It is very therapeutic to garden, though.

Comments

• 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’.

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  • 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.

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    • 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.

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• 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.”

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• 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.

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  • Gradually_Adjusting@lemmy.world ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    For an entire community space without any centralised leadership that lasted about one calendar month, the garden looked alright:

    crosscut.com/…/seattles-chaz-community-garden-tak…

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    • Aux@lemmy.world ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      Alright? That’s the saddest “garden” I’ve ever seen!

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    • Wanderer@lemm.ee ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      There was definitely a crappier looking photo than that.

      It looks like an abandoned building plot, a small one.

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  • EmoDuck@sh.itjust.works ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    CHAZ was such a bizarre fever dream

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• 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.

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  • FiniteBanjo@lemmy.today ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    Subsidizing home farming isn’t really possible with our current society, and not subsidizing industrial farming could be disastrous and lead to famine.

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    • iknowitwheniseeit@lemmynsfw.com ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      New Zealand stopped subsidizing farmers, and survives. So we have at least one data point showing that it is possible.

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    • Phoenix3875@lemmy.world ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      It does say “yield and cost effectiveness” in the picture, so I’m not emphasizing on availability, but discussing just that.

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• GiovaMC1@lemy.lol ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  Quality ≠ quantity

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  • FiniteBanjo@lemmy.today ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    Then why even bring quality up in the first place?

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• bluewing@lemm.ee ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  It depends on what and how much you grow in your garden. Growing up and even when our kids were young and at home, we grew a large garden to save money. Growing things that store well, like potatoes, squash, carrots, turnips, rutabagas, and other root crops will save you money because they require no very little to no extra processing to store.

  Tomatoes, while VERY tasty straight off the vine, often get highly processed into sauces and jarred to preserve. That is time consuming and expensive. But, if you have enough freezer space, you can freeze tomatoes and peppers very easily. But you need enough freezer space for them. Growing string beans are also fairly efficient crops that require little processing to freeze. But, there is still some extra work to be done with them. Sweet Corn take a lot of room to grow enough to make it worth your while preserve.

  But best of all is to garden because you want to and you enjoy it. I no longer grow a large garden - me and Grandma don’t need much anymore, but I still grow tomatoes and peppers, turnips, green onions, and amaranth. Amaranth is often used as a background plant in flower gardens, but the whole plant is edible. From the roots to leaves to the seeds. It has a wonderful nutty flavor and is stupidly easy to grow.

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  • samus12345@lemmy.world ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    Whoa, Black Betty, amaranth!

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• troglodytis@lemmy.world ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  And still a vastly more efficient use of our resources than chemical-fest irrigated lawns.

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  • 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.

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• MystikIncarnate@lemmy.ca ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  Sure, but I don’t have to pay for the food they produce, just some seeds. Seeds are way cheaper than whatever is available from the local grocery.

  It might yield a relatively small amount but I’m not feeding a city. I only need enough for me and my family.

  If I can save a couple hundred bucks over the year, not buying produce at the shop, I’ll fucking do it.

  The economy isn’t doing me any favors.

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  • FiniteBanjo@lemmy.today ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    There are associated costs to even small homegrown crops. Unless you’re planting them randomly in the wilderness and hoping for the best.

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    • enbyecho@lemmy.world ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      There are associated costs to even small homegrown crops

      But do you know what they are? How much precisely?

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    • MystikIncarnate@lemmy.ca ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      I have some land prepared for a garden. It was pretty well laid out by the previous owner of the property. I’ll have some costs in getting it going, since the last guy used it mainly for flowers, so I want to put in some raised beds and something to keep the animals away from my food, beyond that, it’s all planting and waiting. It rains sufficiently here so no need for irrigation, and there’s plenty of sun. The soil is pretty decent too.

      Direct financial costs will be minimal, year over year, and then it’s just the indirect cost of my time to tend to it as it grows.

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    • YeetPics@mander.xyz ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      Just got my bill from the sun today. I guess it takes time to snail mail over 93M miles.

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• 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.

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  • FiniteBanjo@lemmy.today ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    I feel like there are helpful and harmful fantasies, and villainizing the foundation of all modern life in favor of unrealistic self-sustenance is leaning harmful.

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    • antidote101@lemmy.world ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      Honestly, you don’t have to do much to villainize some aspects of industrial farming. It’s mostly only possible due to the haber-bosch nitrogenation process, which was invented by the same guy who invented chemical warfare, and the process itself uses lots of petrochemicals and dumps a lot of nitrogen into the natural environment. That’s not even getting into the use of migrant workers, or the patenting of dna over some crops, and the food monopolies that exist in some countries.

      I also don’t think it’s a case of “there can be only one system”… And I don’t run into a lot of people saying that.

      For myself, this isn’t one of the more pressing issues in the world. I don’t really think people have enough land to be able to be self-sufficient, but gardening is a nice hobby.

      Food markets vary from nation to nation, and have political aspects I’m fairly disinterested in, so can’t really comment on that.

      Bye!

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• DarkGamer@kbin.social ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  The quality and variety of what produce you can eat will be much higher, though. There's a lot of cultivars that don't make financial sense at scale but are wonderful to eat.

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• SomeAmateur@sh.itjust.works ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  You can have both and it doesn’t need to compete with industrial farming.

  But it lets you grow the stuff you want how you want and eat it fresh without taking days and trucks on a highway to get it to you. If it didn’t have a positive impact why did they push victory gardens so much in WW2?

  It feels good, teaches valuable skills and gives you healthy things to eat. It’s more than simply therapeutic.

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  • FiniteBanjo@lemmy.today ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    You can have both, or you can have just industrial, but you cannot have only homegrown non-industrial.

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• 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

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• mlg@lemmy.world ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  Also subsidized industrial agriculture: “lmao let’s grow nothing but corn in a pool of roundup ready corrosive acid”

  “Here’s your high fructose heart attack, double dipped in glyphosates, in a can. enjoy lol”

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  • FiniteBanjo@lemmy.today ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    Problems with quality is a regulatory issue that is not in any way addressed by trying to make your own corn.

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    • Semjaza@lemmynsfw.com ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      The problems of quality with mass agriculture corn that has enough might to have lobbying power to influence regulatory policy aren’t solved by growing your own corn that you can regulate and control the cultivar and farming methods?

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    • mlg@lemmy.world ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      Yeah I know I just thought it was funny to point out the lopsided subsidized corn production because byproducts go brrrrrrrrr

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    • enbyecho@lemmy.world ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      It makes me really sad that you’ve apparently never tasted GOOD corn. Like the kind where you start boiling the water before you pick the corn. Or just eat it in the field.

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• Maeve@kbin.social ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  https://www.jacn.org/are-food-crops-in-the-usa-becoming-less-nutritious/

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• Kolanaki@yiffit.net ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  If my home was on several acres of fertile land and I had modern machinery to cultivate it, I could reach pretty good production levels. But then I’d have way too much.

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• sirico@feddit.uk ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  Ironically Jerusalem artichokes

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• ZILtoid1991@lemmy.world ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  The only thing I grew at home (in a pot, because dogs) was chili, because it’s more scarce in stores than stuff like onions. Some do fear that the store ones are all “GMO” secretly, or even manufactured from some petroleum products, like my stepmother, who once learned that things like milk powder, egg powder, and meat powder exists, but she thought they all weren’t made of the real things, because she couldn’t believe those are being made out of the real deals.

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• JakenVeina@lemm.ee ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  Agreed, my wife and I had that conversation recently, as it happens. Though, for some things, there are other benefits. Herbs is the best example, even the fresh, packaged herbs that you can buy at a grocery will be noticeably not-as-good as something that you picked fresh in the backyard 2 minutes ago. Dill, basil, thyme, mint, what have you. I’ve found the same to be true of things like bell peppers and jalapenos.

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• SeattleRain@lemmy.world ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  And yet industrialized subsidised agricultural continues to fail to feed millions while homegrown continues to feed more and more.

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  • FiniteBanjo@lemmy.today ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    Imagine thinking that the billions of people on earth aren’t sustained by industrial agriculture.

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    • SeattleRain@lemmy.world ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      Imagine believing an industry that’s heavily subsidised is supporting anyone.

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    • enbyecho@lemmy.world ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      Technically? They are being killed by it. Not to be toooo reductionist or anything…

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• rapechildren@lemmynsfw.com ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  www.vidlii.com/watch?v=-HkErc-xfRK

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