Hell yea! Let’s bring back victory gardens! With a subsidy!
Comment on It is very therapeutic to garden, though.
enbyecho@lemmy.world 5 months ago
I ran commercially successful regenerative farms for many years. Here is the shocking truth Corporate Jesus ™ didn’t want you to know:
You aren’t “competing” on price or quantity. You are competing on quality. Quality in taste, quality in freshness which also means quality in nutrition^ and quality in sustainability.
So… it might cost you a bit more in money and/or time to grow food in your garden but you are getting so much more value out of it. That’s the yield and that’s the cost effectiveness.
That’s massively more efficient than subsidizing huge-scale industrial agriculture so that some giant corporation can yield higher profits. In fact, come to think of it, shouldn’t home gardens be subsidized?
- ^ E.g. 90% of vitamin C in spinach is lost after 72 hours from harvest*
NegativeInf@lemmy.world 5 months ago
TubularTittyFrog@lemmy.world 5 months ago
home gardening requires time and land.
It’s largely a privilege for those who have both. not a solution for the economically depressed who have neither.
enbyecho@lemmy.world 5 months ago
I’m pretty sure that’s what Corporate Jesus would want people to believe. And to be honest, sometimes labeling something as “privileged” is just another way of reinforcing that thinking. It doesn’t have to be that way.
A key component in this is a general misunderstanding of the value of your labor. When you garden you retain 100% of the value of your labor and your time is worth much more. When you work for others and then have to pay for food at a significant markup, you are losing a very large proportion of that labor. This is one of the central lies of capitalism that forces you into wage slavery and promotes false narratives like “growing food is most efficient on a huge scale”. Efficient to whom? Not to you.
d2k1@lemmy.dbzer0.com 5 months ago
Please do! I am just starting with some gardening and haven’t much experience yet.
enbyecho@lemmy.world 5 months ago
Uh oh.
Well I’ll just mention one thing… just. one. thing. Ok, no, let me do my top beginner mistakes, which seem to all be not understanding what plants need.
zazo@lemmy.world 5 months ago
that’s why OP was suggesting we subsidize home (and I’d add allotment) gardens - give people money to plant food and flowers and they’ll be better of f both physically and mentally.
TubularTittyFrog@lemmy.world 5 months ago
and who will till the soil, weed, fight pests, harvest, etc.
govt going to provide the physical labor that is required too?
enbyecho@lemmy.world 5 months ago
Involvement in food production to some degree is involvement in your own freedom and independence from capitalist hegemony. To me it’s the opposite of privilege. It’s not a luxury and it’s so so sad that people think of it in those terms.
Somehow along the way folks were instilled with the idea that growing their own food is hard, not efficient… even equated with being poor or some kind of peasant. And there’s a very good reason for this - big industrialized agriculture doesn’t work except at huge scales and it takes everyone buying cheetos and hot dogs for it to work. And somehow we got into this rut where you have to work 50 hours a week - paid a fraction of the real value of your labor - to afford the “value-added” food that is not nutritionally dense, tasty or grown sustainably.
The truth is that growing food is about as simple and basic as it gets IF you have the knowledge. It is even more viable if people work collectively to get some of those economies of scale.
So take 10 hours of that week and use it to produce valuable food for yourself and for your neighbors. 2-3 families working 10 hours a week each grows A LOT of food. You do not need a lot of land… indeed there is land out there available to be used for community gardens, for free.
Unlike a lot of folks, I’m not going to say this can’t work in every situation because I believe it can. Further, I believe it’s an existential necessity.
zalgotext@sh.itjust.works 5 months ago
In the case of a home garden, the homeowners, just like it’s expected for a homeowner to care for all the other plants on their property.
In the case of an allotment/community garden, community members would provide the labor. That’s how they currently work.
I’m confused what the problem is - just because you know some people that wouldn’t benefit from a home garden subsidy, doesn’t make it a bad idea, if it encourages more people to grow food at home. It’s not a one-size-fits-all solution to be sure, but it is a solution that would work for some, with little to no downside that I can conceive of.
Also the whole “you need a lot of land if you want to garden” thing is kind of a myth. You can do a surprising amount in containers, with vertical systems, or even indoors with grow lights or hydroponics these days.