Re:The Coming Food Catastrophe
by bell-cot on Thursday May 19, 2022 @04:27PM
(#31439747)
Try talking to some older folks - who at least heard many first-hand accounts from relatives who both had WWII Victory Gardens, and also gardened food during the Great Depression, out of economic necessity. With a few years' experience doing that, sharing tips and seeds with neighbors also doing it, and memories of being pretty hungry at times in the winter...ordinary people can get pretty damn good at growing a lot of food in a fairly modest-sized garden.
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Getting good at gardening doesn't allow you to exceed agribusiness land efficiency levels, so we can put a pretty tight cap on how much small home gardens actually helped.
Re:The Coming Food Catastrophe
by Scoundreller on Thursday May 19, 2022 @07:13PM
(#31441406)
Agribusiness will happily choose lower yields in exchange for improved mechanization. Or resistance to disease (higher risk thereof from aggressive monoculture). Or better shelf life/transportability. Or marketability (yellow tomatoes don’t sell as well).
The backyard gardener doesn’t quite have those worries and could get higher land efficiency.
Isn’t this a bit of a false dichotomy though - solving a (potential) world food shortage or not; being more efficient than industrial farming or not; feeding one’s self/family completely via gardening or not gardening at all?
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.