Hacker News Reader

Comment by Traster | Hacker News Reader

I wonder if the people planting vegetables are aware of just how much they would need to plant in order to supply even a small fraction of someone's required calories. I mean, there's a good reason we've centralized food production into massively efficient enormous farms with heavily mechanised harvesting.

View on HN

For my family and me it's not about calories, it's about nutrition. Vegetables are an excellent source of all kinds of vitamins and minerals, especially ones grown in quality soil with quality seeds. It's also about fiber. We get our calories from fats and protein.

In general most people planting these gardens "ad-hoc" and not doing it more or less "as a job" probably don't have that much dedicated surface for this, nor can put in that much effort/time into it in order to obtain more than a nice and tasty complement for their meals. If you can consistently offset a shortage for your family then you're pretty much a farmer.

And I say this as someone who actually cultivated such a garden for years, with help from the family. I allocated a lot of time each day to tending that garden, more than most people would be able to do these days and have a stable job, even with WFH.

It was just a pretty hard but pleasant activity, relaxing, I got fresh air and exercise, and I could get some really tasty vegetables but nothing that could "feed the family". And my livelihood didn't depend on the success. Like a dessert at the end of the meal: great but not quite main course.

Yeah!! And they taste better!

And it incentivizes good composting and soil practices everywhere, which help all of us choose better choices in what we support for businesses and governments.

100% this is correct. We have 10 raised beds that are 4'x16', and we supply probably 1/2 of what we need for the year for a family of 3. We're super efficient and good at this, too.

wait wait... that can't be correct math. You must be getting far far more of your calories than 50%.

The normal estimate is that it takes 1 acre of land to feed a person for the full year. One acre is 43560 square feet. Your 10 beds are 640 square feet.

Somewhere the math is very very wrong.

It's the difference in growing techniques and your estimates translating into the real world.

Your estimates are based on what, grain production? That grain production equals meat and other things, not just produce. That estimate is also based on traditional row-cropping, is my guess.

Also, at the heart of it, your impression is incorrect. I didn't say the raised beds provided 50% of the family's calories, but 50% of our vegetable and other fresh produce needs. This does not include meat, most proteins in general, or fruits.

Finally, it is an assumption comparing traditional row cropping to square foot gardening in the raised beds. You get much more produce in a smaller space in square foot versus row crops, but it is much more labor intensive. You cannot use machinery in square foot gardens, compared to row crops. So there is a trade off.

In other words, the math doesn't work with your assumptions, because they're two different things. My estimate is that, while the garden produces 50% of our vegetable and produce needs, it's probably 10-20% of our overall caloric consumption. But that's a madey upey number, really. I have no idea.

> Your estimates are based on what, grain production?

1 acre/person is roughly what a pre-mechanization, pre-chemical-fertilizer, pre-pesticide subsistence peasant needs to keep himself alive.

Just on a quick Google, figures from the 1970s suggest you only need 4000 sqft/person.

https://www.growveg.com/guides/growing-enough-food-to-feed-a...

You omitted the next line...

> with about another 4000 square feet (370 square meters) for access paths and storage

Not intentionally. Just trying to give a more up to date figure and a source for it.

That's still less than 1/5th of an acre even if you waste all that space for no reason. Keep in mind, Jeavons is trying to sell books and speaking engagements for his gimmick, not trying to be efficient. I grow much more than 4000 square feet of crops and I use zero square feet for storage and less than 1/10th of the growing space in paths.

>The normal estimate is that it takes 1 acre of land to feed a person for the full year

That is not an estimate, it is a meme.

Well, it appears that your math is wrong.

https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=arable+land+usa+in+acr...

https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=arable+land+europe+in+...

Basically with that rule of thumb USA is on the verge of starvation and EU has been starving for a few decades already.

And this doesn't even consider the fact that eating animals is less efficient than eating plants. Where is the food for the 8 billion chicken and 70 million pigs in the USA coming from?

From my own calculations roughly 3588 sqft of wheat are necessary to feed a single person. Of course people are different, farms are different and plants are different. So a rule of thumb of 4000 sqft sounds about right and matches DoreenMichele's number.

I look at growing a garden like washing your hands for this current situation. It won't prevent starvation if the world turns into Fury Road but it can meaningfully move the needle in aggregate and reduce pressure on strained supply chains.

There is no strained supply chain of food. If anything, coronavirus will cause a massive overproduction of food, because people are not splurging on giant feasts. The issue is that the supply chain typically leans towards restaurants and businesses, and that's been almost completely suspended. It will take time for the supply chain to adjust and food to start appearing in stores or direct to consumer, but it will.

> The issue is that the supply chain typically leans towards restaurants and businesses, and that's been almost completely suspended. It will take time for the supply chain to adjust

That sounds like a strained supply chain to me. =)

I'm looking at the current situation as just the beginning of the start of this situation. There may well be localized flareups for the next year or two. Ill-timed flareups may cause further disruption (think the central valley during a harvest). I don't think there's going to be widespread starvation or anything, but adding more resilience to the system can't hurt and gives me something to do outside for the next several months.

But it's not. The suppliers that supply restaurants and stuff will have extra on hand. It's just a matter of their orders going down and grocery orders going up.

I have seen the empty shelves, but grocery stores are still well stocked with enough food to eat.

Around here at least, the shelves are pretty much back to normal.

...except for toilet paper!

Um ...

> The empty grocery shelves are unnerving. While we're probably not going to starve in the long run, the farm system is going to be seriously stressed. Most of our fruits and vegetables are picked by hand. 73% of farmworkers in the U.S. are foreign born; half are undocumented. What happens when those workers get sick? How do we keep the food supply chain going when borders are closed over coronavirus concerns?

https://www.npr.org/2020/03/25/821593542/episode-984-food-an...

> the food supply chain going when borders are closed over coronavirus concerns?

After the last two decades, believing the United States has any ability to police its borders (especially its southern one) is willful delusion.

I encourage you to give the podcast a listen. Hygiene and sanitation conditions for farm workers are horrific. The not-yet-realized future where undocumented farm workers successfully cross the border, then fall ill, is even worse. Now you have little or no crop, or contaminated crops, and a bunch of very sick people.

It is highly unlikely the virus lives very long on many crops. In most cases, a few days of storage will denature the viral particles enough. Something surely for food regulators to think about, but nothing insurmountable.

Not only that, but a lot of food in US grocery stores comes from other countries. Many of these other countries are likely to get hit very hard by the pandemic, and most probably won't be responding as effectively as South Korea, so expect to see long-term shortages of foreign food.

>What happens when those workers get sick?

The vast majority will have a mild cold and continue working. Covid isn't dangerous enough to the working age population to significantly impact the workforce

I don't understand why you're being downvoted. This is just empirically true. A 1% death attrition rate is really nothing in terms of farm output. The human cost may be a lot, but it won't affect much in terms of production.

Food isn't just about calories. Fresh fruits and veggies are desirable for good health. Even a small garden producing a small amount of tasty, fresh produce forms a good complement to shelf-stable rice, dried beans, etc.

Enormous farms do not optimize yield per hectare, they optimize total amount of land being utilized. Maximizing yields over land is very labor intensive and you would be surprised how productive you can get a garden to be.

We only did that for staples, because we have ways to easily mechanically harvest huge quantities of them. We went from a man with a scythe harvesting an acre of wheat per day, to a man with a combine with a 45 foot header harvesting 600 acres of wheat per day. Vegetables are still harvested by hand. With vegetables we have gone from 4 workers harvesting an acre per day to 4 workers harvesting an acre per day.

A whole family doesn't even need one acre to grow all their grains, fruits and vegetables, so the labor really isn't a big deal.

Ya but massively efficient enormous farms with heavily mechanised harvesting don't remind me I'm human, while my garden does.

...which is why you would say it's for your mental health - not your physical health.

A home garden provides a trivial amount of food.

A garden provides as much food as you want it to. 500 square feet of potatoes provides 25% of a person's caloric needs for a year. That is a trivial amount of land and work, and a substantial amount of food.

Farm.bot have some calculations on their website [1]. They claim that a 2000 calories/day of vegetables only can be grown using 110-205 m^2. But even vegetarians eat grains etc , so assuming 3 cups of veggies per day, one person needs 7 m^2.

[1] https://farm.bot/pages/yield

Exactly. The only people who think "farming" sounds like fun are people who never farmed for a living. It is fine if you enjoy fresh tomatoes or whatever but it isn't a replacement for your grocery store trips. Even if you go big enough to grow enough, you are going to spend a lot of time canning too.

Before potatoes getting enough food from crops was very difficult. Wheat was common in Europe but the amount of work to get calories from wheat is intense. After potatoes it's much much easier to get a lot of calories from a small amount of land. Thank you South America!

Yeah, be prepared for some disappointment. I've been growing vegetables in my backyard now for about five years. I usually get a lot of jalapenos, some spices, and maybe a handful of tomatos, cucumbers and zucchinis. Plus it takes months before anything edible appears at all.

Not so much as you think. You can have lots of potatoes in a relatively reduced space.

Potatoes are indeed the game changer if you need to survive off of your garden.

This family of 3 produces 6000 pounds of food a year on 1/10 of an acre that is organic, non-GMO and vegetarian: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NCmTJkZy0rM

They have enough surplus to sell to local restaurants to the tune of about 20,000$/year to supplement their income.

They use a lot of techniques handed down from antiquity, apparently.

Shh, don't tell the eugenicists masquerading as environmentalists and conservationists!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com