Some stuff you can def grow yourself easily and not have to buy at the store. I don’t have to buy tomato's all summer just from a few plants. Never buy herbs. But yeah sustenance farming I am not. Support local farmers!

Surplusable farming is literally the basis on which all civilization is built

Like the whole point of the way things work for us now is that you don't have to be a farmer or a hunter or a gatherer to be able to have access to a consistent source of food.

People romanticize about the idealic agrarian past but human civilization was literally invented over how back breakingly difficult that kind of work is for people who aren't built for it.

Fun fact: IDK about like a backyard vegetable garden, but small family-sized farms are actually more productive per unit of land than big industrial agriculture.

The farming conglomerates like to enforce big farming operations because they make things easier for the managerial class, and let them be in charge of everything. But if your goal is just to produce food and have the farmers make a living, small farms are actually better even economically (and not just for like 10 other reasons).

100% granted. In the 100 square feet of my property I set aside for vegetable gardening in my spare time, I cannot grow as much food as a full time professional farmer can in a given 100 square feet of a multi-acre field.

I can, however, produce more food than the non-native species of turf grass that used to grow there.

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

My handmade solid maple and walnut furniture will never reach the yield or cost-effectiveness as IKEA. I guess I’ll just have to burn my shop down

counterpoint: industrial agriculture exists mostly to sustain animal products

Why would home gardeners optimize for yield and cost effectiveness? They can't deploy automation or economies of scale.

You garden at home because you enjoy the flavor, freshness, and variety. Those are the perks. Miss me with those mealy, flavorless grocery store tomatoes.

I ran commercially successful regenerative farms for many years. Here is the shocking truth Corporate Jesus ™ didn't want you to know:

You aren't "competing" on price or quantity. You are competing on quality. Quality in taste, quality in freshness which also means quality in nutrition^ and quality in sustainability.

So... it might cost you a bit more in money and/or time to grow food in your garden but you are getting so much more value out of it. That's the yield and that's the cost effectiveness.

That's massively more efficient than subsidizing huge-scale industrial agriculture so that some giant corporation can yield higher profits. In fact, come to think of it, shouldn't home gardens be subsidized?

^ E.g. 90% of vitamin C in spinach is lost after 72 hours from harvest

I don't understand why anyone would argue against a garden. Should my yard just be grass? Why shouldn't I plant something I can eat in it? It doesn't matter if it's less efficient than industrial farming, it's basically unused land to start with.

Is probably true. However, one should question their world view if they measure everything as a minimization problem with respect to cost efficience and yield.

It may be true for 'soldier' plants. However there are thousands of plant species that can't be both efficiently mass produced and shipped while still being of good quality. So you get a bad produce, very costly produce or both.

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.

Also, if you never tasted cherry tomatoes straight from the plant you don't what you are missing, and how shity is the produce in the market.

Agree, but also do plant something that you'll use just a small amount from time to time, like herbs, spices, scallion, chive, and so on. Thing that you'll want it fresh but you can never use it all before it compost. Don't even need a garden, just plant it in pot.

I have screwpine leaf, lemon grass, coriander, and scallion in my garden, and i can harvest the onion when i need it.

The more you grow and eat at home, the less the food industry needs to burn fuel to ship. I know you folks in the US hate doing anything to help out with the world, but if you took the saying of be the change you want to see, imagine the tens of millions of acres being wasted on lawns being put to environmental and nutritional use. Imagine instead of putting leaves into plastic bags to get shipped to a landfill, or burning, houses normalized having compost piles. You get to put waste paper and cardboard in there too instead of bagging it.

I challenge all of yall to grow beans this season. They grow fast, they grow easy, theyre pretty nutritionally complete, they fertilize your soil themselves. Make use of your land.

I smoke a lot of weed. Always have. Last year I grew 4 plants in my backyard garden and this year I've saved thousands of dollars on weed. It's not as strong as store stuff but you get used to to it quickly and there's less paranoia with homegrown I find. I'm always gonna grow my own weed from now on. Only reason I didn't before was that it was illegal. This year I germinated 3 seeds but only one took so I'll have one super tall pot plant in my backyard haha.

Home gardening is an important element of individual food security. It’s not meant to replace industrial agriculture which maintains food security for the nation as a whole

The thing about it is that I'm keeping the benefit of the cost effectiveness myself instead of some farmers and taking heads elsewhere. It's more efficient per dollar for ME.

'Cost effectives' when not counting all the costs of monoculturing all the things. Or transport.

Have you tasted store bought vegetables? Farmers market may be grown, may be store bought. I have 2 4x2ft planters full of veggies, out $200 this year setting it up. Next year just the price of seeds.

Went to a local farmers' market over the weekend. Everything was very good, y'all should give it a try

no shit you can't compete with something subsidized lol, how is that an impressive argument?

just.. subsidize the homegrown produce if you want it to be competitive? big brain moment

It's better to encourage native fauna by planting native flora than plant a vegetable garden that you give up on after 2 months and then gets overrun with foreign weeds.

You're getting a lot of hate here, but you're not entirely wrong. Cost aside, home gardens are massively more carbon intensive than modern industrial agricultural methods. Community gardens are generally better.

https://phys.org/news/2024-01-food-urban-agriculture-carbon-footprint.html

That said, gardens do still offer a ton of other benefits, both for your mental health and your taste buds. But let's not completely decentralize our agricultural system.

Last year I bought a packet of sugar pumpkin seeds just because I thought the flowers looked nice the previous time I'd tried (and failed) to grow pumpkins. Got plenty of pumpkins out of it, saved some of the seeds, and started buying butternut squash when the pumpkins ran out. Saved the seeds from those, too, and now I've got seedlings of both popping up. I'm gonna have so much pie!

But it doesn't need to have a better overall yeld or lower price. It can work as a complementary production, to bring variety, resiliency, and protect local crops and pollinators.