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Comment by rini17 | Hacker News Reader

It's only your preconceptions that are ludicrous. In 1990s agriculture in Russia partially collapsed, so people turned to their small plots of land and "captured the food production". They were lucky they knew how - the communist government-managed centralized distribution was unreliable so the skill was handy. Of course, there's no hard data from this chaotic period, but being from eastern european country myself, it is fully conceivable. There's widespread home food gardening culture (only we don't call it "organic", just "how it was always done").

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Those home food gardening systems aren't sustainable, if you're implying that. They very often use artificial fertilizers (and in wrong dosages ,too - hey if one gram is great, 2 grams must be better, right?) They are often based on tilling and/or small monocultures with maybe a basic crop rotation system, etc. Sure, they have beneficial aspects that traditional farms don't have, but home-scale subsistence farming is just bad in different ways from conventional industrial scale farming.

You're making a lot of assumptions, and they aren't founded. Of all the people I've met who have gardens, the vast majority of them do some form of composting. Tilling is almost never used as is is too labor intensive, they mulch instead. They plant a diversity of crops, and not just annuals - a plethora of perennials as well. They typically don't spray pesticides, though some will spray soapy water around pests. Most counter pests by creating habitat for birds and beneficial insects like lacewings, and by intermixing pesticidal plants into the garden.

This sort of gardening absolutely decimates conventional ag in terms of food/acre. It is also sustainable, produces better food and creates an attractive green space. Properly performed, permaculture farming principles can even reclaim deserts. The cost is labor, but what if all the people trying to sell you stupid shit you don't need decided to farm instead? Can you imagine beautiful green cities with fruit trees and gardens everywhere? How nice would it be to be able to forage in your neighborhood to get fresh vegetables for dinner rather than go to the store? That can be reality, if we as a species can overcome this idea that we need to produce and collect as many widgets as possible.

I can't even. Of course they are sustainable without artificial fertilizers, if compost and animal manure (nothing big necessary, just chicken and rabbits) is used. Of course, you can use fertilizers and stuff in unsustainable way, too, but what does that prove or disprove?

Well it depends on what you call 'sustainable'. I use a pretty common definition, roughly 'can in this way, without using non-renewable, external energy sources, a population be fed'. If I'm reading you correctly, you're using a definition of 'can this particular plot be sustained as a home garden without external inputs'; well yes, it probably (maybe) can. What my definition adds is 'can the whole population be fed this way'; and no, home-scale agriculture can't do that, in the aggregate (maybe in one village, or a rural(ish) part of a developing country somewhere; I don't care for specific case studies, I'm talking about the aggregate).

If some people can feed themselves off their own land, while relying on (many) others in the rest of society to produce stuff and infrastructure etc. who need large-scale agriculture to sustain themselves, I argue that those few aren't being 'sustainable' - just ignorant of their reliance on infrastructure provided by others who produce more efficiently.

Let me provide example of what I think is sustainable. This system uses electrical energy from grid(still much less energy than fossil eqivalent used by mainstream farming machinery) and occassional local as-needed application of pesticides. I know the man who developed it, he was able to repay all loans without subsidies and he is able to provide food for 50 people iirc. http://www.slideshare.net/inmediaslovakia/farmlandia

The article is discussing how we 'whether we will be able to make enough food if we try to grow everything locally', which I am saying is silly since we aren't really headed in that direction outside of high end niche markets.

You are saying the other way around, 'we have to go local because we can't make enough food', which is great, and I believe something people should be more prepared to do just in case, but it has nothing to do with the article.

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