https://record.umich.edu/articles/study-examines-carbon-foot...
Think raised beds with wheelchair access, concrete paths, new toolsheds, 'new' tools from BigHardwareInc., bags of GrowNow trucked in across town, etc.
Our tools are all 20+ years old, repaired with old fencing wire, the manure we get is in bulk, grabbed from the source as we were going past anyway.
I don't even use fertilizer. I mix in all the remaining green matter into the post once autumn has killed everything.
My little set up doesn't produce very much but my goodness the flavor is much stronger compared to store bought, especially tomatoes.
Could be that reusing waste water or using greener pots could reduce it and yet have more carbon footprint than open farming..
The tanks and roof added a lot of carbon, but the tanks take CO2 out of the air and turn it into nitrogen via fish poop - and plants love nitrogen.
Do you count the wire and the fence posts as if they were new? Do you assume the compost is average, even if it's turned properly in her specific garden? Do you count the decomposition of the grass even though it comes from her own property, and do you count it as methane even though it's spread thinly enough to avoid an anoxic environment? Do you count the shovel and wheelbarrow even though she'd still need to own them for other purposes?
You can come up with either a bad number or a good number depending on how you choose to represent specific carbon costs.
I don't want to read the article because it sounds like it'd get my blood pressure up. In the general sense not everyone can go net negative, but it doesn't matter because the benefits outweigh the potential for "carbon". To name just one benefit, genetic diversity.
There are massive economies of scale at play between a 1000 acre farm and a backyard garden plot.
As a general rule of thumb, if it costs more to grow it at home, it probably has a bigger footprint. The embodied energy and carbon footprint for a few garden tools is more than enough to counteract the entire savings.
Not to say it is always the case. Home crops that grow in native soil with minimal support are great. I recommend tree kale like a madman to just about everyone with a garden.
https://gaertnerbuch.luberaedibles.com/en/tree-kale-8211-the....
More expensive and fragile fruits and vegetables seem efficient though. I think my efficiency on heirloom tomatoes and strawberries beats the grocery store, again going by unit cost.
Hopefully we discover additional methods of efficient home cultivation.
Soil depletion in industrial farming is probably more work to remedy because there's not enough residue mulch (~compost) for a field but there is enough for a garden.
How does mandatory composting of food waste change the - indeed probably contrived to affect real estate markets - relative efficiency of no till farming and no dig gardening?
Allotments are chunks of land set aside for housholds to grow their own fruit and veg. Its generally an older gen (plus some younger woke) that use them, so nobody who the telegraph readers will care about. The councils have had a very hard time of it from the party in power due to many factors, and some are on the verge of bankruptcy. [1]
So being able to sell land that is genrally in walking distance to other residental zones to devlopers would be a welcome shot of cash. With the thin justification of "Its better for the enviroment" to keep most the would be defenders busy arguing if it is, or isnt, untill the deals are done, and they are lost.
It almost funny when the UK also has a general, saying that "Britain must train citizen army" [2], and allotments were promoted so the UK could feed itself when being blockaded. [3]
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/society/2023/dec/06/english-town... [2] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-68086188 [3] https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/earth/environment/9996180/H...
Wat? The average age of a Telegraph reader is 61 [1] (at least as of a decade ago).
[1] https://www.telegraph.co.uk/multimedia/archive/01863/Digital...
* The majority of the emissions do not come from the growing of the food themselves, the scientists say, but from the infrastructure needed to allow the food to be grown.
* “The most significant contributor to carbon emissions on the urban agriculture sites we studied was the infrastructure used to grow the food – from raised beds to garden sheds to pathways, these constructions had a lot of carbon invested in their construction.”
* The study, published in the journal Nature Cities, recruited 73 urban agriculture sites around the world, including Europe, the US, and the UK, and conducted a comprehensive life cycle assessment on the site’s infrastructure, irrigation and supplies.
* Fruit was found to be 8.6 times more eco-friendly when grown conventionally compared to in a city, whereas vegetables were 5.8 times better for the environment when left to the professionals.
But...
* some crops have a lower carbon footprint than others [...] Tomatoes grown domestically, for example, have a lower carbon footprint than conventional farming, as does asparagus.
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FWiW I'm in a rural area, surrounded by large broad acre grain crops and we grow about an acre and half of "home food" - figs, oranges, lemons, pears, tomatoes, potatoes, pumpkins, chili's, blackberries, grapes, etc.
It's all very 1930s level home garden stuff - setup by my father who was born in 1935 and who still picks up and spreads a double axle trailer worth of donkey shit (mixed with barley stubble straw) every month or so.
I'd rate it pretty damn efficient, water wise, and useful to trade for other stuff aout the area.
Conventional farming is 2 to 3x more efficient in America than it was around WWII [1]. Home grown is delicious. But it's a luxury for a reason, even when dovetailed to a conventional farm operating at scale.
[1] https://www.ers.usda.gov/amber-waves/2018/march/agricultural...
We also run multispectral imaging drones to collate data from ANOVA crop variations to build databases on yield V. tempreture | humidity | nurients, etc.
Despite all that home grown figs, pears, tomatoes still swap well for other good and here at least we're not thinking of as luxury, just a way of life.
It's probably much more carbon intensive for me to build a bookshelf rather than buying an IKEA one.
I'm not really that interested in becoming a "perfectly optimal cog". If you follow that as a main goal, you end up plugged into VR on an IV drip or something because it's "carbon efficient".
I used to want to grow my own food, thinking I would be helping the environment. But I realized I probably couldn’t compete on efficiency with real farmers. So instead, I garden to provide ecosystem services with plants that foster native biodiversity. There isn’t a profit motive to doing this so it isn’t optimized like farming is.
https://ij.org/press-release/illinois-becomes-second-state-t...
To talk about whether these gardens are good or bad for the environment, we would need to consider all kinds of additional factors. What alternative use would the land be put to? Does it make sense to amortize the carbon cost over units of food when the community derives value from it in many ways other than caloric?
It should be unremarkable to all but the most confused flower child that industrial agriculture’s economies of scale are capable of producing food at a lower per unit cost (carbon, money, etc). That doesn’t strike me as a good argument for ditching urban gardens.
I think it’s time we start considering the radical solutions. Not carbon capture, because there is always a way to smear those[^1] too. I say it’s high time to install the orbital hooks and start the exodus.
[^1]: I just found this example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Direct_deep-sea_carbon_dioxide...
You are being manipulated. Resist this manipulation.
People focus on the sheer scale of large rural growing operations, and forget that that scale is exactly what keeps the per-unit cost, and carbon cost, low.
Why don’t we focus on how awful return to office is for the environment? If we were serious about saving the plant this would be everywhere.
we are in the 'cull teh useless eaters' phase now. Ukraine, palestine, white nations with the bioweapon injections and third world invading army, toxic particulate sprayed from planes, toxins in food and water... and on it goes
The plan is GENOCIDE, ASSET-STRIP, ENSLAVE. BANKERS. they use I.O.U's from insolvent foreign bankers to finance all the killing. The suckers call those worthless I.O.U.'s Dollars. Imagine pushing a button and instantly with no cost, creating a trillion "dollars" in an account and then handing it out to your friends to buy up Property from under the people, or weapons to kill their neighbors. GENOCIDE ASSET-STRIP ENSLAVE
