself as "these plants relate to each other and support each other and you can compose them into guilds that will provide you food with minimal maintenance!" It's complex system design.
The problem is that it's not actually based in hard science. We don't know if the nitrogen produced by nitrogen fixers is available to plants around them. It might only become available once those plants die back. The studies that support the idea of dynamic accumulators measured nutrient amounts in the leaves - not the nutrient amounts in the soil as the plants grew and died back. Most of the "companions" are based on folk tales, not research.
The whole permaculture design system is the classic "anecdote is not data" fallacy turned into a design system. It's based on individual observation, not careful data collection and experimentation. The criticisms of the reductionist approach that science often falls into are well taken, as are the criticisms of industry's failure to account for unintended consequences when applying science. But that doesn't mean the alternative is to go back to a pre-scientific approach of individual naturalists observing the world and making proclamations based on their observations. Which - having spent five years embedded in the permaculture community and philosophy - is exactly what permaculture is.
This failures of anecdotal observation means that permaculture in practice often boils down to the very thing it was meant to change: humans thinking they can engineer and control nature to fit their vision, instead of learning from nature and fitting their vision to the natural realities. Permaculture doesn't actually end up designing systems that work with nature most of the time, it designs novel ecosystems with non-native plants that could have massive unintended consequences.
There's a lot to be said for the core concept of farming in nature's image, and I think Mark Shepherd is potentially on to something. We do need to explore whether we could redesign our farm systems to be habitat and feed us at the same time. Food forestry as an idea is a really promising one.
But the suburbs need to go away if we're to live sustainably, not be turned into a bunch of experimental gardens. And any agroforestry system needs to be built to fit into the native ecosystem it is a part of, using native plants. And we need to base our approach to designing a permanent culture and regenerative agriculture in science and careful research, not individual observation.
I agree with you and this is partly why I started this platform: We need to get away from anecdotal, someone famous said it works, so it works kind of thinking to socially verified approach: If many people in my area with a similar soil type have grown this specific plant successfully then I have high chances too. But there is no such platform for that kind of info. YET!
Happy to chat more!
A platform for sharing anecdotes is still providing anecdotes. What we need is research.
What do you think about Wikipedia? I think they did a great job of creating something which is not based on science but still has a high trust factor and usefulness for people.
It's probably pretty easy to fall into the trap of "we dont have many contributors, so any contributions are welcome", but what I'd _really_ like to see is a requirement that attempts are made to take measurements and pictures throughout the growth process.
That is a good thing. I like my job and do not want to spend any time on having land and growing my own food. Better leave that to someone that likes to do that job. Everybody happy.
I've been investigating a few systems of agriculture.
- There's Small Plot INtensive (SPIN) which is specialized for market production, emphasizing minimizing labor and maximizing market crops.
https://spinfarming.com/ (Be aware that these folks are selling their system as a course, and this is a sales site not an info site. You can get the details from reading carefully and watching the videos that practitioners have made.)
https://www.transitionculture.org/2011/09/05/spin-farming-ba...
Quitting Your Job To Farm on a Quarter Acre In Your Backyard? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SJx1SPClg6A
Backyard Farming: 2 Year Market Garden Update of Nature's Always Right Farms https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zpn1oGkQrrg
Profitable Farming and Designing for Farm Success by JEAN-MARTIN FORTIER https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=92GDHGPSmeI https://www.themarketgardener.com/
Neversink Farm in NY grosses $350,000 on farming 1.5 acres (area in production). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u5IE6lYKXRw
- Then there's the "Grow Bioinstensive" method which is designed to provide a complete diet in a small space while also building soil and fertility. They have been dialing it in for forty years and now have a turn-key system that is implemented and functioning all over the world.
http://growbiointensive.org/ (These folks are also selling their system, but they also have e.g. manuals you can download for free. I find their site curiously hard to use.)
- Permaculture (which could be called "applied ecology" with a kind of hippie spin. I'm not a hippie but I'm sometimes mistaken for one.) and a similar school (parallel evolution) called "Syntropic" Agriculture.
Both of these systems aim to mimic natural ecosystems to create "food forests" that produce crops year-round without inputs (no fertilizer, no irrigation.) The process takes 5-15 years or so but then is self-sustaining and regenerative.
For Permaculture I find Toby Hemenway's (RIP) videos very good:
https://tobyhemenway.com/videos/how-permaculture-can-save-hu...
https://tobyhemenway.com/videos/redesigning-civilization-wit...
There's a very lively and civil forum at https://permies.com/forums
For Syntropic agriculture: https://agendagotsch.com/en/what-is-syntropic-farming/
(FWIW, I find Gotsch's writing (in English) to be impenetrable, even though I pretty much know what he's doing. Anyway, his results are incontrovertable.)
I'm afraid I don't have a good link in re: Food Forests and eco-mimetic agriculture yet. This "Plant Abundance" fellow'...
I first got into Permaculture from reading my parents' copy of the Next Whole Earth Catalog ~25~30 years ago. (Yeah, I'm a California cliche. lol)
Right now I'm living in a small townhouse in San Francisco with a tiny yard. Somehow the covid virus pushed me to do what I can in the space available. I got some chicks and we're raising them and I've been growing things in large containers.
I can't really grow a lot of vegetables, we're out by the ocean so we don't get the warm climate typical of CA and it's the wrong season for annuals anyway. It was foggy 50F this morning. So I've been concentrating on building rich soil (for when I eventually get access to more land.)
I take wood chips that have been amended with chicken manure and feathers and layer it with Kellogg's GROMULCH[1], about four or five layers, water it well, then broadcast a dense seed mix (different mixes in different bins, whatever I have on hand at the time.) I call it "layer cake".
The GROMULCH mycelium rapidly pervades the wood and converts it to an almost chalky consistency. (The earth "akin to the vegetative" of the hugelculture quote.[2]) Part of the idea here is to see how well various plants' roots integrate with the mycelium. Another aspect is that the seedlings are so dense that their roots will form a mat or fiberous layer over the whole surface. The leaves will cover the soil quickly, protecting it and creating a moist micro-climate.
Before long the bin will be all soil (instead of half wood chips and half soil) and it will be enriched by the growth of the fungus and plants.
At that point, I put the bin in the chicken run and let them eat the plants, then dump it out and cover it with more wood chips and let the chickens kick and scratch it out. I'll store it there and rake it up for building planting beds in the Spring. Eventually, I can use the material itself to make layer cake instead of buying more GROMULCH from the store.
In one bin I added some starting-to-rot lettuce and some woody growth trimmed off a hedge, in another it's just wood chips and GROMULCH. In a third bin I added some nightcrawlers...
Meanwhile, I'm starting perennials like dwarf tamarillo and alpine strawberries, again for when I have access to more land.
Enough about me.
In re: your project, first, congratulations! I think you've identified two key pieces of the puzzle: a plant database and a specialized online marketplace. (The garden log and planner is also awesome, just I personally don't see it as as big of a barrier as the other two.) I think we also need a marketplace for land (Airbnb for small plots of garden/farm, eh? Hosh mentioned https://sharedearth.com but I didn't get any response from the site when I tried it. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23887329 Hosh if you read this, sorry for not contacting you yet, I fully intend to...)
There are a few existing plant databases, mostly not as useful as they could be, my advice there is to focus on standards and open data, don't try to reinvent a wheel, rather engage and cooperate with the folks who are already ahead of you.
Same thing with the specialized marketplace: there are e.g. online/digital Farmer's Market systems and sites, but again, they don't seem as useful to me as they might be. I'm thinking Craigslist+Etsy for handmade food and food products, combined with scheduling and bidding features (e.g. I am a chef and I want to plan out meals for my restaurant, the site should help me pre-order ingredients. Or I am a grower and I want to pre-sell my crops before I even sprout them... Eh?)
[1] ShamelessC ↗ Great idea, lots of potential. Made some quick notes browsing the site itself: foofoo4u ↗ > It is really magical if you think of how much you spare our planet with growing your own food: You need to get a job to make money so that you can spend that money on buying food which was produced and delivered close to you by large, complex and very inefficient industries. This system spends incredible amounts of resources (time, energy, labor) which you can save by simply growing your own food.
Favicon would be nice.
Lists: How do you ensure quality public lists? Curation? Upvotes? Rigid rules?
Statistics on plants: In addition to "wants", and "haves", would it also be possible to implement a "satisfied"/"dissatisfied" stat for people who did/didn't have success with the plant in practice?
I think something like this would be particularly cool with users having the ability to update little case studies they performed with individual plants, lists and companions that would be linked to on their respective pages.
Companions: I love the idea of a list of "proven combinations". I see in the description you're claiming these combos work well. What I'd really like to see is an explanation for why each combination works well, if there is one, or at the very least a case study of someone else having used the combination effectively.
I guess mostly what I'm looking for, as someone new to permaculture, is a vote of confidence that the information you're providing is well-informed. That can come in the form of just more in-lined text explanations, links to data/research used as reasoning for your companions, or just inlined case studies from wiki contributers themselves.
I've got a buddy who is _far_ more into permaculture than I am. I'm gonna ask him to check it out later today. I'll respond here with any of his comments.
It's not the first time I've seen this line of thinking. It's economically naive. I'll explain why.
Let's imagine everyone decided to grow their own garden like the author suggests. What does one need to start a garden? The common items are shovels, timber, soil, hoses, wires, fertilizer, knee pads, gloves, pots, pesticide, and many other things. Obtaining these items requires physically driving to one's hardware store. Most people drive SUVs. This means there is a sudden influx of people driving their gas guzzling machines to obtain these basic items. We also have to consider the reality that multiple trips will be made. People commonly forget to purchase basic things, need to make returns, or realize they are short on supply (such as soil) and need to purchase more. Now consider other realities. Most people don't know how to grow. Even fewer people know how to grow a plant to its maximum potential. It takes many seasons for individuals to learn the best techniques. Think about the wasted resources spent on this. Now think about the excess waste commonly found in gardens by those who finally learn how to grow. I see this all the time. Gardens filled with oversupply of produce. More than what even their friends want to take home. Consider the yield of produce in respect to time, labor, cost of materials, and CO2 emissions. For every shovel, glove, hose, pot, etc. purchased, for every car drive made, and for every supply chain used to produce these goods, is only put to work on a small plot of land in one's backyard. They are not used to their full potential. This is both a waste of resources and an unnecessary increase in CO2 emissions. If these same resources were used on an actual farm, then they will be used for larger portions of land which will in turn yield more produce. In effect, the costs are being spread across the land, thus making them more effective.
I'd like to explain this in the opposite perspective. The absurdity seems to become much more apparent this way. The author says that these industries are inefficient as appose to simply growing in one's backyard. If it truly were more efficient, then wouldn't it be most effective if industries simply adopted this? They are looking to save money after all. Instead of purchasing one giant tractor, why not revert to shovels and an army of physical labor? Instead of hauling supplies on a few semi-trucks, why not dispatch an army of SUVs? Instead of having one massive farm that spans hundreds of acres, why not break it up into thousands of 500 sq/ft "mini gardens", each of which has its own dedicated set of shovels, hoses, gloves, knee pads, etc. And for every "mini garden", instead of growing being dictated by farm owners with many generations of growing experience, they will be grown by individuals who hardly have any experience at all.