Have a home garden, don't really use much of 1) or 2), and we get enough rain throughout most of the growing season that usage of 3) is pretty light - on the or

Have a home garden, don't really use much of 1) or 2), and we get enough rain throughout most of the growing season that usage of 3) is pretty light - on the order of "we water the garden for 1-2 minutes once every 2 weeks or so, and it's fine". (I don't have precise figures to attach to these.) (More on 1) - we do use Jiffy planters for some things, which we then rinse after transplanting and reuse the next season. However, we mostly sow directly outside.) There are a few things missing from this comparison, though! First and foremost: impact of shipping. Once you ship zucchinis from Mexico to your local grocer / supermarket, there's a lot more embodied carbon than in a zucchini you pulled from your front step. Second: mechanization. AFAIK, most home gardening is a pretty manual process. Not so for industrial-scale farming, which involves tractors and tillers and spraying planes and giant irrigators and so on. While there is a bit of "amortization at scale", those all add to the total lifecycle resources necessary to grow something. (Not to mention that all that equipment has to be built somewhere from materials extracted somewhere else, and the ongoing maintenance cost / burden of this equipment is decidedly higher than for our push mower or pruning shears.) Finally: land use. Most farmland was (either recently or historically) cleared from forests, which are also giant CO2 sinks. The most prominent example today is probably heavy deforestation in the Amazon, mostly for agricultural and meat production. Now, of course our home garden sits on previously cleared land, but we're not clearing any more of it - in fact, we have trees, bushes, ground cover, etc. in parts of our garden space, meaning that we're taking what was underutilized urban land and converting it to a CO2 sink. I'd love to see a scientific lifecycle analysis of gardening vs. agriculture, along with guidelines for "environmentally responsible gardening" - but I'd be very surprised if the analysis didn't come out heavily in favour of local small-scale gardening.