Someday in the future lefty Utopia
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Fun little statistic, if you ripped up half of the yard grass and half of the horse farms in the U.S. and turned them into no-till farm land, you would double the U.S. agricultural output, and halve our CO2 emissions.
I don't believe this for a second. It sounds like typical anti-single-family-home-with-decent-yard nonsense.
It's got to be making extremely generous assumptions about yields and what could be realistically be grown in the climate. A lot of yards also have trees or other shade features that aren't great for gardens. Are we supposed to cut those down while we're at it?
There are no solutions. Only trade-offs.
Remind us what exactly happened with solar roadways?
I know they were a brief meme several years ago, and that stupid Kickstarter.
Never seemed feasible to me. The hardest glass in the world is used on smartphone screens. It could never hold a car, let alone hundreds.
And who's going to harvest? Individuals are going to spend half a day by hand picking what grew on their land? With modern mechanized harvesting half a day could do 50+ acres easy. How much losses will be had because they are unable to use pesticides? They'll turn into weed seed beds in just a few seasons because herbicides are banned too.
It would only work with government forcing people to do it and stealing that excess production to make it worth enforcing the directives.
I keep forgetting that most people here are city dwelling Eloi. Go read up on no-till and the side effects of all those "wunderbar" agri chemicals. The protection Bayer and Monsanto have against lawsuits resulting from "proper" use of their products makes all the clot shot makers look like mom and pop LLCs.
Most of the food you eat in a year, shy the grains and grain derivatives, could be grown in your yard without touching the trees. If you live in South Florida or Hawaii, you could even grow your own tropical fruit.
Real life isn't a survival game where you have to hunt to find a single piece of fruit, it's a race to harvest what is coming in before it spoils.
The reason why our current industrial agriculture requires so much space is because big ag loves them corn and soy subsidies, and because industrial agriculture requires enough space too drive a million dollar John Deere through.
The reason current agriculture requires so much space is because you wildly underestimate how much space is needed to support a family for a year. A typical farmer in preindustrial areas would farm something like 2-4 acres in order to subsist. Not to generate a profit, not to support multiple families. That's just keeping himself and his family alive through to the next season with a very very small surplus left over for sale, barter and storage.
1 acre = 4000 m^2. So that farmer was farming between 8 and 16 THOUSAND m^2 and he did it all without chemicals--he tilled because tilling increased yields. he grew grains because they could be stored, he ate meat because it could be preserved. And all of this was backbreaking, horrible labour. All of this just to break even. Prior to the industrial revolution, the vast majority of the population lived rurally because they couldn't generate the food necessary to sustain large cities. People had to feed themselves off of large plots of land because large plots of land is what is necessary to grow enough food to feed a person for a whole year.
Little suburban veggie plots of a fun hobby, not a serious method of feeding a population.
Yes, modern small gardeners use medieval methods to farm, because there has been no advancement in technology, yield or sustainability.
Currently, using organic methods, you could raise all of the vegetables and grains for a family of 4 on an acre. Welcome to the 21st century.
Once again, I am a fucking farmer. You are literally trying to tell someone who has worked the ground from the time he first walked what agriculture is like. It's actually kinda hilarious.
That's a bold proclamation. How much acreage do you think the average person has? And how many people are living, on average, on that acreage?
I assume the average suburbanite has access to 200 square feet. But, dunno, I am only a guy who's researched the issue, you seem to know so much fucking more than I do, right?
There’s a YouTube channel called epic gardening that did this
I’m sure there are others, but that’s the biggest one I know
The hardest part of gardening is what to do with all your produce. You really have to learn about canning, preserving, etc.
Gardening takes a lot more time and money than people think. But I love it and do it yearly
Love watching his channel, and I am reading a book he recommended (How to become a gardener) right now.
I grew up on a farm, and I am trying to return what is left to operation and profit. My current problem is how to generate 20+ cubic yards of organic compost a year.
Even if that were true, are we going to legislate the Sun itself to add 4-6 hours to the day to give people the time to work and harvest that?
Because that's why things ended up moving away from that in the first place. Once you had to go to work instead of working around your own home and land, you no longer had the time to care for your own land while also having a family and time for any leisure.
I work 40 hours a week, I literally own a farm, and I still have time for leisure. I just don't live in Eloi-ville where it takes me half a day to get to and from work because I am sharing the road with all the other Eloi.
My entire daily routine for taking care of two acres of fields, another acre of orchard, couple dozen chickens and a couple of pigs takes less than an hour a day. When the last pumpkins get ripe and the sweet potatoes mature, I will have to spend about an hour a day hauling them to the storage shed.
The modern concept of farming as subsistence labor hasn't been true in the Western world for a long time.
Well I'll just let all the rest of America know that we need to rip up our acres of lawn that we all have so that way we can accomplish the same tasks you do with your already established and running farmland.
I'm sure tomorrow if I went outside and just threw some seeds in the ground and put up a fence, I'd have a sub hour hobby that provided plants to eat within the season and animals with minimal care or investment to put in.
Or, instead of speaking authoritatively about a subject you don't know much about, you could do some research. Joel Salatin, David Goodman, Steve Solomon, and Kevin Espiritu are great starters.
You could, right now, lay down some newspaper and some store bought compost and grow some winter vegetables (your local extension office will have details for what varieties are best for the area).
Or, you could keep financing companies that hate you and have openly talked about the fact that they don't care about food quality, just their bottom line.
I'd throw in golf courses.
Shhh, people here are already upset about the idea of turning their yards into gardens, if you start talking about turning unprofitable Stickball Fields into gardens, whoo lad.
Yeah, that's a charitable way to interpret people saying, "I don't have time or acreage to do that."
Not amount of reading Joel Salatin, David Goodman, Steve Solomon, or Kevin Espiritu will give people arable land on which to grow food.
No man, don't you see. With literally minutes a day, you can have a fully functional garden to fully supplant your vegetable purchasing. Its not an infomercial, its his literal life!!
Protip, if you can grow grass, you can grow food crops. Guess what most food crops are? gasp Grasses (corn, rye, wheat) and naturalized ground covers (peas, beans, peanuts, soy).