Local farm has a dirt cheap produce subscription. $40 a week for locally grown produce!

The Agricultural Revolution was a trap

Who the fuck prioritized efficiency over quality in their backyard garden?

The Billions of human beings who rely on agriculture to live.

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.

That’s a really good counterpoint.

Crops like soybeans are mostly cultivated for animal consumption, but are you sure it holds for the entirety of the industrial agriculture?

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)

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.

The animal products are also just more industrial scale, subsidized farming, too.

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.

EDIT: Also I’ve tried making tomatoes in colder climates before and they almost always succumb to disease. Huge success with zuccini and onions, though.

That’s because nobody is arguing that. The argument is against people saying that industrial farming is evil and should be stopped, which is a bit of a past time hobby around here.

They have to defend capitalism and the idea that overproduction is good, regardless of the waste.

They simply don’t care, about anything but money.

I don’t understand why anyone would argue against a garden.

I don’t understand why anyone thinks I ever argued against a garden.

I used to hate tomatoes, then I tried home-grown and just realized grocery store tomatoes often suck by comparison. There are many plants that don’t store/ship well so you either can’t get them in stores (e.g. pawpaws) or they taste bad because of short shelf life/bruising.

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.

The basil plants you buy in grocery stores are designed to die after a while. It’s not lack of sun or water, it’s because there are just way too many plants in the tiny pot and basil does not like to be root-bound. They basically strangle themselves to death.

You can easily propagate the plant through cuttings or you can separate the grown plants and re-pot them in smaller groups.

Okay but how does this feed 8 Billion People?

While it’s still in the “vegetation” stage look up how to “clone” plants and you can make that one plant into as many as you can successfully clone!

Alright, I’d like to retroactively change my statement to have the amendment: “Except for Weed. You can easily be self-sustaining on weed.”

Yeah, a lot of farmers are good hardworking people.

Yeah like look up 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.

“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.”

We grow the vast majority of our own veggies, eggs and chicken. Our kids hate store bought food, it’s even hard to go to restaurants. We sell a little bit from an on site farm stand to help pay for supplies mostly. Our seeds were $600 this year though. It’s a rather large and diverse garden.