Who the fuck prioritized efficiency over quality in their backyard garden?
My handmade solid maple and walnut furniture will never reach the yield or cost-effectiveness as IKEA. I guess I’ll just have to burn my shop down
It is very therapeutic to garden, though.
Submitted 6 months ago by FiniteBanjo@lemmy.today to science_memes@mander.xyz
https://lemmy.today/pictrs/image/d8a4329a-6092-4cc3-97e5-f629938186c5.png
Comments
Fenrisulfir@lemmy.ca 6 months ago
TubularTittyFrog@lemmy.world 6 months ago
You are missing the point.
It’s not about your shop. It’s about everyone making their own furniture… which doesn’t scale and isn’t feasible.
YeetPics@mander.xyz 6 months ago
It scaled and was feasible before the industrialization of production.
I think you mean, you don’t want it to scale or be feasible.
FiniteBanjo@lemmy.today 6 months ago
Who the fuck prioritized efficiency over quality in their backyard garden?
The Billions of human beings who rely on it to live.
meep_launcher@lemm.ee 6 months ago
I think the imperative phrase here is backyard garden. They aren’t referring to a 40 acre field of wheat and potatoes, they probably are thinking a 10’x10’ raised bed.
Fenrisulfir@lemmy.ca 6 months ago
What exactly does homegrown produce mean for you?
Sethayy@sh.itjust.works 6 months ago
Funny enough ‘efficiency’ industrially tends to just mean what makes the most money anyways, so most crop’s have been trained to be nutrient sparse, yet large
captain_aggravated@sh.itjust.works 6 months ago
100% granted. In the 100 square feet of my property I set aside for vegetable gardening in my spare time, I cannot grow as much food as a full time professional farmer can in a given 100 square feet of a multi-acre field.
I can, however, produce more food than the non-native species of turf grass that used to grow there.
PhlubbaDubba@lemm.ee 6 months ago
Surplusable farming is literally the basis on which all civilization is built
Like the whole point of the way things work for us now is that you don’t have to be a farmer or a hunter or a gatherer to be able to have access to a consistent source of food.
Cylusthevirus@kbin.social 6 months ago
Why would home gardeners optimize for yield and cost effectiveness? They can't deploy automation or economies of scale.
You garden at home because you enjoy the flavor, freshness, and variety. Those are the perks. Miss me with those mealy, flavorless grocery store tomatoes.
FiniteBanjo@lemmy.today 6 months ago
I came to the realization earlier today that there are an alarming number of people who theorize that they can just live off homegrown and composting. They think they can challenge big agriculture by “going off the grid” and that society would be better without subsidized industrial farming.
That’s why they would optimize for yield and cost effectiveness. They think they can compete.
xor@infosec.pub 6 months ago
man, you’re going to be really alarmed when you hear about community gardens and greenhouses…
the idea for most people isn’t to completely replace all farming, but to reduce it, grow food instead of a lawn, have some fresh delicious non-gmo shit…
have something to fall back on when the nuclear apocalypse happens…industrial farming will never be as nutritious, delicious, or satisfying as home-grown…
p.s. working with soil has natural antidepressant properties…
mister_monster@monero.town 6 months ago
Absolutely you can compete my dude. Just not if you’re doing it commercially. If you have the space you can grow everything you need and save a ton of money.
The problem is everyone can’t do that. It doesn’t scale. To feed 8 billion you need the big ag machine. But you, yourself, if you want to focus your time and effort on digging in the soil instead of being a corporate cog, can absolutely support your needs for very cheap.
BakerBagel@midwest.social 6 months ago
How northern are we talking? Our tomatoes didn’t so well last year in Northern Ohio, but the summer before i was absolutely drowning in cherry tomatoes!
mozz@mbin.grits.dev 6 months ago
Fun fact: IDK about like a backyard vegetable garden, but small family-sized farms are actually more productive per unit of land than big industrial agriculture.
The farming conglomerates like to enforce big farming operations because they make things easier for the managerial class, and let them be in charge of everything. But if your goal is just to produce food and have the farmers make a living, small farms are actually better even economically (and not just for like 10 other reasons).
FiniteBanjo@lemmy.today 6 months ago
This article about the study:
Aragón conducted a study on farm productivity of more than 4,000 farming households in Uganda over a five-year period. The study considered farm productivity based on land, labour and tools as well as yields per unit area of cultivated land. His findings suggested that even though yields were higher for smaller farms, farm productivity was actually higher for larger farms. Similar research in Peru, Tanzania and Bangladesh supported these findings.
And then the Actual Study HERE:
What explains these divergent findings? Answering this question is important given its consequential policy implications. If small farms are indeed more productive, then policies that encourage small landholdings (such as land redistribution) could increase aggregate productivity (see the discussion in Collier and Dercon, 2014).
We argue that these divergent results reflect the limitation of using yields as a measure of productivity. Our contribution is to show that, in many empirical applications, yields are not informative of the size-productivity relationship, and can lead to qualitatively different insights. Our findings cast doubts on the interpretation of the inverse yield-size relationship as evidence that small farms are more productive, and stress the need to revisit the existing empirical evidence.
Meaning the author is advocating for more scrutiny against the claim and against land redistribution as a policy stance with the intention of increasing productivity.
First, farmers have small scale operations (the average cultivated area is 2.3 hectares).
The definition of “small family farms” in this case is on average more than 5 acres, which would absolutely be under the umbrella of subsidized industrial agriculture in developed nations.
mozz@mbin.grits.dev 6 months ago
Yeah, that's why I included "per unit of land." It is in practice a little more complex, and a lot of times the smaller farms are more labor-intensive.
My opinion is that modern farming is efficient enough that we can very obviously sustain the farmer, and sell the food at a reasonable price, and it all works -- the only reason this is even complicated at all and we have to talk about optimizing for labor (certainly in 1st-world farms) is that we're trying to support a bloodsucking managerial class that demands six-figure salaries for doing fuck-all, and subsistence wages for the farmers and less than that for farmworkers, and stockholder dividends, and people making fortunes from international trade; and if we just fixed all that bullshit then the issue would be land productivity and everything would be fine.
But yes, in terms of labor productivity it's a little more complex, and none of the above system I listed is likely to change anytime soon, so that's fair.
LibertyLizard@slrpnk.net 6 months ago
5 acres is miniscule compared to conventional agriculture, at least in the US. So these aren’t backyard gardens but they are likely quite different from agribusiness as well.
lgmjon64@lemmy.world 6 months ago
Also, you can’t just look at the amount of food produced, but the amount produced vs waste, storage and transportation costs. Most things in the garden can stay ripe on the plant for a while and can be picked as needed.
Anecdotally, we were supplying about 80% of our fruit and veg needs on our own garden plot on our standard city residential lot with a family of 7. And we were literally giving tomatoes, citrus and zucchini away as fast as we could.
match@pawb.social 6 months ago
counterpoint: industrial agriculture exists mostly to sustain animal products
FiniteBanjo@lemmy.today 6 months ago
That’s a really good counterpoint.
sukhmel@programming.dev 6 months ago
You mean, compared to what goes to the market for people?
I don’t eat much of not industrial agriculture products, even local farms only produce fruits, and I would say they are also industrial (not sure where is the line)
Bademantel@feddit.de 6 months ago
Cows and other farm animals need a lot of food:
More than three-quarters of global agricultural land is used for livestock, despite meat and dairy making up a much smaller share of the world’s protein and calories.
flora_explora@beehaw.org 6 months ago
Not only that. But our agriculture is so centered around animals that we also have a huge surplus of manure (the animals’ feces, horn shavings, basically anything left of them) that we then use on all kinds of plant crops. It is so baked into the system that it will be a long way before we can really get a animal-free agriculture…
zeekaran@sopuli.xyz 6 months ago
The animal products are also just more industrial scale, subsidized farming, too.
flora_explora@beehaw.org 6 months ago
This is certainly true for our modern agriculture today. But is this really true for any possible industrial agriculture? Couldn’t we also have a plant based industrial agriculture leaving domesticated animals out of the equation altogether? Sure, we are a far way off from that. But I think it would be achievable and that we should aim for it.
blazera@lemmy.world 6 months ago
The more you grow and eat at home, the less the food industry needs to burn fuel to ship. I know you folks in the US hate doing anything to help out with the world, but if you took the saying of be the change you want to see, imagine the tens of millions of acres being wasted on lawns being put to environmental and nutritional use. Imagine instead of putting leaves into plastic bags to get shipped to a landfill, or burning, houses normalized having compost piles. You get to put waste paper and cardboard in there too instead of bagging it.
I challenge all of yall to grow beans this season. They grow fast, they grow easy, theyre pretty nutritionally complete, they fertilize your soil themselves. Make use of your land.
SomeAmateur@sh.itjust.works 6 months ago
Yup we shoud normalize gardening and canning. It’s a thing my grandparents knew. Their families survived times of world wars, dust bowls and the great depression. They probably didn’t have much choice in the moment but even when times got better they kept up a wonderful little garden. Kid me didn’t get why they didn’t just buy the things they needed.
I love the conveniences of modern farming and I use it every day. But like all big industialized systems they can be fragile. Covid was a huge problem for a lot of indistries and thankfully farming wasn’t really one of them. But if it was countless people would have struggled.
I’m not really a prepper or anything crazy but I don’t want to forget the lessons learned just a few decades ago- gardening is great and worth the effort.
GBU_28@lemm.ee 6 months ago
What a bullshit blanket rude comment. Lots of folks in the US are working hard to affect change at their personal and local level. You should edit your comment because it’s nationalistic and disparaging.
Aceticon@lemmy.world 6 months ago
It makes sense for it to be the same as solar power: just because most of energy generation is done in big facilities and even some kinds of solar generation (such as solar concentrators) can only be done in large facilities, doesn’t make having some solar panels providing part of one’s needs (or even all of one’s needs for some of the time) less cost effective in Economic terms or a good thing in Ecologic terms.
So it makes sense to raise some of one’s food, but maybe not raise one’s own beef or even aim for food self sufficiency, both for personnal financial reasons and health reasons. That it’s also good in Ecological terms (can lower the use of things like pesticides and definitelly reduces transportation needs) is just icing on the cake.
Annoyed_Crabby@monyet.cc 6 months ago
Agree, but also do plant something that you’ll use just a small amount from time to time, like herbs, spices, scallion, chive, and so on. Thing that you’ll want it fresh but you can never use it all before it compost. Don’t even need a garden, just plant it in pot.
I have screwpine leaf, lemon grass, coriander, and scallion in my garden, and i can harvest the onion when i need it.
Delonix@lemmy.world 6 months ago
It’s better to encourage native fauna by planting native flora than plant a vegetable garden that you give up on after 2 months and then gets overrun with foreign weeds.
enbyecho@lemmy.world 6 months ago
Try this one cool trick: Don’t give up on it.
JudahBenHur@lemm.ee 6 months ago
I know what the hell… its not that hard
ummthatguy@lemmy.world 6 months ago
sabreW4K3@lazysoci.al 6 months ago
He’s not the Messiah, he’s a very naughty boy!
EunieIsTheBus@feddit.de 6 months ago
Is probably true. However, one should question their world view if they measure everything as a minimization problem with respect to cost efficience and yield.
enbyecho@lemmy.world 6 months ago
if they measure everything as a minimization problem with respect to cost efficience and yield.
Well to be fair, that 3rd home in the Hamptons and a bigger yacht are not going to pay for themselves.
GarlicToast@programming.dev 6 months ago
It may be true for ‘soldier’ plants. However there are thousands of plant species that can’t be both efficiently mass produced and shipped while still being of good quality. So you get a bad produce, very costly produce or both.
I can’t afford fresh Basil leaves, I maintained a plant in my kitchen in some of the apartments I lived in. The current one doesn’t have enough sun. It took 10 minutes of work to arrange and emptying left over water.
Also, if you never tasted cherry tomatoes straight from the plant you don’t what you are missing, and how shity is the produce in the market.
FiniteBanjo@lemmy.today 6 months ago
Okay but how does this feed 8 Billion People?
GarlicToast@programming.dev 6 months ago
We don’t have a stable way to feed 8 billion people. The dependency on monoculture will cause many people to die under a changing climate.
Self gardening may:
- Increase food stability
- Increase access to nutrients rich food, GR while saving many, reduced food quality
- Be fucking tasty and cheap
Evil_Shrubbery@lemm.ee 6 months ago
'Cost effectives’ when not counting all the costs of monoculturing all the things.
Aceticon@lemmy.world 6 months ago
Most “cost effective” things are only that if you don’t count Negative Externalities.
The obvious example is fossil fuels.
FiniteBanjo@lemmy.today 6 months ago
I think the hypothetical here implies transport would still exist for a primarily home-garden non-industrial agriculture replacement system. Or do you think the whole world should suddenly stop trading? Might as well since we’re writing a fantasy fiction, anything goes.
nossaquesapao@lemmy.eco.br 6 months ago
But it doesn’t need to have a better overall yeld or lower price. It can work as a complementary production, to bring variety, resiliency, and protect local crops and pollinators.
ZombiFrancis@sh.itjust.works 6 months ago
Given the sheer volume of food waste produced to begin with: it sure don’t have to be as ‘efficient’.
FiniteBanjo@lemmy.today 6 months ago
A third of all food goes uneaten in the USA AT THE CONSUMER AND RETAIL LEVEL. It’s not going to waste on the farm, nor would that change from gardening on your own.
ZombiFrancis@sh.itjust.works 6 months ago
Right, the yields of the industrialized farms are what go to waste. You dont need a level klof productivity that gers bottlenecked at what I’ll definely broadly and loosely as ‘distribution’–from a garden.
Swedneck@discuss.tchncs.de 6 months ago
no shit you can’t compete with something subsidized lol, how is that an impressive argument?
just… subsidize the homegrown produce if you want it to be competitive? big brain moment
azi@mander.xyz 6 months ago
Yeah like look organopónicos in Cuba. Thanks to the collapse of the import market that fuelled industrial agriculture and government support of local growers, a good chunk of food in the country now comes from ecology-sound urban agriculture.
FiniteBanjo@lemmy.today 6 months ago
“Hi, this is Chett from the local government non-industrial agriculture office. We see that you grew 6 tomato vines this year and didn’t take advantage of our program to loan you the costs of 34% of maintaining the crop, as it isn’t your first year, would you like to be pre-approved for a $46.38 loan for next year? In return, we ask you to install flood barriers and have your soil tested regularly.”
Blackout@kbin.run 6 months ago
Have you tasted store bought vegetables? Farmers market may be grown, may be store bought. I have 2 4x2ft planters full of veggies, out $200 this year setting it up. Next year just the price of seeds.
Enkers@sh.itjust.works 6 months ago
Seeds and amendments. You gotta add more nutrients to the soil or else your yields will start to suffer. Although, there’s a lot of permaculture ways to add nutrients for free.
gamermanh@lemmy.dbzer0.com 6 months ago
Unless you live somewhere with 0 soil quality or literally never do any work to fertilize it’s not that much extra cost to fertilize and keep soil doing well
Run a compost heap and you’re practically going to supply yourself with everything needed for free if you can scale it enough (which is like, 2 2x4 beds and remembering to dump organic food remnants too)
Lupus108@feddit.de 6 months ago
All hail the compost worms!
31337@sh.itjust.works 6 months ago
A lot of industrial produced food is cheap because of child, forced, and otherwise exploited labor (undocumented workers, for example). Heavily mechanized farming (mostly used for grains) is cheap because of the vast amount of fossil fuel “energy slaves” used. And that’s only cheap because the costs are externalized.
Anyways, growing your own food can definitely be cheaper than buying it. Of course, not if you start plants under lights, build raised beds and fill them with purchased soil, buy organic pelletized fertilizer, or stuff like that. It can be nearly free to grow your own food (if you don’t count the cost of your own labor) by saving seeds and intercepting materials from waste streams (wood chips, lawn clippings, manure, used coffee grounds, etc) to “feed your soil.”
Steak@lemmy.ca 6 months ago
I smoke a lot of weed. Always have. Last year I grew 4 plants in my backyard garden and this year I’ve saved thousands of dollars on weed. It’s not as strong as store stuff but you get used to to it quickly and there’s less paranoia with homegrown I find. I’m always gonna grow my own weed from now on. Only reason I didn’t before was that it was illegal. This year I germinated 3 seeds but only one took so I’ll have one super tall pot plant in my backyard haha.
FiniteBanjo@lemmy.today 6 months ago
Alright, I’d like to retroactively change my statement to have the amendment: “Except for Weed. You can easily be self-sustaining on weed.”
MechanicalJester@lemm.ee 6 months ago
Sometimes. You cannot go to a store and buy the freshest, most mouth watering and delicious fruits because they cannot handle being shipped even locally.
A warm, juicy peach right off the tree is an amazing experience.
Also, you know 100% of what what was and what wasn’t done to your stuff.
That said, I don’t have the time or will to grow all my own veggies that I like daily.
I can, however make enough other stuff that’s saleable so I can afford fresh veg year round.
FiniteBanjo@lemmy.today 6 months ago
Great but that has nothing to do with keeping a population of 8 Billion People happy and healthy.
Grass@sh.itjust.works 6 months ago
I mean the government could open up facilities for cooking meals or processing food for cold storage that would otherwise be thrown out, and regulate both farming and grocery stores so that anything that would get wasted instead goes to feed homeless people or something. Its a massive yeah right though. All industrial farming has done on this side of this rock is pump us full of ready roundup and microplastics, crush small independent grocers, drive up water and other resource consumption, and people are still going hungry regularly. Corporate america will never let people be happy and healthy without wealth divisions on this continent, and likely as much of the others as can be influenced.
Aceticon@lemmy.world 6 months ago
Judging by the median quality of life (rat race, anybody) and the obesity epidemic (and related diseases), neither “happy” nor “healthy” seem to be objectives and it looks a lot more like it’s just “alive and energized enough to work”.
Industrial Food (and that includes the Intensive Farming and Cattle Rearing side) in the US is particularly bad at the healthy part, and even in countries with better food regulations the industrial stuff (and again that includes the products of intensive farming) is still significantly worse in that sense than the non-industrial kind but at least they don’t shove corn so hard that it adds up to over 70% of the human food chain directly and indirectly.
Not that I’m saying that the World can sustain this big a population without intensive farming. I’m just disputing that the modern version of it even tries to have “happy” or “healthy” as objectives, much less have succeeded in achieving either.
TranscendentalEmpire@lemm.ee 6 months ago
Neither does industrial farming? We grow more than enough food to feed the world every year, but don’t because that’s not the point of industrial farming. The point of increasing the amount of industrial level farming every year is to increase the profit margins of large agriculture conglomerates.
I
MonkeMischief@lemmy.today 6 months ago
Imagine if the powers that be actually tried to solve for “How do we keep 8 billion people happy and healthy.” Lol
Surely, it stretches the imagination…
polskilumalo@lemmygrad.ml 6 months ago
HeyThisIsntTheYMCA@lemmy.world 6 months ago
That’s what roadside fruit stands are for
crispyflagstones@sh.itjust.works 6 months ago
Counterpoint: if you, personally, can save some dollars so you’re mainly spending on the things you can’t grow, that’s hardly a bad thing. Also, working with soil is known to be good for you. Exposes you to soil bacteria that are known to boost mood.
And it sounds corny as fuck and I didn’t really take it seriously until I did it, but homegrown produce can be so incredibly much better than what you get off an industrial farm.
Just let people feed themselves and be happy, fuck.
FiniteBanjo@lemmy.today 6 months ago
They’re not feeding themselves, though, they’re primarily reliant on buying what they cannot produce themselves.
troglodytis@lemmy.world 6 months ago
And still a vastly more efficient use of our resources than chemical-fest irrigated lawns.
FiniteBanjo@lemmy.today 6 months ago
Yeah fuck lawns. I mow mine but I don’t feed or water it. The weeds can overtake the grass and I wouldn’t care.
recklessengagement@lemmy.world 6 months ago
You’re getting a lot of hate here, but you’re not entirely wrong. Cost aside, home gardens are massively more carbon intensive than modern industrial agricultural methods. Community gardens are generally better.
phys.org/…/2024-01-food-urban-agriculture-carbon-…
That said, gardens do still offer a ton of other benefits, both for your mental health and your taste buds. But let’s not completely decentralize our agricultural system.
GiovaMC1@lemy.lol 6 months ago
Quality ≠ quantity
FiniteBanjo@lemmy.today 6 months ago
Then why even bring quality up in the first place?
antidote101@lemmy.world 6 months ago
Assuming it used all the same tools and techniques, making only minor replacements of tractors for voluntary domestic labor … I don’t see why it couldn’t reach averages in a similar magnitude.
mojofrododojo@lemmy.world 6 months ago
it’s therapeutic and it helps - fucking cucumbers are just co2 and a few random minerals from the soil my man, grow that shit, it’s easy af
Wanderer@lemm.ee 6 months ago
Where’s that 4chan post where all the BLM rioters tried to set up a new community in Seattle or something. Then they had everyone give there skills and what that want to do in the new world, everyone was saying they can grow food. Then there was the crappest plot of veggies I have ever seen.
Phoenix3875@lemmy.world 6 months ago
Why subsidized? A fair comparison would be subsidized home farming vs. subsidized industrial farming, or neither are subsidized.
The exact problem was discussed in Seeing Like a State by James C. Scott, where he reached a very different and nuanced conclusion. You can have a read if you are truly interested.
ilikemoney@lemm.ee 6 months ago
This only true in places that aren’t environmentally supportive of agriculture. My family never had to buy vegetables. Granted we had about 2 acres of farmable land. We didn’t sell produce, we harvested and froze until we needed it
Roldyclark@literature.cafe 6 months ago
Some stuff you can def grow yourself easily and not have to buy at the store. I don’t have to buy tomato’s all summer just from a few plants. Never buy herbs. But yeah sustenance farming I am not. Support local farmers!
BakerBagel@midwest.social 6 months ago
Local farm has a dirt cheap produce subscription. $40 a week for locally grown produce!
fushuan@lemm.ee 6 months ago
That’s super expensive… 40 a week for just veggies? I spend 40 a week on all my groceries at most.