Depends whether you're gardening for a global food shortage, or to supplement your own use, which I suspect is why most people have home gardens.

A home garden can supply a significant fraction of your food - especially if you do canning or otherwise preserve for winter use.

From the link in the parent post:

Fruit and vegetables harvested in these home and community plots was estimated to be 9,000,000–10,000,000 short tons (8,200,000–9,100,000 t) in 1944, an amount equal to all commercial production of fresh vegetables

No, the effect on supply is the same.

> A home garden can supply a significant fraction of your food

It takes 5+ acres in a decently arable region with fertilizer to feed one person. By the time you're providing for a significant fraction of your caloric intake, it ceases to be a "garden".

> an amount equal to all commercial production of fresh vegetables

I guarantee this is some misleading bullshit statistic. They've probably selected "fresh vegetables" to mean some very small subset of industrial agriculture, like vegetables that are never canned or frozen.

This is incorrect, it takes around 1/2 an acre if it's vegetarian or 1.5 acres including chickens/ducks for meat and eggs. That's using a traditional organic farming. If you use Hydroponics (Plants grown in water with no soil) or Aeroponics (Hydroponics grown in towers) or Aquaponics (Hydroponics with aquaculture, where the fish provide both protein and the fertilizer for the plants) the yield is dramatically higher (5x-10x per sq ft) can be done year round and indoors. It's not a perfect solution, it takes knowledge to setup and run, a very small capital investment for startup, and a constant power source. That said it IS commercially viable, you can already today buy produce produced this way in almost any grocery store, and it's viable for home production. I personally have several systems running in my apartment ranging from off the shelf commercial systems (AeroGarden Back to the Roots...) to custom built aquaponics systems. On a pure dollar level it's more expensive per lb of food, no doubt but within reason I don't care about that. I grow better and fresher food and most importantly I control the supply chain.

We can and should use these kind of technologies to replace as much of the modern agriculture system as we possibly can. No of the this mentions the MASSIVE environmental improvement that switching to these systems would make, which is reason enough to do it.

I'm sorry, but I just can't believe that. Is that fudged to account for livestock or waste or something? A single acre is what, 40*100m? That's huge, you could feed a whole family all year on potatoes, peanuts, greens, squash etc

well, no, if you're growing for personal use you can make a notable effect on your own supply/food costs. You don't have to solve the global food shortage to benefit from a personal garden and since the global food shortage will drive up prices, the financial benefit is even greater (as long as price increases in things like fertilizer don't eat up your cost savings).

It doesn't matter if a piece of corn is made in your garden or on a farm. The net effect on the corn supply is identical.

It takes orders of magnitude more input to grow a piece of corn in a garden than on a farm. That had better be offset by the personal enjoyment of the gardener.

Yes, I tried to be clear:

Depends whether you're gardening for a global food shortage, or to supplement your own use, which I suspect is why most people have home gardens.

No one's backyard garden in the USA is going to help feed someone in Africa, but even if the global food shortage doesn't mean food shortages in the USA, it's going to drive up prices, and a backyard garden can help offset that household expense.

It's also probably wrong that a home garden will net save you money unless you make like $3/hr. Again, unless you're extracting pleasure from gardening.

Yes, that's why I quoted it specifically and clarified that I was talking about a home garden.

It's also probably wrong that a home garden will net save you money unless you make like $3/hr. Again, unless you're extracting pleasure from gardening.

The people that benefit the most financially from a home garden are already low paid - those are the people that aren't going to struggle to afford food as prices rise. My sister has been gardening for years, a couple years ago she kept a spreadsheet and added up her savings based on retail prices of produce and her "revenue" from her garden (which covers most of the back yard of her 1/2 acre lot plus one apple tree) was over $2500 after deducting expenses (excluding labor).

She estimated around 2 hours/day tending the garden for a 6 month growing season, so that's around 360 hours of work, or around $7/hour, which is better than she'd take home working a minimum wage job and in exchange they get all of the organic produce they can eat in the summer, plus a lot of frozen or canned food in the winter. And she ends up giving a lot of it away to friends/family.

For a lot of people here, putting in 360 hours of work to earn "only" $2500 worth of food sounds like a terrible bargain, but for many people in this country, that's a great bargain.

The backyard gardener doesn’t quite have those worries and could get higher land efficiency.

It seems to me that the more people who supplement their food supply with goods that don’t depend on imported supply (home or community gardens) lessens demand fractionally on the general supply, which fractionally helps with local pricing and household budgets, both of which are positives.

I’m not sure it’s ever been a requirement of victory gardens to be completely autonomous unless ur a hardcore prepper.

So I read this book called "How Asia Works" which documented the economic transformations of a few different Asian countries.

I was shocked to learn that in a lot of cases, the industrial farming not the huge boon that was expected efficiently a few people can grow things with intensely you can plant small plot farms.

Countries that promoted small-scale household farming instead of moving too soon to large scale farming were more successful, but this was largely because the labor pool can't transition that fast to going from farmers being everyone one in ten overnight.

We live at a time where very few people work in farming, the smallest amount in history. Why can't it slide back the other way?

Promoting small-scale farming and industry lead to widespread poverty and famine in cultural revolution China.

> very few people work in farming, the smallest amount in history. Why can't it slide back the other way?

It could, but this would probably be a pretty bad thing. I guess it depends how many people who currently have fake bullshit jobs transition to being farm workers. My guess is that almost everyone who would go into an expanded ag labor base is currently doing some actually useful work, and we would suffer a severe net decrease in labor output, if we tanked farming efficiency.

In this specific example, there might have been other causes.

In general I agree with you, getting the entire US to "go Amish" isn't viable. Just picking on your example which leaves out some of the details about how the transition was "promoted".