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Comment by flavor8 | Hacker News Reader

https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-33133712 has a pretty good discussion of this question.

> Compare the lifestyle of a subsistence farmer with that of a wealthy city-dweller in a developed country. More land is required to grow the city dweller's food

Maybe I'm misreading this - but is the productivity of Subsistence farming so much better than that of more industrial farming methods, and if so why would we not just switch all farms to using same methods that Subsistence farmers do?

Without digging into the topic in depth, ten will get you twenty it is primarily a question of diet rather than technique. Maybe less food waste. The lessons from the diet will be ones you probably already know (eat less meat, especially beef), and not all good. The reasons for less food waste aren't particularly useful, unless you want to adopt the hyperlocal production implicit in subsistence farming.

> unless you want to adopt the hyperlocal production implicit in subsistence farming.

Will it have better crop yields than modern farming techniques? Then maybe? I mean for that efficiency it may be worth it. I still find the claim astounding and I would love to see some citation for it though rather than some anecdotes on waste less.

There are easily three major reasons you could find for why the statement in the BBC article (per person, fewer acres are used growing food for a subsistence farmer than a city-dweller):

1. Diet (subsistence farmers probably eat less meat, beef in particular; beef has an absurd environment footprint in on basically all metrics).

2. Food waste (the transport of food and delay between production and consumption of food is a major source of food waste; food doesn't spoil in the grocery store waiting to be bought if it is never in a grocery store).

3. Better per-acre yield (which would be surprising, given that for major crops, per-acre yields increased by 3-10x over the last century of industrial farming).

I'm saying I don't think 3 is the case at all, and that mostly 1 and maybe 2 explain the difference adequately.

"More land is required to grow the city dweller's food, more materials are used to build the city dweller's home and workplace, more energy is required for transport, heating and cooling."

Presumably, American city dwellers waste more food than subsistence farmers, but that factor is dwarfed by such measures as CO2 production. As the article describes.

The claim is not that they waste more food but as you quoted that "More land is required to grow the city dweller's food".

Which as I pointed out I find hard to believe and would like to see supporting evidence for.

Futher, if the CO2 production of subsistence farming methods for the same output is so much lower - why not switch all food production to those?

I really would like to see something to support the claims in this article.

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