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> 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

by Lazare 6y ago

> 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!

bluntfang 6y ago
>...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.
- jopsen 6y ago
  That's a very extreme position. 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 :)
  - bluntfang 6y ago
    >A call for deindustrialization is so far fetched it's pointless. Can you show me who in this thread is calling for this?
    - eitland 6y ago
      >>A call for deindustrialization is so far fetched it's pointless. > Can you show me who in this thread is calling for this? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24697463 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24697463
  - hosh 6y ago
    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.
- montenegrohugo 6y ago
  > 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).
  - CommieDetector 6y ago
    Communist detected! Deploy starvation memes!
  - bluntfang 6y ago
    >as you suggest 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.
    - eitland 6y ago
      > FYI, if I suggested anything at all it was that industrialization under capitalism is bad, 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.
      - bluntfang 6y ago
        Then I resign that my communication failed. 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.
- eptcyka 6y ago
  >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?
  - simgooder 6y ago
    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.
- cedex12 6y ago
  > 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?
  - bluntfang 6y ago
    >doesn't industrialization allow for... 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.
    - cedex12 6y ago
      > 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?
    - vimy 6y ago
      > 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. [1] https://www.brookings.edu/blog/future-development/2018/09/27/a-global-tipping-point-half-the-world-is-now-middle-class-or-wealthier/ https://www.brookings.edu/blog/future-development/2018/09/27... https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/world-population-in-extreme-poverty-absolute https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/world-population-in-extre...
- nzmsv 6y ago
  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.
  - hosh 6y ago
    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.
    - 0-O-0 6y ago
      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?
      - hosh 6y ago
        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.
kiliantics 6y ago
> 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.
- jonfw 6y ago
  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.
  - kiliantics 6y ago
    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.
adriand 6y ago
> 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.
- hosh 6y ago
  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.
  - Loughla 6y ago
    >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.
    - hosh 6y ago
      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. https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/permaculture-for-the-future/id1494403834?i=1000471762358 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-farming-revolution-how-to-create-self-sufficient-cities/8660204.article 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.
op03 6y ago
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.
- hosh 6y ago
  ... 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.
- hirundo 6y ago
  > 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.
  - op03 6y ago
    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.
nicoffeine 6y ago
> 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. -------- 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_Evaluating_Greenhouse_Tomato_and_Pepper_Input_Efficiency_Use_in_Kosovo https://www.researchgate.net/publication/326836113_Evaluatin... [2] http://www.renewablefarming.com/images/2015Images/2015PDF/Gabe-Brown.pdf http://www.renewablefarming.com/images/2015Images/2015PDF/Ga...
belorn 6y ago
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.
macawfish 6y ago
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.
- roboben 6y ago
  Also not to forget that nothing in this system focuses on some mildly important things like taste :)
  - macawfish 6y ago
    Not to mention basic nutrition! People are eating foods starved even of common electrolytes. It's ridiculous.
akiselev 6y ago
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.
- roboben 6y ago
  Thanks for that! I agree 100% 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".
  - jonfw 6y ago
    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?
roboben 6y ago
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. Happy to hear your thoughts!
- Lazare 6y ago
  > 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.
gdubs 6y ago
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.
carapace 6y ago
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.
fuzzybear3965 6y ago
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.
noblethrasher 6y ago
Speaking of stupid efficiencies: “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 https://www.pitt.edu/~syd/ASIND.html
- FooHentai 6y ago
  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. Similar commentary from Marx on Abstract Labour.

by Lazare 6y ago

bluntfang 6y ago

>...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.

jopsen 6y ago
That's a very extreme position. 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 :)
- bluntfang 6y ago
  >A call for deindustrialization is so far fetched it's pointless. Can you show me who in this thread is calling for this?
  - eitland 6y ago
    >>A call for deindustrialization is so far fetched it's pointless. > Can you show me who in this thread is calling for this? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24697463 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24697463
- hosh 6y ago
  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.
montenegrohugo 6y ago
> 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).
- CommieDetector 6y ago
  Communist detected! Deploy starvation memes!
- bluntfang 6y ago
  >as you suggest 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.
  - eitland 6y ago
    > FYI, if I suggested anything at all it was that industrialization under capitalism is bad, 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.
    - bluntfang 6y ago
      Then I resign that my communication failed. 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.
eptcyka 6y ago
>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?
- simgooder 6y ago
  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.
cedex12 6y ago
> 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?
- bluntfang 6y ago
  >doesn't industrialization allow for... 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.
  - cedex12 6y ago
    > 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?
  - vimy 6y ago
    > 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. [1] https://www.brookings.edu/blog/future-development/2018/09/27/a-global-tipping-point-half-the-world-is-now-middle-class-or-wealthier/ https://www.brookings.edu/blog/future-development/2018/09/27... https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/world-population-in-extreme-poverty-absolute https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/world-population-in-extre...
nzmsv 6y ago
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.
- hosh 6y ago
  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.
  - 0-O-0 6y ago
    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?
    - hosh 6y ago
      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.

kiliantics 6y ago

> 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.

jonfw 6y ago
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.
- kiliantics 6y ago
  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.

adriand 6y ago

> 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.

hosh 6y ago
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.
- Loughla 6y ago
  >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.
  - hosh 6y ago
    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. https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/permaculture-for-the-future/id1494403834?i=1000471762358 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-farming-revolution-how-to-create-self-sufficient-cities/8660204.article 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.

op03 6y ago

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.

hosh 6y ago
... 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.
hirundo 6y ago
> 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.
- op03 6y ago
  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.

nicoffeine 6y ago

> 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. -------- 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_Evaluating_Greenhouse_Tomato_and_Pepper_Input_Efficiency_Use_in_Kosovo https://www.researchgate.net/publication/326836113_Evaluatin... [2] http://www.renewablefarming.com/images/2015Images/2015PDF/Gabe-Brown.pdf http://www.renewablefarming.com/images/2015Images/2015PDF/Ga...

belorn 6y ago

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.

macawfish 6y ago

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.

roboben 6y ago
Also not to forget that nothing in this system focuses on some mildly important things like taste :)
- macawfish 6y ago
  Not to mention basic nutrition! People are eating foods starved even of common electrolytes. It's ridiculous.

akiselev 6y ago

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.

roboben 6y ago
Thanks for that! I agree 100% 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".
- jonfw 6y ago
  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?

roboben 6y ago

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. Happy to hear your thoughts!

Lazare 6y ago
> 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.

gdubs 6y ago

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.

carapace 6y ago

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.

fuzzybear3965 6y ago

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.

noblethrasher 6y ago

Speaking of stupid efficiencies: “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 https://www.pitt.edu/~syd/ASIND.html

FooHentai 6y ago
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. Similar commentary from Marx on Abstract Labour.