

Why growing and preparing your own food is the future - baremetal
http://blog.baremetalnetworks.com/why-growing-and-preparing-your-own-food-is-th

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orangecat
_We truly believe everyone will be living like this in 20 years._

Also, everyone will build their homes from scratch and compile their own Linux
kernels. Sorry, division of labor is a good thing.

~~~
billswift
Right. I am quite capable of growing my own fruits and vegetables (and meat
for that matter); are they going to buy me the land to do it on? I strongly
suspect (since they didn't show their math) that their ROI claims don't
include either the cost of the land or opportunity costs.

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crististm
20 years ago we ate local (east Europe) tomatoes that _had_ a taste. Now we
eat big imported tomatoes and almost as hard as a rock - but sadly with no
flavor whatsoever. I don't wonder any more why children don't want to eat
vegetables as I don't want to eat them either. Only when I go to my
grandparents in the countryside I can eat good vegetables - because they grow
them themselves and and not from engineered seeds.

The difference in taste is incredible.

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Sukotto

      I don't wonder any more why children don't want to eat vegetables
    

As a counterpoint, my kids (6 and 4) find it easier to eat the "tasteless"
veggies than the ones with real flavour.

They don't like any kind of spice on their food either. Makes it really
frustrating to find meals that the whole family can enjoy... Either we all
have bland food (and the adults add spice after being served) or we have to
cook the kid's food separately.

My mother assures me that this is just sweet, sweet revenge for my own
childhood misbehaviour :)

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dmm
When they get hungry enough they will eat.

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Sukotto
That's the sort of thing I used to say before I had kids. :D

The reality is more complex. When they get hungry they also start to lose a
lot of self control: running around and screaming; fighting; raiding the
fridge; etc. And these are kids that are normally very well behaved.

I suppose if I ruled the house with an iron fist I could enforce the "they'll
eat it when they get hungry" paradigm. But doing that results in other (far
less desirable) rebellious behaviour.

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dmm
> self control: running around and screaming; fighting; raiding the fridge

Children pretty much by definition lack self-control. That is why they require
parents, to provide external control.

> these are kids that are normally very well behaved.

They behave well when you give them they want? What happens when they want to
stay up all night and kick strangers in public?

> if I ruled the house with an iron fist

Children thrive in an environment of clear and consistently enforced rules.
The rules themselves are pretty arbitrary. Consistency is the key. Let them
rebel against the rules and let the pre-established consequences result.

> But doing that results in other (far less desirable) rebellious behaviour.

Who is in control of the household: the parents or the children?

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Sukotto

      They behave well when you give them they want?
    

No, they behave well in general.

It's more that becoming hungry seems to suppress their natural self control
and sense of social balance. (To a certain degree it's fascinating to watch)
in much the same way that an overtired child loses a lot of emotional control
and sense of perspective about minor annoyances.

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zipdog
CSAs are more likely to be the future (Community Supported Agriculture). It
combines pretty much all the benefits of growing the food yourself while still
letting a farmer run a farm effectively.

The general idea of CSA is that small to medium farms sell shares of their
crop each season. That money funds their operation, and they produce a
variable and generous amount of crop for each shareholder. The price is
competitive and there's economies of scale, with the guarantee of knowing
where and how the food is produced. Of course, its not for everyone, but its a
better bet for most people who'd like to grow their own crops but don't have
time/knowledge/space etc.

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viggity
The day that everyone joins a CSA is the day that I become a Malthusian. I
believe we can easily feed everyone in the world despite record population
growth, but it sure isn't going to happen without the technological advances
of industrial agriculture.

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zipdog
Industrial farming has its benefits, but one interesting data point is that
the yield for small to medium farms is often higher than the super farms (ie
of the US mid-West), around 1.5 to 2 times from the people I've spoken to. The
ability to adjust the crop planting and fertilizer, etc by knowing the land is
often diminished in the very large farms. That said, I could forsee better use
of computer monitoring of conditions, etc in a large farm bringing their yield
up considerably.

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wiredfool
10 lbs/day/100sf? Seriously? Not in my climate.

I get about 200lbs of potatoes/year out of ~1000 sf. That's one crop a year. I
get a year's supply of garlic in another 100sf or so.

Slugs ate my greens this year, so we're at 0 lbs/40sf so far, though there are
some chard coming on.

The chickens were doing well till spring, when they molted and went from
~.9egg/hen/day to about .4/hen/day, so the price per egg went from ~15c to
~30c.

Had to build a greenhouse for the tomatoes after getting nearly none last
year, so the first one's going to cost $150, but the second one will be cheap.

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simonsarris
If you haven't given beer traps a try for slugs, they have work ed wonders for
me.

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wiredfool
I have, but while it killed off a lot of slugs, I'm not sure that it actually
protected the plants. We have a nearly infinite supply of slugs.

And now, I have an almost 2 yr old, and I'm not really into him pouring sluggy
beer all over himself.

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roel_v
This list doesn't make sense. For example the costs he's citing basically
assume that the work you put into it costs nothing. If everybody growing their
own food is so awesome, why did we move away from it centuries ago, and why
are millions of people in developing countries trying desperately to get away
from it?

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grannyg00se
Actually he addresses the "work" issue:

"People focus too much on the 'work' aspect of it, it should be looked at as
more of a zen practice. Growing and preparing food is very zen and is a very
karmic and devotional practice!"

In this way, one could conclude that the work you put into it actually does
cost nothing and in fact benefits you through it's karmic ROI.

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hencq
That seems like an overly romantic way to look at it though. I'm sure I would
probably derive some happiness from growing my own food; after all that's
mostly why people tend to gardens/model railways/personal blogs/etc. However,
if it's something that needs to be done to be able to actually eat, that work
soon becomes just that: work.

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grannyg00se
Well, to be more serious about it, the actual work involved in producing food
for a small number of people is not very significant. Once you have your setup
built you can have a self-running hydroponic system in place that requires
very little work. I grew peppers and tomatoes this way on a 2' by 5' work
bench. The only work required during the growing period was occasional water
resevoir filling.

I would love to have a large multi-level greenhouse to work with. I suspect
that the average backyard could supply enough food for three or four families
with about 1hr per week invested in time.

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roel_v
(I used to grow some peppers and tomatoes too this way, I understand the
attraction in it).

When you set up a hydroponic system like that, the cost side of the argument
in the OP changes dramatically though. Then it becomes a real 'hobby' in the
sense that it costs more than you can possibly get out of it (unless you grow
marihuana in it - ironically, the most information I could find on hydroponics
was in books for marihuana growers, and the shop I got my supplies from sells
their stuff mostly to that audience and demos their gear by growing peppers in
them. The first time I came there the guy was quite excited to speak to
someone who didn't intend to grow marihuana).

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samlevine
I'm guessing the reason why they feel heathier after eating food they grew
themselves is the placebo effect.

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adestefan
It's probably from the exercise of tending a large garden.

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ph0rque
10 lb/day in 100 ft^2 is ~36.5 lb/ft^2/year... sounds really high. Can you
post more details?

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fr0sty
I'm also suspicious of these numbers...

Can you really harvest 70lb/wk from a 10x10 plot? For how many weeks?

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wiredfool
I seriously doubt it. 70 lbs/week is about the order of magnitude of what one
person would eat in a week, but people who eat mostly from their gardens
normally are working more on the order of a couple thousand sf/person.

You can jack the numbers up a lot with heavy irrigation/fertilization/perfect
climate and lots of experience and work, like in some of the urban
homesteading movement. But even the urban homesteaders are serious outliers.

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known
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Risks_to_civilization,_humans_a...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Risks_to_civilization,_humans_and_planet_Earth#World_population_and_agricultural_crisis)

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warmfuzzykitten
My eyes crossed at "Growing and preparing food is very zen and is a very
karmic and devotional practice!"

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RobMcCullough
Just finished spending about $200 to get my garden going this year. I always
look at it as an investment.

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da_dude4242
So who is held responsible when your spinach gives e coli? Farmers have
insurance and adhere to regulations to prevent these types of situations.

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wccrawford
If you're the only one eating it, then you are responsible for your own
health. You take your chances.

If you sell it to others, you now fall under the same regulations as regular
farmers.

Disclaimer: I am not a laywer, etc etc.

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kiiski
They say they give that food to their employees and friends so they're not
really saying everyone should grow their own food (just that people should eat
locally/naturally grown food). Besides, you wouldn't realistically grow
everything yourself anyway.

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rajpaul
i shake my head when i see stories like this. it tells me that mainstream
culture has gotten so far from common senses when it comes to some things,
like food. A vegetable garden has become an innovative idea.

however, i appreciate people's efforts to correct the situation.

i see immigrant homes (Chinese, Indian, Italian, Greek, Vietnamese), on the
less desirable side of town with fantastic vegetable gardens. instead of
planting decorative trees, people planted fruit producing trees. but when
someone on the more desirable side of town makes a small little garden, they
make the front page of the newspaper :(

