Someday in the future lefty Utopia
(media.kotakuinaction2.win)
You're viewing a single comment thread. View all comments, or full comment thread.
Comments (68)
sorted by:
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.
Good for you. Almost everybody else isn't. And almost everybody else also doesn't have an acre to farm. So your hypothetical is completely worthless.
Look, man. I don't doubt that you raise crops, and I know full well that strong yields can be achieved through contemporary botany but it's not scalable to the level of feeding a civilization--it takes too much skill and it requires the full efforts of the farmer. Our civilization is too specialized and diversified to be majority farmers anymore. Small crop farming is great, but selling it to normies isn't going to happen. It's just not. And even if it would--they wouldn't be any good at it and would take short cuts and we'd end up at agroindustry all over again. People like you would specialize and we'd just reinvent largescale monocrops all over again.
Plus a change in yields from 2-4 acres (depending on local fertility) to 1 acre is not such a good improvement considering that 1 acre for a family of 4 is not much different from 2-4 acres for a family of 10. Medieval farmers were actually very effective at what they did. They just didn't have refrigerators or canning. Tough shit for them.
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?