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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?

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.
    - threatofrain 8y ago
      It still sounds like transparent governance of community-funded farms would enable you to address the biodiversity of your region. Having an efficient farm doesn't mean you have to crank the efficiency dial to the maximum. But inefficiencies are paid with the fact that fewer people can access the ecological lifestyle we're talking about, whereas a community farm will allow someone who doesn't have a garden to pursue an ecological lifestyle. Furthermore, a community governing a farm can centrally plan out for ecological concerns, and they can actually measure and study their progress. A decentralised community is hoping the winds of fortune will coordinate them. A lot of this comes down to whether you trust the ability of a community to maintain control. Also I know people who have a well-sized garden meant to actually make produce, but nobody would say it could remotely alleviate their food or lifestyle burdens. The time-sink is huge; they do it for the gratification of home gardening, not as a mitigation of food burden.

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.
  - threatofrain 8y ago
    It still sounds like transparent governance of community-funded farms would enable you to address the biodiversity of your region. Having an efficient farm doesn't mean you have to crank the efficiency dial to the maximum. But inefficiencies are paid with the fact that fewer people can access the ecological lifestyle we're talking about, whereas a community farm will allow someone who doesn't have a garden to pursue an ecological lifestyle. Furthermore, a community governing a farm can centrally plan out for ecological concerns, and they can actually measure and study their progress. A decentralised community is hoping the winds of fortune will coordinate them. A lot of this comes down to whether you trust the ability of a community to maintain control. Also I know people who have a well-sized garden meant to actually make produce, but nobody would say it could remotely alleviate their food or lifestyle burdens. The time-sink is huge; they do it for the gratification of home gardening, not as a mitigation of food burden.