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Comment by oooyay | Hacker News Reader

Is it possible to make a system that sustains itself? Right now I've got a worm farm going that produces viable compost pretty often, but the Berkely Method would be faster. I have four chickens that produce yards and yards of compost every 3 months and require about a cup of corn a day.

You'd need to scale the chicken operation to cover whatever your three month compost needs are and you'd need people to eat or use the eggs relatively quickly. You could produce, dry, and store the corn on site.

What am I missing?

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America had better tech except now everything is built to break otherwise the air backed monetary system would fall apart if planned obsolescence didn't exist.

The only reason costs are so high is because money can be printed at will so your savings will always be reduced.

Sadly most people don't learn anything about finance and think stocks and bonds are good investment vehicles and fractional reserve is great.

I guess if you go to a school that was designed to make you a factory worker then you will only learn how to be a worker and not the owner.

Can you elaborate more ? I am curious.

A good place you can start is looking at "The Country School of Tomorrow"

I found a 26 page book on archive org written in 1913 . Did you meant that book ?

Who is the writer? Do your own research and don't trust some idiot on the Internet to give you ideas

> Is it possible to make a system that sustains itself?

Oh, definitely. We are doing it on a universal scale right now.

If you meant smaller than that, then what are you restrictions?

We really aren't doing that on any lasting timescale.

You can burn your furniture to stay warm, and congratulate yourself on how well you're doing. But it doesn't take long to run out of furniture.

The fact that "long" here means less than a century or so doesn't alter that point. It just turns it into a generational problem rather than an immediate personal one.

in fact more and more people are being affected by climate damage, food shortages, and pollution with lasting effects. But apparently most of suburbia won't notice until it starts happening there too.

Right now? Space to grow food. I grow tomatoes, lemons, basil, cucumbers, and strawberries in the basement. Most of that isn't good for chickens or worms, though. I'd need to scale my food production to a bigger variety for the system to feed itself so it does still take some input from me other than sweat equity.

The thing I started doing all of this for was renewable compost, though, so at least that goal is met. I also don't give away my yard trash anymore (leaves, clippings). They go into the compost piles and get spread across the yard a few months later. My question moreso centered around fertilizer - why do we keep needing synthetic fertilizer if we can produce renewable compost chains?

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