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I don't think you have any grasp of the efficiency gains brought by modern agriculture and its scale. I actually grew up on an old school farm and it took the

I don't think you have any grasp of the efficiency gains brought by modern agriculture and its scale. I actually grew up on an old school farm and it took the land area equivalent of an apartment complex to feed our one family all year round. Tending to it was almost a full time job for 6 of the 12 months of each year. This is how people have been living for hundreds of years, the math is pretty well understood. If you have anything better than a pair of op-eds to show that home gardening can be made 10-100x more efficient than it was a generation ago, I would love to see. My fruit+veg garden is a fun hobby and is quite large and healthy, but there is no way it could feed me for a year, never mind my family.

DoreenMichele 8y ago
What part of "Grow some of your own food" are you interpreting to mean "grow all of your own food"? I'm well aware that the efficiencies of modern agriculture has allowed us to have more than half the global population living in cities for the first time in human history. This not only become true within my own lifetime, it became true within the lifetimes of my children. None of which is really pertinent to the idea that there is value in having some food supplies outside the chain of industrial agriculture as a protective measure. Last I heard, American gardens provided about 10 percent of America food. I didn't bother to mention that earlier because I couldn't find a source. Ten percent of a nation's food is not insubstantial, even if is less efficient than industrial agriculture.
- kuzehanka 8y ago
  I really doubt american home gardens are providing 10% of america's food. But I think a large home garden like mine could ostensibly provide 10% of my family's fruit/veg intake. It takes a nontrivial mount of work to maintain, it takes a lot of water and energy, and it takes ownership of a large piece of land, and I could have also subdivided the land and built a second house instead of that garden. Oh did I mention one fuckup with extreme weather pests or birds means you lose everything? Guess who was enjoying my first ever harvest of peaches? It wasn't me, it was the fucking cockatoos that raided it in less than an hour. All of those opportunity costs to reduce my intake of harmful chemicals by 10%? That's laughable. No one is doing home gardening unless they enjoy it. The health benefits are a minor bonus that comes way down the list after real benefits like proper flavour.
  - DoreenMichele 8y ago
    No one is doing home gardening unless they enjoy it. The health benefits are a minor bonus that comes way down the list after real benefits like proper flavour. I've spent time on an email list where the owner was growing food for their ill spouse in order to have control over everything that went into that food. Not everyone does things for the same reasons you do them.
- threatofrain 8y ago
  If you thought there were enough people who thought similarly, wouldn't the right move be to sponsor a farm together? Don't people already do things like that? IMO a community funded farm with a highly accessible interface and transparent operations would be amenable to a lot of health-concerned people. It makes a lot sense to me that like-minded individuals who don't like how how their food is handled should prefer a scalable method that doesn't break your back and takes advantage of modern efficiencies, and a way to handle excess supply so you're not wasteful. I can't see a vehicle going from house to house collecting tiny and disorganized surplus. Plus, I'd rather see what a community plot could do rather than vs small home plots good for only growing mint tea, if even that.
  - DoreenMichele 8y ago
    No. Monocultures are a large part of the problem. If you want a human world that is resistant to drug resistant infections, you want a bunch of individual efforts to grow things in the kitchen window of their city apartment and in small container gardens on the balcony and in square foot gardens in the back yard. That's the correct antidote to the monoculture of indistrial agriculture. Biological and genetic diversity is how you foster a world where one genetic variation of one infection cannot simply run like wildfire through the global population. You want an intentionally inefficient system. The efficiencies of industrial agriculture are the problem. They are how we are creating these super bugs.
    - threatofrain 8y ago
      But there's nothing stopping your community-run farm from engaging in ecologically aware practices... the right move seems to be to take control of industry, not to decentralise it into home plots. I feel you're losing levers and knobs with which to operate your ecological concerns, and one ends up hoping the decentralised winds blows in their favor.
      - DoreenMichele 8y ago
        It doesn't have to be like solar power. When they began creating tree farms, they came up with some German word that means "forest death" (or something like that) to describe the sickly trees you get from planting nothing but a single species of tree. It strips the land of the same nutrients over and over. You combat that with commercial fertilizer and commercial pesticides. It is fundamentally not possible to simultaneously pursue both goals you espouse. You decry the variability in quality/quantity of hardest while claiming we can solve this on industrial farms. The consistency of yield that you seem to feel is the most important detail is the root cause of drug resistant infections developing. If you want to stop crating ever more efficient super bugs that perform excellently well at eating people, then you need to intentionally inject more inefficiency and diversity into our food chain.

DoreenMichele 8y ago

What part of "Grow some of your own food" are you interpreting to mean "grow all of your own food"? I'm well aware that the efficiencies of modern agriculture has allowed us to have more than half the global population living in cities for the first time in human history. This not only become true within my own lifetime, it became true within the lifetimes of my children. None of which is really pertinent to the idea that there is value in having some food supplies outside the chain of industrial agriculture as a protective measure. Last I heard, American gardens provided about 10 percent of America food. I didn't bother to mention that earlier because I couldn't find a source. Ten percent of a nation's food is not insubstantial, even if is less efficient than industrial agriculture.

kuzehanka 8y ago
I really doubt american home gardens are providing 10% of america's food. But I think a large home garden like mine could ostensibly provide 10% of my family's fruit/veg intake. It takes a nontrivial mount of work to maintain, it takes a lot of water and energy, and it takes ownership of a large piece of land, and I could have also subdivided the land and built a second house instead of that garden. Oh did I mention one fuckup with extreme weather pests or birds means you lose everything? Guess who was enjoying my first ever harvest of peaches? It wasn't me, it was the fucking cockatoos that raided it in less than an hour. All of those opportunity costs to reduce my intake of harmful chemicals by 10%? That's laughable. No one is doing home gardening unless they enjoy it. The health benefits are a minor bonus that comes way down the list after real benefits like proper flavour.
- DoreenMichele 8y ago
  No one is doing home gardening unless they enjoy it. The health benefits are a minor bonus that comes way down the list after real benefits like proper flavour. I've spent time on an email list where the owner was growing food for their ill spouse in order to have control over everything that went into that food. Not everyone does things for the same reasons you do them.
threatofrain 8y ago
If you thought there were enough people who thought similarly, wouldn't the right move be to sponsor a farm together? Don't people already do things like that? IMO a community funded farm with a highly accessible interface and transparent operations would be amenable to a lot of health-concerned people. It makes a lot sense to me that like-minded individuals who don't like how how their food is handled should prefer a scalable method that doesn't break your back and takes advantage of modern efficiencies, and a way to handle excess supply so you're not wasteful. I can't see a vehicle going from house to house collecting tiny and disorganized surplus. Plus, I'd rather see what a community plot could do rather than vs small home plots good for only growing mint tea, if even that.
- DoreenMichele 8y ago
  No. Monocultures are a large part of the problem. If you want a human world that is resistant to drug resistant infections, you want a bunch of individual efforts to grow things in the kitchen window of their city apartment and in small container gardens on the balcony and in square foot gardens in the back yard. That's the correct antidote to the monoculture of indistrial agriculture. Biological and genetic diversity is how you foster a world where one genetic variation of one infection cannot simply run like wildfire through the global population. You want an intentionally inefficient system. The efficiencies of industrial agriculture are the problem. They are how we are creating these super bugs.
  - threatofrain 8y ago
    But there's nothing stopping your community-run farm from engaging in ecologically aware practices... the right move seems to be to take control of industry, not to decentralise it into home plots. I feel you're losing levers and knobs with which to operate your ecological concerns, and one ends up hoping the decentralised winds blows in their favor.
    - DoreenMichele 8y ago
      It doesn't have to be like solar power. When they began creating tree farms, they came up with some German word that means "forest death" (or something like that) to describe the sickly trees you get from planting nothing but a single species of tree. It strips the land of the same nutrients over and over. You combat that with commercial fertilizer and commercial pesticides. It is fundamentally not possible to simultaneously pursue both goals you espouse. You decry the variability in quality/quantity of hardest while claiming we can solve this on industrial farms. The consistency of yield that you seem to feel is the most important detail is the root cause of drug resistant infections developing. If you want to stop crating ever more efficient super bugs that perform excellently well at eating people, then you need to intentionally inject more inefficiency and diversity into our food chain.