6 ms·

How cost effective is this space-bucketry? Right now tomatoes are $3.99/lb at WholeFoods. If I grew my own tomatoes, and my yield was, say, 5lbs, would the cost

How cost effective is this space-bucketry? Right now tomatoes are $3.99/lb at WholeFoods. If I grew my own tomatoes, and my yield was, say, 5lbs, would the cost of growing them (electricity, nutrients, etc.) come out to be less than $20?

ZoeZoeBee 11y ago
Most people are growing something which is a little more expensive per pound than $20
IkmoIkmo 11y ago
Holy crap almost $9 per kg, that's expensive! Anyway it wouldn't be very cost effective but you can certainly save some money. Thing is, one tomato is about 200g total, if you eat that say 5 days a week, you're looking at about $0.50 a day. Even if you can cut that price in half by growing it yourself, you're saving $7.50 a month, and you'll surely easily spend more than 2 hours a month on setting things up, germinating seeds, harvesting etc. At say a quite modest (for HN) $30 salary per hour, you're throwing out the window 8x your savings in opportunity cost. So you'd only really do this if you enjoy it, or if you grow pot. (for pot, you probably get 150g off of a single plant, and prices of $10 a gram are pretty typical. If you grow a plant every few months, it's probably worth your time in a world where it's legal, although in that world, prices come down pretty fast, too). In short, growing pretty much anything at home can save you money if you value your opportunity cost at 0 (i.e. do it purely for fun). If you actually account for your opportunity cost, it's pretty terrible, industrialised farming is just way more efficient. If you enjoy it and have a garden, it can actually save you a few hundred bucks a year, much more than these buckets can (the economics of paying for artificial sunshine rather than using the sun we have makes no sense, nor does the investment in any of the material when you have soil, even just in pots if you have no garden), but you'll probably spend a few hours in the garden each weekend and so your hourly wage is beyond crap, you really just have to do it for fun and see the cost savings as a nice surprise. The buckets aren't cost effective, they're purely for weed, or for fun DIY projects, not for saving money. (they can save some money, again, if you don't put a value on your time, but not as well as simply using pots or a garden.) For a quick idea about the cost. Big thing obviously is lighting. A lot of guys use 100W setups for 16-18 hours a day, at a 15c per kwh rate you're paying about $7.50 in electricity alone per month. So if you use that setup to grow enough so you can eat 1 tomato every single weekday from your bucket, all else being free, you're still saving just $17.50 or so in the shop, and spending $7.50 on lights. So your net benefit is $10 a month. Now imagine your neighbour offered you a job to build him a bucket (for free, with your own money), and pay you $10 a month to tend the tomato plant in his bucket, you'd say hell no, but those are really the economics (ignoring the fact you may think it's fun and do it even if it saves you no money at all). At a slightly bigger scale it can make sense but again, you'd really rather just have a small garden, plant multiple crops, not setup any electrical work or anything and pay no extra electricity. And at a huge scale it makes no sense whatsoever, i.e. if you do this to sell to other people, your production costs are waaaaay higher than a normal farm.

ZoeZoeBee 11y ago

Most people are growing something which is a little more expensive per pound than $20

IkmoIkmo 11y ago

Holy crap almost $9 per kg, that's expensive! Anyway it wouldn't be very cost effective but you can certainly save some money. Thing is, one tomato is about 200g total, if you eat that say 5 days a week, you're looking at about $0.50 a day. Even if you can cut that price in half by growing it yourself, you're saving $7.50 a month, and you'll surely easily spend more than 2 hours a month on setting things up, germinating seeds, harvesting etc. At say a quite modest (for HN) $30 salary per hour, you're throwing out the window 8x your savings in opportunity cost. So you'd only really do this if you enjoy it, or if you grow pot. (for pot, you probably get 150g off of a single plant, and prices of $10 a gram are pretty typical. If you grow a plant every few months, it's probably worth your time in a world where it's legal, although in that world, prices come down pretty fast, too). In short, growing pretty much anything at home can save you money if you value your opportunity cost at 0 (i.e. do it purely for fun). If you actually account for your opportunity cost, it's pretty terrible, industrialised farming is just way more efficient. If you enjoy it and have a garden, it can actually save you a few hundred bucks a year, much more than these buckets can (the economics of paying for artificial sunshine rather than using the sun we have makes no sense, nor does the investment in any of the material when you have soil, even just in pots if you have no garden), but you'll probably spend a few hours in the garden each weekend and so your hourly wage is beyond crap, you really just have to do it for fun and see the cost savings as a nice surprise. The buckets aren't cost effective, they're purely for weed, or for fun DIY projects, not for saving money. (they can save some money, again, if you don't put a value on your time, but not as well as simply using pots or a garden.) For a quick idea about the cost. Big thing obviously is lighting. A lot of guys use 100W setups for 16-18 hours a day, at a 15c per kwh rate you're paying about $7.50 in electricity alone per month. So if you use that setup to grow enough so you can eat 1 tomato every single weekday from your bucket, all else being free, you're still saving just $17.50 or so in the shop, and spending $7.50 on lights. So your net benefit is $10 a month. Now imagine your neighbour offered you a job to build him a bucket (for free, with your own money), and pay you $10 a month to tend the tomato plant in his bucket, you'd say hell no, but those are really the economics (ignoring the fact you may think it's fun and do it even if it saves you no money at all). At a slightly bigger scale it can make sense but again, you'd really rather just have a small garden, plant multiple crops, not setup any electrical work or anything and pay no extra electricity. And at a huge scale it makes no sense whatsoever, i.e. if you do this to sell to other people, your production costs are waaaaay higher than a normal farm.