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Comment by Lazare | Hacker News Reader

> I got hooked on growing food for my family and me. It is really magical if you think of how much you spare our planet with growing your own food: You need to get a job to make money so that you can spend that money on buying food which was produced and delivered close to you by large, complex and very inefficient industries. This system spends incredible amounts of resources (time, energy, labor) which you can save by simply growing your own food.

I mean, I know what the author is getting at here, but that's...really not true at all as written. Comparative advantage is a thing. And also, large agribusiness and monocropping and industrial farms exist because they are stupidly efficient. They have a lot of drawbacks and problems, but efficiency is never one of them; if anything they're too efficient. In the past we used far more land per person to grow food, and spent far more of incomes on food. That's still the norm in some countries.

If we're trying to minimise resource usage and maximise efficiency, it's obviously better to have people focus on app development, doctoring, food production, clothing production, etc., and trade, than everyone split their time between all of these. I'm going to spend a lot more time, energy, and labour growing my food than an industrial farm would, much like the workers there would spend more time trying to debug a malfunctioning cache invalidation scheme than I would.

Of course, all of that is irrelevant. It's a cool project and a cool idea; I wish them every success. It's just that the intro wildly misses the mark in terms of describing the advantage. People want to grow plants, it's a fun hobby, growing your own food is fun, this is great. Efficiency shouldn't be our only goal in life, it's totally fine to grow some potatoes, and I bet they're delicious.

...you're just not saving the planet. Which is fine!

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Industrialized farming is only so efficient because we sacrifice everything from ecological sustainability to taste to get that efficiency. Their comparative advantage is economical efficiency, which does far more damage than small scale agriculture. They are not ecologically efficient, which is what people mean when they talk about "saving the planet." (Medium to long term they're not economically efficient either - see the entire history of modern agriculture).

Trading human labor for machine labor and increasing density (land use efficiency) is what got us into this mess in the first place. With integrative pest control, crop rotation, and composting a small farm can get well within the ballpark of industrialized farming without contributing further to our planet's decline (source: eight acres). Yes, it's "inefficient" by some arbitrary measure that makes no sense now that we're past 400 PPM.

If anyone thinks we can survive the coming few centuries without some significant strategic deindustrialization or that any small group of people or issues will "save the planet", they're deluding themselves. Growing your own food, when done correctly on a few acres (especially if you grow your own meat), is one of the best ways to contribute now. We just have to throw away the efficiency metrics that got us here in the first place - it's our labor or the planet.

Thanks for that! I agree 100%

Another thought: 60-70 years ago almost every household in the US had their own chicken or rabbits. I assume also way more people were growing their own food.

I think it is really bad that all that vanished and is one part in why our food system is currently so vulnerable: Having huge centralized industries makes it much more easy to wipe out whole harvest through pests or diseases. Let alone if there are production errors and products need to be called back etc. This is a price no one calculated in the so called "efficiency".

Centralized industry also makes it much easier to enforce regulations which control disease, and it justifies expensive research on things like pest and research prevention that wouldn't be economically feasible to generate returns on at smaller scales.

Here's a good question- do you think that food-born illness is more or less common in countries that have more centralized their food production?

>do you think that food-born illness is more or less common in countries that have more centralized their food production?

Tricky one to answer, since each country has a lot of counfounding factors (e.g. Use of pathogen-bearing 'night soil' as fertilizer, availability of refrigeration in warm and humid climates, potable water availability). Best measure IMO would be each country taken individually pre- and post-centralization of agriculture.

What those figures seem to show (taking primarily the CDC figures for USA) is less frequent outbreaks, but greater spread when they occur, overall the number of impacted individuals looks similar if not slightly lower. This makes sense - centralized production and wide distribution means a single instance of contamination, though much lower in likelihood to occur, will reach out and touch more people than it otherwise would have when it occurs.

> Industrialized farming is only so efficient because we sacrifice everything from ecological sustainability to taste to get that efficiency.

It gets worse. The fiscal payoffs of those productivity gains went overwhelmingly to capital holders, and many negative externalities (like massive abuse of antibiotics) produced by the system help maintain a dysfunctional US healthcare system where the extractive value again overwhelmingly goes to capital holders. I'm a lowercase capital holder myself, so I'm empathetic to their interests, but this systems design screams fragility to me.

Unfortunately, I have no general prescriptives, only what I'm doing for my own situation.

You've really got to distinguish between different types of agriculture when discussing efficiency, and specify the metrics you are optimizing for. Row crops/grains, fruits, vegetables, and meat all have different growing conditions, footprints, and shipping concerns.

A tonne of wheat costs 0.05 tonnes of CO2 to ship from Kansas to New York, requires 0.6 acres to grow, and contains ~3,500,000 calories.

A tonne of tomatoes costs 0.3 tonnes of CO2 to ship from California to New York, requires 0.06 acres to grow, and contains ~180,000 calories.

The lowest-hanging fruit, so to speak, in food production is reducing beef production to pasture-raised beef on lands that can be sustainably ranched but are not suitable for other forms of agriculture. After that comes producing more (of some types of) vegetables locally, particularly ones that are mostly water and consumed for nutrients rather than calories, and eating fresh foods in-season.

Any plan that tries to get rid of grains or other staples produced on massive scales in monoculture fields in the parts of countries best suited for them runs afoul of the "we need to produce enough food for 10 billion people for at least the next two centuries" constraint of agricultural planning.

> Industrialized farming is only so efficient because we sacrifice everything from ecological sustainability to taste to get that efficiency.

Agreed. That's a point I touched on with my comment about industrial farming being, if anything, too efficient. There's concerns about water use, fertiliser use, carbon emissions, biodiversity, monocropping. Industrial farming is about the most efficient use of resources possible (ignoring any negative externalities; if it's not priced in - like, eg, the potential harm of fertiliser runoff to marine life - it's ignored).

> They are not ecologically efficient

....well, no. That's just not true. Subject to the caveats above about exernalities (and the fix there would be better regulation, carbon taxes, etc.), industrial farming is about being efficient with everything. Yes, in many ways small scale agriculture is just as efficient; in others it's significantly less efficient. But there is no way it's more efficient. And keep in mind one of the most important ecological resources is land, and industrial farming is very land efficient. (Unused land is critical for regulating carbon, among other things. We need forests! There's a reason people get so wound up about Brazil.)

Example: Organic farming (which is, these days, generally highly industrialised, but still a step closer to what you have in mind, I imagine) yields less food per acre - or to put it another way, uses more land per unit of food. Studies have shown a 20-40% gap between organic and conventional farming in practice. Worse, they show that the carbon footprint is the same; the lower carbon intensity is fully cancelled out by the lower efficiency. (See, eg, https://www.acsh.org/news/2017/05/26/organic-farms-use-more-...)

> Yes, it's "inefficient" by some arbitrary measure that makes no sense now that we're past 400 PPM.

No, it's just inefficient. And it's inefficient that is more important in a high carbon world. The planet is not going to be saved by cutting down forests so we can grow food less efficiently. Even if we really, really wish it would be. You can't say "but carbon" and then push a solution that isn't any lower carbon.

If we really care about the environment, we're talking about a shift to largely vegetarian diets, with the bulk of our calories grown in dense, super efficient ways. There's X billion people, we need Y trillion calories per day, how can we achieve this with the least amount of land, water, fertiliser, carbon, and labour? That probably looks a lot like massive industrial farms in places with good climates and spare water, being shipped to places with lots of people and little land and water.

My grandparents had a WWII victory garden in their backyard in Queens, NY. Many other people did as well. It was a supplement to what was available in stores, and a way to have fresh produce at a time when food was scarce.

Industrial farming is a modern marvel — but it’s also heavily subsidized, and the negative externalities are going to be felt in years to come; land use change, fossil fuel for transportation, chemical fertilizer production.

To me, the biggest benefit of making a garden with your own hands is the perspective you gain. You see what goes into food production. You gain a sense of pragmatism as you weigh the trade offs in different forms of pest management, approaches like permaculture, etc.

It’s easy for people to speak from the sidelines — but gaining some real world experience helps people feel more directly connected to the process.

> People want to grow plants, it's a fun hobby, growing your own food is fun, this is great.

True, and don't expect to be able to sustain yourself to any meaningful extent on food grown on your balcony. You could likely eat all of the potatoes you grow on a balcony over a yearlong period in a week. The most practical use of small spaces for gardening, IMHO, is to grow your own herbs.

You can trade the excess potatoes with other people in the apartment building or in the neighborhood. It builds a stronger local community than it would if everyone were to buy from a grocery store.

That is not the only thing you can plant on a balcony. Taking canopy layers into account increases the available amount you can grow. It is practical to raise quail for eggs or meat in an apartment. Mushrooms can be cultivated in a kitchen cabinet.

>It is practical to raise quail for eggs or meat in an apartment.

Having raised quail, I just absolutely cannot fathom having them in an apartment. They're loud, they smell, and they really, really like flying around. If you raised quail in an apartment, I'm betting it would be in semi-inhumane small cage conditions.

As someone who has not bought food at a grocery store (outside of citrus and other fruits we cannot grow locally due to climate and my absolute fear of scurvy) for the last 5 years, and someone who has cultivated this specific lifestyle for the last 20, I genuinely do not see a way for an apartment of folks to provide for themselves. Nor do I see a functional way for a city neighborhood to do so.

It takes so much space just to feed our family of 3 for the year, and that's with trading goods that we cannot or do not want to raise ourselves.

I agree that it builds a stronger local community and all that. But OP's premise is still accurate - this is an unrealistic expectation of people growing their own self-supporting food. The space just isn't there - in urban areas.

The domesticated quail raised for food feels safer when they are in a confined space. Unlike chickens, it is more inhumane if you let them free range. You build the coop area so that it is short enough that they don’t jump when startled. I am not sure there is much to be done about them being loud.

https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/permaculture-for-the-f...

As far as going close to 100% growing your own food, that’s a pretty amazing accomplishment. I acknowledge that it is impractical for everyone to do with at this time.

However, there are cases where people had to do this and found ways to do it:

https://www.architectural-review.com/essays/cubas-urban-farm...

It just might be that we won’t really try until we are forced to by some kind of collapse scenario or another.

It is accurate that quail should need be free-range, yes. That's just a good way to lose all of your quail.

But, they do need a flight pen, for humane husbandry. They naturally like to run around and peck things. They need space to do that. Anyone who justifies cage raised quail because they like confined space is just trying to justify a bad decision.

>It just might be that we won’t really try until we are forced to by some kind of collapse scenario or another.

This is 100% what I believe the case will be. We won't try anything, at scale, until forced to. The reason I live the way I do is to prepare for (what I believe to be) the inevitable change/shift in the world in the next 3-5 decades.

That being said - mega-cities, and a majority of humans living in cities is a relatively new phenomena. I am not sure our current structure lends itself to 'local' living - that's my argument above. It takes a crap-load of space to feed a family.

I can't find the sources but until 60-70 years ago almost every houshold in NY had either chicken or rabbits.

I’m not knocking your experience and observation, but I wonder if there is some missing piece of information here. The woman who was interviewed on that podcast raised quail on both a farm and privately in her own space. She did try to let the quail free range first, and that was a disaster. She tried to make the coop area more open, and they became too nervous to lay. She eventually created a space that lets them feel safer from predators. She was also talking about a specific breed of domesticated quail. I don’t think she was trying to justify anything. Are we talking about the same things here?

Maybe the missing information is just how big of a cage we are talking about. What are you envisioning when you say that? Are you saying that, if a cage is made to allow them to do that, it would still be too big for a typical sized apartment?

I used to live somewhere where I can see wild quail running around the house every day. I remembered that they liked to hide in shrubs and overhanging trees. The mother might peak out and then run out from one cover to another, with a string of chicks following right a long. I rarely remember them flying out in the open.

>Are we talking about the same things here?

Yes. They need an enclosed, short space in which to feel safe in order to lay eggs. To be happy and well-raised animals, they need a 'flight pen' which is a soft netted topped pen for literal flight. They are birds, and they do need to exercise that ability. Further, their flight pen allows for them to exercise their natural pecking and 'hunting'.

You could absolutely keep them in a small cage. And they would be inhumanely raised creatures.

>Maybe the missing information is just how big of a cage we are talking about.

Small cage. Large flight pen. If the flight pen is a thing, then yes, it's too large for an apartment.

> This is 100% what I believe the case will be. We won't try anything, at scale, until forced to. The reason I live the way I do is to prepare for (what I believe to be) the inevitable change/shift in the world in the next 3-5 decades.

> That being said - mega-cities, and a majority of humans living in cities is a relatively new phenomena. I am not sure our current structure lends itself to 'local' living - that's my argument above. It takes a crap-load of space to feed a family.

It seems you have thought this out a lot more than I have and have the practical experience to boot.

I too also think there is a good chance for a change/shift in the world around the time frame you are talking about. I’ve seen people talk about different collapse scenarios, including some of the weirder ones. It is less about preparing it for myself so much as preparing it for my unborn son and any of his siblings that follow after.

Granted, in some of the post-collapse scenarios I’ve seen, the mega-cities are likely to be shell. I live in Phoenix. I see a lot of space that could be used for growing ... but there is not a lot of water out here. This summer, I started relandscaping my yard to capture the monsoon rains, but they didn’t really come this year. It was effectively a drought. Phoenix is not built as a city that could survive without A/C, let alone much of the areas are distant from the canals. The Salt River that runs through here is dried up. For longer-term, I’m looking at moving the family to Northern Arizona, where we’d have a better shot.

I’m also thinking that the scale at which to grow food is probably going to be at a village size. It would require a different family structure too. The one tech I think that would really need to survive is the internet, though perhaps not in the form that it is now (with control of the internet aggregated into a small handful of players). I think the presence of the internet is what will make the difference between regressing back to horticulture, to something that helps us move forward. But whatever that “forward” is, it won’t be the familiar status quo.

It may take a crap-load of space to feed a family ... I think though, encouraging people to try to feed something of themselves can help them prepare in some way if there is a collapse; and if there isn’t one, I think it would help a lot. One of the things that growing at least some of your own food enables (even if you can’t grow all of it in an apartment), is that it links you into the food cycle. It seeds a sense of agency for the person. It starts the development of personal self-reliance, even if it is not completely self-reliant, or that it is impossible for megacities to support. In this way, it gives a little bit of capability and confidence that, someone can realistically assess their chances while they are still living in a megacity. And who knows, such a person might come up with some creative ways to do so, even if others decide that they need to build their life elsewhere.

> The domesticated quail raised for food feels safer when they are in a confined space.

So, give them a false sense of security? ;)

Yes. And it is a specific breed of quails bred for this. Similar to how domesticated cows in the US are dumber than the ones roaming around India.

Except, even the specific breed of quail for meat still needs time to run and scratch and 'be a quail'.

It's more akin to goats than cows. They're domesticated, absolutely. But they still want to get up to something; they're not content to sit in a box and eat all day.

I've been interested in permaculture and sustainability for a while, and also self-sufficiency, or at least local food production.

There's an old book called "Five acres and independence" which I think is a reference to the amount of land you need to sustain a family. I don't know anything about the subject, really, but I just jumped off that number.

I'm not in America, but we can use it as an example to do calculation. It's probably approximate to a misleading degree, but since I'm a software developer with a degree in an unrelated field making internet comments, that doesn't put me off:

According to Wikipedia, the US is 3,796,742 square miles. Wolfram Alpha says that's 2.43 billion acres. Using Wikipedia's stated 2019 estimate of 328,239,523 people, that's 7.5 acres per person. So under forty acres for each family of five, roughly. So if we say 5 acres is a good number, in the US you're at 8x the amount of land needed for everyone to live off the land at a small scale. Is 1/8th of the US even arable land? What about all the other stuff we'd need, like factories, mines, schools, the cold fusion powered mag-lev network etc.? Will that fit in the rest? Maybe the occasional forest would be nice?

And then of course we need to consider that the US is no. 145 out of some 200 countries for population density. For the European Union, we arrive at 2.3 acres per person, so you'd need to distribute people evenly over roughly half of the land for each five-person family to have a five acre farm. For Africa, 5.8 acres per person.

But maybe that starting number is too high or too low. I just thought it was an interesting thought experiment.

To add to this, folks like this family claim (or were when that video[1] was done) to harvest 6,000 lbs of food a year from a 1/10th of an acre and still have enough left over to sell to local chefs to the tune of about $20,000.

The more I read about this the more I started doubting all the doom about sustainability. Granted, I think they were vegetarian (still had live birds for eggs) but.. I think the combination of pooling together ancient techniques with modern technology could provide better results than the "if GMO & Roundup are eliminated the WORLD WILL STARVE" type of propaganda that, the more I read up about things like Agent Orange and, well, propaganda, the more I want to hear from people like the Dervais kids (RIP Jules) and less from people who have never farmed before or maybe grew some herbs one year.

1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NCmTJkZy0rM

What excess potatoes? A 4sqm field of potatoes over a season can be finished in less than four weeks. What apartment has room for enough area to grow excess potatoes?

We should start questioning why everyone is living in (mostly more expensive) apartments in urban areas with no garden :)

Industrialization of food production has allowed the density and population of cities to grow. If you specialize in something other than food growing, and rely on the food distribution system to provide your food resources, living in an apartment is efficient (from an economic standpoint, not from an ecological one)

> You can trade the excess potatoes with other people in the apartment building or in the neighborhood.

Honestly, that sounds like a lawsuit waiting to happen, unfortunately. Just one person getting sick, even if it wasn't from your potato, could ruin a good time.

adriand literally wrote the opposite - grow for entire year, eat in a week.

Thanks for your comment! I think it doesn't need to be that black and white. Even if you cannot sustain yourself 100%, you can make a contribution to your environment and the people around you and on top having something nice to eat! :)

Chilli is another useful thing to grow, which 1 tree can produce much more than you (and relatives) will eat in a year.

Saying that as the chilli tree at a friends place is always covered in chilli's ready to pick, even if we strip it bare and return a few weeks later. It's an overachiever. ;)

I'm not sure anyone was expecting to replace the grocery store with a balcony garden. If so, a lot of people would be doing it, I'm sure.

I grow tomatoes and some herbs on my balcony. It’s fun and they taste better, but it is clearly orders of magnitude less efficient than basically any alternative. I pay about $10 for supplies and many hours worth of labor to produce maybe $40 worth of produce.

The word "efficiency" looks to be a bit misused here based on what people normally consider when seeing the word, but I can see where the author is coming from. Pumping the ground with herbicides, pesticides and fossil fueled based fertilizers are very efficient methods to produce a lot of food in a short time in small amount of space, but from a system/planet perspective it might not be that very efficient at maintaining the environment long term.

That said, industrial farms that do not use destructive methods for farming are going to be much more effective than what an individual can do in terms of growing their own food. As such, are more optimal strategy in terms of personal efficiency would be to focus on their own strengths like app development, doctoring and so on, and then use the revenue from that to buy exclusively from farms that are long term efficient for the planet. I would claim that growing your own food is a bit of a middle ground.

Speaking of stupid efficiencies:

“In the progress of the division of labour, the employment of the far greater part of those who live by labour, that is, of the great body of people, comes to be confined to a few very simple operations, frequently one or two. But the understandings of the greater part of men are necessarily formed by their ordinary employments. The man whose whole life is spent in performing a few simple operations, of which the effects too are, perhaps, always the same, or very nearly the same, has no occasion to exert his understanding,or to exercise his invention in finding out expedients for removing difficulties which never occur.

He naturally loses, therefore, the habit of such exertion, and generally becomes as stupid and ignorant as it is possible for a human creature to become. The torpor of his mind renders him, not only incapable of relishing or bearing a part in any rational conversation, but of conceiving any generous, noble, or tender sentiment, and consequently of forming any just judgement concerning many even of the ordinary duties of private life. Of the great extensive interests of his country he is altogether incapable of judging; and unless very particular pains have been taken to render him otherwise, he is equally incapable of defending his country in war.

The uniformity of his stationary life naturally corrupts the courage of his mind, and makes him regard with abhorrence the irregular, uncertain, and adventurous life of a soldier. It corrupts even the activity of his body, and renders him incapable of exerting his strength with vigour and perseverance, in any other employment than that to which he has been bred. His dexterity at his own particular trade seems, in this manner, to be acquired at the expense of his intellectual, social, and martial virtues.

But in every improved and civilized society this is the state into which the labouring poor, that is, the great body of the people, must necessarily fall, unless the government takes some pains to prevent it.”

—Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations

https://www.pitt.edu/~syd/ASIND.html

Thank you for that quote, it's something I've been struggling with in my professional life for a while now. In moving to better-paid, senior, more specialist roles a kind of pervasive apathy sets in as less and less time spent could be linked to the real world in any kind of depth.

It's possible to shake the feeling somewhat if the work tempo is high and you can tie it to some overall notion of societal benefit. I also suspect it's responsible for the manifestation of desires to move back to the land, work with one's hands, and generally check out from contribution to society and the world at large. I suppose that instinct often gets channeled into day dreams of an eventual retirement.

Similar commentary from Marx on Abstract Labour.

Thanks for your comment! I don't agree and think if there would be a way to calculate the true costs on the environment of large scale agriculture, it would not look good. There is a lot of things we miss when thinking about that: soil depletion, which recent research shows is a huge factor for climate change. And there is so much more.

One general thing I want to add: Any large scale industry can theoretically be the most efficient and optimal for the environment but these days none of them is. Why is that? I think because there is no incentive to do that and there is no price on environmental costs.

Happy to hear your thoughts!

> soil depletion, which recent research shows is a huge factor for climate change

Soil depletion is neither created by industrial agriculture, nor solved by small scale agriculture. If you grow a bunch of wheat, it leaches nitrogen out of the ground. Your options are:

1. Let it sit fallow while it naturally regenerates, meaning you need 2-3 times more land as you rotate through the fields, meaning you need to cut down a lot of forests and put them to the plow.

2. Add nitrogen based fertilisers. The only viable way to generate them produces a lot of carbon, and the runoff has its own ecological toll.

It's been a huge factor in human development for ever; you either need to use a stupid amount of land, or you add your own nitrogen. Neither option is great; neither option really changes based on the scale you're doing it at.

> Any large scale industry can theoretically be the most efficient and optimal for the environment but these days none of them is.

I mean....aren't they? The issue is scale. Australia produced something in excess of 500 million tonnes of coal last year, mostly exported to Japan and South Korea. What is the most "optimal for the environment" way to extract 500 million tonnes of coal and ship it around the globe so it can be burnt for power?

I would suggest that there is no way to do that, but that's not an indictment of the industrial scale of the process. If you managed to mine that much coal via small batch artisanal hand mining, it'd be just as bad for the environment. Probably worse; you'd need a much larger labour force, meaning even more food and water trucked out to the mines.

If you take a giant factory that's doing something bad for the environment, and split it up into 1000 small factories that are still doing something bad for the environment, you're not obviously winning.

> there is no price on environmental costs.

Quite true, but that works at every scale. The giant agribusiness has no reason not to over-apply fertiliser to their fields other than the cost of the fertiliser (they don't pay for the damage to marine life when it washes into the river). But the small hobbyist gardener has no reason not too either. The same incentives apply at every level.

If anything, there's less incentive to be efficient at a small level, because it seems so small ("how much damage can ONE lawn do?" "how much carbon does ONE trip to the store in a car add?"), or because it's being done at a hobbyist level. A 40% tax on fertiliser (or whatever) would have enormous shockwaves on industrial agriculture; steps would be taken rapidly to reduce useage. A hobbyist growing tomatoes for his own use might not even notice, and thus, would not reduce usage.

>Add nitrogen based fertilisers. The only viable way to generate them produces a lot of carbon, and the runoff has its own ecological toll.

Since we're comparing industrial ag with human-scale stuff it's only fair to point out that simple human-scale means of achieving this is to literally pee in a container, let it sit for a few months, dilute it 10-20x with water, and apply to garden beds. This fertilizer has an NPK of 11-1-2. If you compost, peeing directly onto it will have a similar effect.

Also 'letting it sit fallow' is not really stating the option fairly. Nitrogen-fixing cover crops are an option and these can be cohabit with or grow in rotation with a main crop.

I think it's a mistake here to assert that small-scale gardening should mimic industral ag practice. Of course that would produce a fragmented solution that is less efficient and offers little to no benefit.

>A 40% tax on fertiliser (or whatever) would have enormous shockwaves on industrial agriculture; steps would be taken rapidly to reduce useage. A hobbyist growing tomatoes for his own use might not even notice, and thus, would not reduce usage.

I don't buy that argument. Not only is a small-scale farmer less likely to be heavily reliant on buying in fertilizer, a 40% increase in cost will be equally impactful as to a large scale operator, because their means are proportionally smaller.

>But the small hobbyist gardener has no reason not too either. The same incentives apply at every level.

Not true. Bob the farmer has a much closer societal link to joe the fisherman. If bob's practices impact on Joe's means of sustenance, not only are they on an equal footing to discuss the matter but they can do by leaning over the fence. Big Ag talking to fisheries, by comparison, looks quite different and more abstracted, less neighbourly if you will. Likewise if the polluter is a large industry and the impacted parties are individuals, all the same problems of abstraction and drastically lowered leverage to boot.

There are many examples where this is not true, of course e.g. Damages done at a great distance between source and impact.

First, humans don't generate enough waste to fertilise the crops they need to survive; that's why the Haber-Bosch process was so incredibly revolutionary. Sure, nitrogen fixing crops are a thing; crop rotation, there's a lot of ways we've figured out to get more crops grown in less land, and they all have limitations and tradeoffs, and they're all a lot less efficient than just dropping some cheap fertiliser on it.

Second, no, small-scale agriculture should not blindly mimic industrial agriculture, but you also don't get any advantages just by being small. Pests want to eat your crops no matter who you are. And yes, of course a backyard veggie garden needs fertiliser.

And third, dfferent consumers have different elasticities of demand. Hobbyists doing something for fun often have high elasticities of demand. I mean, obviously; if you were maximally sensitive to price, you'd be buying whatever is on sale at Costco already. :) A friend of mine makes her own cold process soap; they're lovely and high quality, and she has a lot of fun doing it. Even ignoring her time, the cost per bar for her to make them is a couple orders of magnitude higher than store bought. You think she'd stop - or even notice - if one ingredient went up a few cents?

Finally:

> Bob the farmer has a much closer societal link to joe the fisherman.

I can't even begin to imagine how that might be true. We're talking about "hey, what if everyone grew their own potatoes instead of buying them; would that help the planet". But I mean....I don't know any fishermen. I don't even eat fish. And even if I did plant some potatoes in my back yard, I'm not going to suddenly meet a fisherman. And even if I did, I don't see why we'd assume they're an environmental chemist. Seems like he'd probably be pretty busy fishing, maintaining his boat, and (now) growing potatoes, so why would he even know that the fertiliser we're both putting on our potatoes is (eventually, in aggregate) harming the fish?

You seem to be envisioning a pleasant world, but none of it really meshes with my understanding of how our world works. But eh, I suppose my arguments sound equally unconvincing to you, so...

Well thanks to that hyper-efficiency lot of people are going to be jobless. And giving people various routes to purpose is a good thing. I feel we will/should see many more such projects.

... because the efficiency at which products are produced and value is extracted is not the only way to live and relate to the world.

An alternative is to invert value extraction to value contribution, linked into intrinsic motivation rather than extrinsic motivation. A purpose-driven life feels more fulfilling than being treated as a cog in a value extraction machine. Maximizing value extraction ends up squeezing the life out of people.

> Well thanks to that hyper-efficiency lot of people are going to be jobless.

This is false. It's the same argument behind the Luddite handloom weavers who burned mills and factory machinery. It leads to labor arguments like saying we should stop using bulldozers and require workers to use spoons instead to create more jobs.

But in fact jobs come from people with resources who decide that they want to reshape the world in some way, often to gather more resources. That impulse to change the world has never been scarce and likely never will be as long as there are people.

Yes I agree ambitious people obsessed with their empire building aren't going to stop being born. And yes I agree their empires will generate jobs.

But they will be increasingly crappy and mindless as people are used to fill in the gaps that Automation and AI cant.

You can see that playing out in Amazon warehouses as workers try to keep pace with robots and get injured, or in Zuckerbergs content moderation farms as the mods suffer brain damage from what the AI systems miss.

So expect lot of people to say no thanks. And if those people don't find any other purpose expect them to start burning things down. In that context, orgs that provide routes to purpose are doing a good thing.

Crappy mindless jobs tend to be the first ones to be automated.

The less complexity, the more mindless it is. The less complexity, the easier it is to automate.

Unless you think cashier, burger flipper or product labeler is a top-job type thing.

Not the reality at all.

I work in process automation. There are thousands of issues and bugs in our systems that require mindless human activity to work around. Eg- Where our voice rec models fail we have hundreds of people sitting the whole day listening to boring snippets of context less conversation and correcting it. Most hate that work. Where robots malfunction on the line some guy has to just wheel in a new machine and push 2 button. That's all he does. That's what I mean by ppl being used to fill in the gaps. They do it for a few years and end up having no great qualification after the bugs get fixed so they getoved to the next crappy filler job. There is no great dignity to it or satisfaction. And they end up laughing at Obama's speeches abt reskilling cause they know the reality and end up voting for Trump.

Dave Graeber, "Bullshit Jobs"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullshit_Jobs

> It's the same argument behind the Luddite handloom weavers who burned mills and factory machinery. It leads to labor arguments...

The Luddite labor unrest arose from a very real decrease in living standards for many, many people which lasted for decades. Rural/semi-rural artisans lost out to factories staffed by smaller numbers of children who could be paid far less than adults. Many had no choice but to move to cities to fight for whatever jobs they could, and the squalid conditions and extreme labor surplus inspired communist thought.

So yes, this in many ways is the same argument, but I think it would be unwise to dismiss the 'labor arguments,' because while the industrial revolution in Britain did eventually raise everyone's living standards, it took about a century and the social unrest during that time (in Britain and other industrializing nations) provoked far-reaching, unintended consequences.

If you are interested in this subject, The Technology Trap by Frey has an interesting comparison between the first and second industrial revolutions and the ongoing labor shifts in the modern era.

Just to pile on in re: efficiency and industrial production...

As others have pointed out, industrial agriculture is only efficient at producing industrial food and then only if many externalities are left unaccounted.

The industrial system cannot produce even one heirloom tomato. so what's the efficiency there, eh?

But I want to point out the crucial divide between soil-building and soil-depleting agricultures: if you integrate over a large enough time scale the former always beat the latter because soil-building system can keep going while soil-depleting systems are ultimately doomed.

So it doesn't matter that industrial agriculture has been more efficient for two hundred years or so if it eventually results in environmental devastation. All the billions of people who are alive today thanks to Haber & Bosch might also be doomed thanks to Haber & Bosch.

Monoculture methods may be more economically efficient, but they're far more wasteful ecologically in a number of ways, including both basic output of food per the amount of space used/energy inputed and in terms of nutrient input requirements and effects on soil.

Monoculture is only "efficient" because it's economically convenient and benefits from dead simple logistics and easy automation.

Also not to forget that nothing in this system focuses on some mildly important things like taste :)

Not to mention basic nutrition! People are eating foods starved even of common electrolytes. It's ridiculous.

> I mean, I know what the author is getting at here, but that's...really not true at all as written.

It's also possible that you are both correct, depending on the context.

Can a single person be more efficient in their backyard than an industrial farmer in Nebraska farming potatoes? No. Can they grow vegetables more sustainably than an industrial farmer? Yes.

Can a farmer in Kosovo get better efficiency per square foot in a greenhouse than a vegetable farmer in open fields in Nebraska? Yes. [1] Can a farmer in a rural area with no roads or modern infrastructure apply the methods used in Kosovo? No.

Can a farmer using traditional practices add topsoil, improve soil health, create better products, all without the downsides of splitting cattle and cropping into separate industrial processes? Yes. [2] Can they do it without any modern farm equipment? No way.

Eliminating all modern industrial processes is not the answer, nor is turning everyone into a laborer with only hand tools. Huge farms can produce potatoes and micro farms can produce vegetables. We need sustainable planning with sensible automation, customized for variables including access to infrastructure, climate, and local demand for products.

> large agribusiness and monocropping and industrial farms exist because they are stupidly efficient

This is not necessarily the case, considering the vast portion of cropland in the midwest is shipped to concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs). CAFOs are toxic for the animals that live there. Their manure, which would be cheap fertilizer at a smaller scale on a farm, is toxic. The chemical inputs that are now required back at the cropland are usually toxic. The fuel needed to get all of these resources to their destination is toxic. The topsoil gets thinner every year. The climate gets more unpredictable every year. If you consider time outside the scale of the financial quarter, this is not efficient or sustainable.

One major problem is that the tools pushed by equipment manufacturers are targeted for a certain market, usually massive industrial farms. Until recently, ideas like no-till, cover crops, and traditional rotation of cattle and chickens were scoffed at by agricultural schools and by the self interest of corporations who want to lock people in to a certain style of production.

Thankfully, farmers are incredibly resourceful, and they are tired of getting pushed into a corner by self-terminating seeds and endless inputs pushing them to bankruptcy. They're sharing ideas and coming up with new solutions, often based on the knowledge of hundreds of generations of farmers before them. What they need from us is the political will to subsidize sustainable farming instead of the strictly industrial practices that are carbon inefficient, pollute our water systems, and lead to things like vast acres of manure pools in poor rural areas.

We have the technology, the labor, the land to produce food sustainably that is somewhere between monocropping/CAFO and backyard organic.

--------

On a more general note, sweeping generalities and false dichotomies are destroying our politics and our ability to solve problems. I am not pointing fingers here -- I'm as guilty as anyone. I would love to see more targeted constructive criticism, or even better, a statement of goals instead a statement of problems of "the other side".

[1] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/326836113_Evaluatin...

[2] http://www.renewablefarming.com/images/2015Images/2015PDF/Ga...

Thank you so much for this comment!

There is a lot of unpack in this topic and I hope to address this in later posts (this was my first one!).

I think the most important thing now is to write about what you said last: stating goals!

I would love to chat to you more, if you are into it, please reach out at hello at permapeople org! Thanks again!

This assumes that people will substitute their home gardening time with app development, doctoring, clothing production, etc. When, by my observation, it will be spent in a non-productive fashion. Not to sound like a Protestant, but this sort of work is good for the soul.

Also, I don't want to be dependent on a monocultured, government-subsidized, efficient conglomerate agribusiness if it's operations contain externalities whose price we could partially avoid paying simply by having a tarp filled with dirt and some potatoes and skipping one Netflix show a few times per week.

>...you're just not saving the planet. Which is fine!

Every baby step away from industrialization is a step towards sustainability. Capitalism doesn't support long term health of the planet, so we must do it ourselves.

Sustainability is beyond a hobby, it's a lifestyle. It's a lifestyle that rejects the norm of capitalism.

That's a very extreme position.

I think consensus is that capitalism with carbon taxing is a step towards sustainability.

A call for deindustrialization is so far fetched it's pointless.

Edit: I do not assume the author advocates deindustrialization, presumably author just wanted to write a nice intro, to a fun hobby :)

>A call for deindustrialization is so far fetched it's pointless.

Can you show me who in this thread is calling for this?

>>A call for deindustrialization is so far fetched it's pointless.

> Can you show me who in this thread is calling for this?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24697463

The author, like myself, and others who incorporate permaculture design principles, advocates for decentralizing our food system for resiliency, regenerative growth, stronger hyperlocal communities, development of a better sense of place, and a sense of purpose.

There are a lot of angry young people in this generation who felt lied to about their job prospects, or careers. They were told the mark of an adult was someone who can move out of the parent’s basement abd support yourself. Yet unless you can get an entry level job at least $60k a year in the US, you are already swimming against the current. A college degree is no guarantee of success.

That wealth gap is growing, and the pandemic made the reality stark. The recession is effectively over for people with high income, but for those without, it continued to be a huge struggle.

So some get bitter. Some get political, or even radicalized. Some want things to go back to how things used to be — in the 90s even. Others are now seeking solutions with universal basic income.

The thing with permaculture design and its decentralized food system is that it can address some of that wealth inequality. If the methods were expanded to cover the remaining basic needs at the foundational layer of Maslow’s Heirarchy of Needs, then that would work a lot better than universal basic income.

But one of the greatest characteristics of permaculture design is that it is decentralized. It does not require collective action. It can be framed as a hobby to get started. People who are implementing this doesn’t require that you change your views or beliefs, or that you get on board.

>There are a lot of angry young people in this generation who felt lied to about their job prospects, or careers. They were told the mark of an adult was someone who can move out of the parent’s basement abd support yourself. Yet unless you can get an entry level job at least $60k a year in the US, you are already swimming against the current. A college degree is no guarantee of success.

I understand this anger, and I have 3 young people as my own kids who feel this to varying degrees.

But ...

Until about a year ago, the median household income in the USA was about $56k/yr. That means that a substantial chunk of the country has "moved out the parent's basement and supports themselves" on less than $60k/yr.

The problem as I see it is that the basics of "moving out of the basement" got confused with "being able to live in the most expensive real estate markets in the world", presumably because they also just happen to be really cool places to live and have lots of economic opportunity. The conflation of these two is therefore understandable, and is a reflection of our failure as a nation and as a society to ensure the economic opportunity and high quality of living are widely distributed (in terms of both demographics and geography). Our culture has also lied to our young people about what life for most people looks like. Movies, shows, social media filled with impressions not just edited but only representative (!) of the lives of the most priviledged people in society. A massively expanded set of components of the concept of what "middle class" means.

The basics remain however: if you're just starting out in your working career, then the most expensive real estate in the US is off-limits to you unless you've gone into a line of work with outsize income. That still leaves most of the country available and very-to-somewhat affordable, albeit with reduced opportunities for satisfying or very renumerative work. But also much better chances of a much larger garden in which to try out permaculture !

Are you suggesting that people growing food for themselves could somehow serve the same function as basic income?

Will we need carbon taxes for that?

Because, we have labour intensive crops rotting in the fields, when prices are low, because harvesting costs too much (when prices on strawberries is low; or migrant workers aren't available).

I'd like to see math where growing your own crops out performs a job at seven eleven.

Note. I think it can be a great stress relief and a great hobby. But the economics of it, seems sketchy even if we had aggressive carbon taxing (you can't build a garden without materials).

> Every baby step away from industrialization is a step towards sustainability.

That's just plain wrong. Industrialization as it exists currently is bad because its optimizing for profit. If environmental costs were factored in (short and longterm), then we'd arrive at a sustainable balance. A carbon tax is a good first measure.

If we were, as you suggest, to revert from industrialization back to artisanship and manual labor we would produce a fraction of what we do now. That's senseless. Would you wish for every household to have to produce their own food, raise and butcher and skin their own animals, hand-mine their stones and construct their homes, carve out their own furniture, sew their own clothes...? Our living standards would plummet. The fact is that industrialization multiplies efficiency.

We can arrive at a post-scarcity society whilst also being long term sustainable, even with current global populations. It's just a matter of optimizing for it (and not just immediate profit).

>as you suggest

FYI, if I suggested anything at all it was that industrialization under capitalism is bad, and more people living a sustainable lifestyle will show that there's a way to survive without industrial capitalism. It's a baby step that shows people that it's possible. Not the end goal.

> FYI, if I suggested anything at all it was that industrialization under capitalism is bad,

Here is exactly what you wrote above:

> Every baby step away from industrialization is a step towards sustainability.

It is hard to interpret it in any way except that this is the outcome you wish for.

Then I resign that my communication failed.

A baby step away from industrialization will allow people to connect with the world around them. So many people are disconnected from what non-processed food even looks, smells, or tastes like. Showing people that we don't have to eat the perfectly red, plump and tasteless tomato in exchange for a tasty, delicious, non-perfect tomato that they grew themselves helps show them that the world they've been conditioned to exist in isn't the only one available.

I agree with the premise of your position, but it is a bit of an exaggeration to say that everyone would be responsible for every task in society. Even in pre-industrial times people specialized. Towns had tanners, butchers, blacksmiths, farmers, carpenters, etc.

I think what the contrast between this idea and the parent demonstrates the need for balance between the two extremes. We need to use the best parts of industrialization for efficiency and prosperity, but also lower consumption where it isn't necessary. Don't sew your own clothes, but repair them when they tear.

replace "industrialization" with "industrialization as it is now" and you can agree! :)

>Every baby step away from industrialization is a step towards sustainability.

I don't think that industrialization, the act of exploiting the scale of a demand for a specific item to produce it en masse is inherently unsustainable. In fact, I'd counter such an argument with the following hyperbole - every baby step away from industrialization is one more unfed baby. Efficient food production is what keeps a lot of people, of all sorts mind you, able to eat. Quite literally. Obviously, the food industry is notorious for it's wasteful practices, and that just means that there's room to grow. I sincerely wish you to read about the absurdities of food shortages in the USSR and re-evaluate your opinion on industrial food production.

And speaking of sustainability, what does this term even mean in this context?

I'm not sure it's about moving away from industrialized food production as it's about bringing the power (and it's extremely powerful) of food production back to a local level for those who choose to participate.

> Every baby step away from industrialization is a step towards sustainability.

This seems to be at the core of many of my acquaintance's "principles", for lack of a better term. But it seems counter-intuitive to me: doesn't industrialization allow for:

* better efficiency (larger scale)

* higher technology, allowing more efficient techniques, again

At some point, you can't have each of us working on a small 1-family farm if we still want to be able to have, e.g. computers, high quality medicine, travels, etc.

Is "industrialization" the enemy here or is it growth and generalized overconsumption?

>doesn't industrialization allow for...

You tell me! How are we doing as an industrial society?

From my perspective I see slavery and persecution of underprivileged people and pillaging of the Earth's natural resources in order to sustain an upper class lifestyle for a small percentage of the total population.

And trust me, I am very comfortable due to industrialization, but I also know that it's because we make a lot of other people uncomfortable.

> in order to sustain an upper class lifestyle for a small percentage of the total population.

But this seems to agree with industrialization itself not being the problem, but the way we make use of the "industrially produced" resources we have, no?

> You tell me! How are we doing as an industrial society?

Pretty great. Before the industrial revolution the number of people with a comfortable life was a tiny % of the world population. Now, half of the world is middle class or wealthier[1], living a more comfortable life than the kings of the past. Industrialization has been a blessing for humanity.

[1] https://www.brookings.edu/blog/future-development/2018/09/27...

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/world-population-in-extre...

and what about the other half? We just use them as slaves? That's OK with you?

Deindustrialization is a step towards sustainability, but not for the obvious reasons. It would drastically reduce the size of the worldwide human population through childhood deaths, disease, and shorter lifespans due to accidents. While that may be better for the planet, it would be a very hard sell for most people. Our natural instinct is to optimize for the opposite. It's not like our industrial society was created by aliens.

The development of industrialization and being treated as a cog in a machine isn’t our natural instinct. The ideas of averages and seeing workers as another part of a machine came from people who were paid by factory owners to come up with better ways to control and maximize outputs. After a generation or two, kids grow up thinking that’s the way it is supposed to be. A lot of what we got used to with industrialization and feel we cannot live without comes from conditioning and a failure to mindfully examine the lens in which we view the world.

What is this lost paradise taken away from us by industrialisation? Subsistence farming? You don't have to theorise if that was enjoyable lifestyle - just take a look on any developing nation and people that are more than eager to ditch that. Or do you propose we escape further back and live our lives as hunter-gatherers?

That is a really common response I get. I’m not coming from the frame that the past is better than the present, or that the past was somehow a paradise. I am also not coming from the frame that the present is better than the past, or that the future is better than the present, or that just because we got to industrialization, that it is necessarily the best we can do.

I am talking about a different way of seeing and relating to the world that is not the same as way of seeing of the world that lead us to our current industrialization. That, while this frame does share some of the way of seeing from the past, it does not mean that it is the same. That this way of seeing considers people as whole beings, and ecologies that are not separate from people. That humans have a particular role in ecologies that includes their ability to reason, develop technologies, and cultivate the land.

The kind of seeing that lead us to industrialization have been extent since the rise of civilizations and the separation of labor.

I know a lot of people from developing nations seek out to become more like the modern world. I also see people from the modern world having lost some part of themselves, who they are, their sense of place and belonging, and desperately seek out remedies for it. I see people joke about “First World Problems”, but for me, those are symptoms of a much deeper psychological malaise. So they seek out the jungles of Peru for psychedelics. Go to India to find a guru. Search for social justice at home. Cling to traditional values as they watch the rest of the world erode. Or just resign to the grind and hope you are lucky enough to win the social lottery.

I’m looking at a way of seeing that is not what had come before. It is not an escape. It taps into the tremendous power of human creativity, but one self-directed in a way that makes meaningful contributions to the world and society. I think that includes growing at least some of the food yourself, as that changes the participant’s psychology and relationship with the world and people around them, as well as building a decentralized food system. Not everyone is going to do that full time. But not everyone who can contribute something meaningful (art, music, etc) are able to do so now with the current systems in place.

> large agribusiness and monocropping and industrial farms exist because they are stupidly efficient

They are stupidly efficient within the framework of capitalism, where they receive government subsidies and externalise many costs. In the framework of ecology and permaculture they are absolutely not efficient.

When we give our labour to the corporations, building apps and contributing to clothing production, we are facilitating and exacerbating this inefficiency. Clothing is an extremely wasteful industry for example. If we take that labour away from these pursuits and instead put it into feeding ourselves and regrowing our ecosystems, we are doing double the good.

You ever heard of economies of scale? Big businesses are inherently more efficient in many industries because of this. A good example as it relates to farming is the ability to use larger pieces of heavy equipment across more land- rather than the alternative, many smaller tractors, that independent farmers would each own.

Also- the ability to specialize. There are lots of different jobs on a farm- on smaller farms you see fewer laborers doing more jobs. On a larger farm- you can specialize labor and increase productivity in that manner.

Again, efficient in what context? Yes, it's absolutely amazing how fast we produce obscene amounts of t-shirts to sell to everyone. And those t-shirts last a few wears and wash cycles and then you need another. So you need to grow more cotton, produce more dye, extract more labour from poor Bangladeshi mothers and their children, so you can get more dollars per year from all the t-shirts etc. That sounds to me like it's really efficient at making a few people really rich, really efficiently using up lots of land and resources and peoples' time to make shit I don't really need. All I want is a few t-shirts and trousers that last and to let everyone spend more time doing fun things like playing games and making art. But we really aren't good at doing that, are we?

I understand that it's foolish for all of us to start growing our own rice and potatoes -- and yes, I think that's because of "economies of scale" and the benefits of specialisation -- I wouldn't really advocate for that radical a shift. But there is certainly something that is more sensible than the insanity of overconsumption and waste that we are engaging in right now, and that applies to the food industry too.

Economies of scale in food production are really complicated. Yes, to first order, you can make more food with bigger machines over larger land masses, but at what cost? And for how long? We can already see a lot of fallout from overuse of land, overuse of synthetic fertilisers, destruction of ecodiversity. This is not to mention that agribusiness has massive crop losses calculated into the cost, crop losses that occur exactly because of the monocultural practices. Permaculture is harder to scale because it is more complex, it takes local ecosystem dynamics and microclimates into account and works with them to be more productive per acre and less destructive in the long term. So it's actually more efficient in many ways.

While everyone talking about specialisation and scale sure may feel that they are smarter than the person asking for a return to a more "simple" approach, I really believe they are the ones offering the more simplistic and erroneous solutions...

You could make a good analogy with "technical debt". Climate change and irreversible environmental damage (e.g. corral reef death) is like the technical debt of industrialisation finally rearing its head because we didn't account for it while scaling. It turns out we should have scaled our food production etc. in a more sustainable way so now we will be paying the price. With a LOT of interest.

I think you're confusing multiple separate issues here. Efficiency in production and total amount of production are separate concerns. You don't aim to lower total production numbers by decreasing the efficiency of production.

It sounds like you're unhappy with how much we produce. Not the point of the conversation. Looks like you're just shoe-horning your political agenda into a conversation which is barely tangential.

The bare minimum amount of food we could produce without starving is still more than enough to need very large farms to capture economies of scale.

I don't think I am confused but maybe I wasn't clear enough for you. It's not just the quantity but the methods of production and the negative side effects of those methods. Just because we can scale output with these methods doesn't make them efficient in every sense. When you have to kill whole populations of birds and bats and other important participants of an ecosystem, across massive geographic regions, even if it's just to grow enough to keep from starving, then you are introducing a lot of problems that have so far gone unaccounted for. In fact, they will eventually lead to extreme decreases in production as the land withers.

This is not a matter of shoe-horning an agenda, this is just the consequences of our trajectory as a society which are generally recognised by any relevant experts (but also pretty obvious to anyone who takes the time to think it through). I don't know why you seem to be unwilling to account for these factors and rather stick to your simplistic argument of "production efficiency by any means = good". It would seem that you are actually the one who is clinging to a political agenda, whether you are aware of it or not.

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