Carbon footprint of homegrown food five times greater than conventional | Hacker News Reader

Carbon footprint of homegrown food five times greater than conventional

telegraph.co.uk

32 pointsfwungy40 comments

If I was being paranoid, Id say this is ground softening/ giving cover for, the councils to sell off allotment land, to make up for shortfalls in their budgets.

Allotments are chunks of land set aside for housholds to grow their own fruit and veg. Its generally an older gen (plus some younger woke) that use them, so nobody who the telegraph readers will care about. The councils have had a very hard time of it from the party in power due to many factors, and some are on the verge of bankruptcy. [1]

So being able to sell land that is genrally in walking distance to other residental zones to devlopers would be a welcome shot of cash. With the thin justification of "Its better for the enviroment" to keep most the would be defenders busy arguing if it is, or isnt, untill the deals are done, and they are lost.

It almost funny when the UK also has a general, saying that "Britain must train citizen army" [2], and allotments were promoted so the UK could feed itself when being blockaded. [3]

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/society/2023/dec/06/english-town... [2] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-68086188 [3] https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/earth/environment/9996180/H...

> Its generally an older gen... that use them, so nobody who the telegraph readers will care about

Wat? The average age of a Telegraph reader is 61 [1] (at least as of a decade ago).

[1] https://www.telegraph.co.uk/multimedia/archive/01863/Digital...

Telegraph readers skew wealthy so probably own a private vegetable patch.

Not at all surprising, having participated in both.

There are massive economies of scale at play between a 1000 acre farm and a backyard garden plot.

As a general rule of thumb, if it costs more to grow it at home, it probably has a bigger footprint. The embodied energy and carbon footprint for a few garden tools is more than enough to counteract the entire savings.

Not to say it is always the case. Home crops that grow in native soil with minimal support are great. I recommend tree kale like a madman to just about everyone with a garden.

https://gaertnerbuch.luberaedibles.com/en/tree-kale-8211-the....

Thanks for the info on tree kale, I didn't know about it but it looks amazing :)

Yeah I really enjoy gardening but I don't actually grow anything calorie-dense in my garden. Potatoes are somewhat difficult and there's no way I could beat the store's efficiency on those.

More expensive and fragile fruits and vegetables seem efficient though. I think my efficiency on heirloom tomatoes and strawberries beats the grocery store, again going by unit cost.

FWICS on YouTube, potatoes can be grown in a jute bag or a 5gallon bucket with a hole cut in the side for harvesting and tomatoes on top.

Hopefully we discover additional methods of efficient home cultivation.

Soil depletion in industrial farming is probably more work to remedy because there's not enough residue mulch (~compost) for a field but there is enough for a garden.

How does mandatory composting of food waste change the - indeed probably contrived to affect real estate markets - relative efficiency of no till farming and no dig gardening?

Pretty weak arguments, sounds like someone has an axe to grind. They say the majority of emission increases comes from the infrastructure needed. This makes sense if you build some infrastructure and do large scale agriculture as opposed to many people building infrastructure and doing small scale gardening. But it presupposes that the carbon footprint of the people doing gardening would otherwise be zero. Fact of the matter is, people need to do something with their lives, and if they don't do gardening, they'll do something else. I might spend my sommer in the garden as opposed to someone flying to Spain for a summer vacation. I have a friend that doesn't use his backyard for gardening, but he built a pool during COVID lockdowns. Is the carbon footprint of that lower than that of a garden shed? Doubt it.

If i use an 80 year old ford tractor to dig a trench and put trees that fell over during a hurricane in the trench and bury them, and plant on and around the hill that's made, i wager the carbon footprint is probably net negative. native groundcover and there are nurseries that start and sell 2 year old plants within a few miles. These are very old, established nurseries, the carbon footprint of their construction has amortized to nothing.

I don't want to read the article because it sounds like it'd get my blood pressure up. In the general sense not everyone can go net negative, but it doesn't matter because the benefits outweigh the potential for "carbon". To name just one benefit, genetic diversity.

It's the telegraph. Not reading it should be the starting position.

It's kind of stupid, yeah. My mum has a vegetable patch fertilised by compost, covered in mown grass, and surrounded by some wire that used to be part of a derelict turkey shed plus some old rusty steel fence posts she got from a garage sale.

Do you count the wire and the fence posts as if they were new? Do you assume the compost is average, even if it's turned properly in her specific garden? Do you count the decomposition of the grass even though it comes from her own property, and do you count it as methane even though it's spread thinly enough to avoid an anoxic environment? Do you count the shovel and wheelbarrow even though she'd still need to own them for other purposes?

You can come up with either a bad number or a good number depending on how you choose to represent specific carbon costs.

The Telegraph most definitely has an axe to grind… they’re a right wing, pro-Brexit, anti immigrant, climate change denying publication

https://archive.md/VSolt

* The majority of the emissions do not come from the growing of the food themselves, the scientists say, but from the infrastructure needed to allow the food to be grown.

* “The most significant contributor to carbon emissions on the urban agriculture sites we studied was the infrastructure used to grow the food – from raised beds to garden sheds to pathways, these constructions had a lot of carbon invested in their construction.”

* The study, published in the journal Nature Cities, recruited 73 urban agriculture sites around the world, including Europe, the US, and the UK, and conducted a comprehensive life cycle assessment on the site’s infrastructure, irrigation and supplies.

* Fruit was found to be 8.6 times more eco-friendly when grown conventionally compared to in a city, whereas vegetables were 5.8 times better for the environment when left to the professionals.

But...

* some crops have a lower carbon footprint than others [...] Tomatoes grown domestically, for example, have a lower carbon footprint than conventional farming, as does asparagus.

-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-

FWiW I'm in a rural area, surrounded by large broad acre grain crops and we grow about an acre and half of "home food" - figs, oranges, lemons, pears, tomatoes, potatoes, pumpkins, chili's, blackberries, grapes, etc.

It's all very 1930s level home garden stuff - setup by my father who was born in 1935 and who still picks up and spreads a double axle trailer worth of donkey shit (mixed with barley stubble straw) every month or so.

I'd rate it pretty damn efficient, water wise, and useful to trade for other stuff aout the area.

> all very 1930s level home garden stuff

Conventional farming is 2 to 3x more efficient in America than it was around WWII [1]. Home grown is delicious. But it's a luxury for a reason, even when dovetailed to a conventional farm operating at scale.

[1] https://www.ers.usda.gov/amber-waves/2018/march/agricultural...

We're trading food with "conventional" Australian grain farmers with 4,000+ acres (we use both hectares and acres as many boundaries here predate the 1970s metric changeover) because we have the time to do fruit, jam, preserves, etc (fiddly stuff) and swap that for 20+ kg bags of flour, whole lamb, etc.

We also run multispectral imaging drones to collate data from ANOVA crop variations to build databases on yield V. tempreture | humidity | nurients, etc.

Despite all that home grown figs, pears, tomatoes still swap well for other good and here at least we're not thinking of as luxury, just a way of life.

> Despite all that home grown figs, pears, tomatoes still swap well for other good and here at least we're not thinking of as luxury, just a way of life

To be clear, what you're doing sounds wonderful. I, too, strongly favour small-production food. And I suspect you're doing it more efficiently than other small or home farmers.

But foregoing the low-cost substitute to your higher-intensity preference is a luxury. It doesn't scale to working for everyone who might want it.

Luxury is entirely relative - to you perhaps, wherever you are, this all sounds like luxury.

For us it's a continuation of exactly what my father (still alive) did during WWII when his father and most older males were away overseas, trade was greatly diminished, many people were on the verge of starving, and he (primary school age) fended for his three younger siblings and his mother.

Today we no longer cart water from wells many miles away, we still use windmills (corregated iron sails, Australian not Dutch) to draw up bore water, etc.

As Luxury goes it's zero cost other than literal sweat equity, uses materials about the place (all the water that runs through the house goes to the garden), and has little in the way of fossil fuel usage (we do use a car to fetch manure from nearby stables as needed .. but that's optional in the sense that we can go back to hauling sans car).

The only we're not still doing is shooting | trapping rabbits.

Not surprised due to effects of scale, but who cares, only a small fraction of the population, gros their own food as a hobby. It’s a statistical blip.

Why don’t we focus on how awful return to office is for the environment? If we were serious about saving the plant this would be everywhere.

I feel like this sort of analysis ignores the fact that this is a significant hobby and source of joy for many people.

It's probably much more carbon intensive for me to build a bookshelf rather than buying an IKEA one.

I'm not really that interested in becoming a "perfectly optimal cog". If you follow that as a main goal, you end up plugged into VR on an IV drip or something because it's "carbon efficient".

Some people choose to grow food as a hobby partly because they believe it will help with climate change. Studies like this help them make a better-informed decision.

Also, gardeners can use this information to guide how they go about it.

I used to want to grow my own food, thinking I would be helping the environment. But I realized I probably couldn’t compete on efficiency with real farmers. So instead, I garden to provide ecosystem services with plants that foster native biodiversity. There isn’t a profit motive to doing this so it isn’t optimized like farming is.

Soon coming to you, "EU Agenda 2030: illegal to grow your own lettuce, gotta buy the new glyphosate lettuce".

This was my thought exactly. Make it immoral to grow your own food and you have political cover for a lot of crazy shit.

There's a movement to enshrine the right to grow your own food that is slowly spreading - two states so far, but 3-4 other states are very close. How about working on it in your state?

https://ij.org/press-release/illinois-becomes-second-state-t...

This is an interesting finding. I don’t know what conclusions the article draws, since the Telegraph doesn’t seem to have linked to it. The conclusions the Telegraph draws are pretty dumb.

To talk about whether these gardens are good or bad for the environment, we would need to consider all kinds of additional factors. What alternative use would the land be put to? Does it make sense to amortize the carbon cost over units of food when the community derives value from it in many ways other than caloric?

It should be unremarkable to all but the most confused flower child that industrial agriculture’s economies of scale are capable of producing food at a lower per unit cost (carbon, money, etc). That doesn’t strike me as a good argument for ditching urban gardens.

The article is simply preaching to the choir. If you're dumb enough to believe C02 is bad for you then you're dumb enough to believe the reason is gardens.

Great! Damned if we do, damned if we don’t. And now we can feel bad for growing our own tomatoes.

I think it’s time we start considering the radical solutions. Not carbon capture, because there is always a way to smear those[^1] too. I say it’s high time to install the orbital hooks and start the exodus.

[^1]: I just found this example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Direct_deep-sea_carbon_dioxide...

>> And now we can feel bad for growing our own tomatoes.

You are being manipulated. Resist this manipulation.

I don’t see how. I have some big pots on my balcony that I use to grow veg in the summer. All I add is water and seeds. I don’t see where the CO2 is coming from. In fact I’m pretty the plants are absorbing CO2.

They're principally talking about "big city" urban market gardens for apartment dwellers that want to get dirty hands.

Think raised beds with wheelchair access, concrete paths, new toolsheds, 'new' tools from BigHardwareInc., bags of GrowNow trucked in across town, etc.

Our tools are all 20+ years old, repaired with old fencing wire, the manure we get is in bulk, grabbed from the source as we were going past anyway.

The title of the post is misleading. The study was about urban farms specifically not arbitrary food grown at home.

https://record.umich.edu/articles/study-examines-carbon-foot...

The plants don't simply grow in the pot, you had to get potting soil which had to be transported and was most likely packaged in plastic. You might have driven somewhere to get the seeds, etc. The pots had to be made from clay (needs quite some energy to be fired in a kiln) or plastic. And your scenario might be even one of the more optimal ones, with no additional land use...

I actually got the dirt from outside because I was lazy, it was there and for free. The pots I have I have had them for almost 10 years now. I recollect the seeds from the previous harvest because I'm curious about breeding (I was slowly getting to a black sunflower for fun).

I don't even use fertilizer. I mix in all the remaining green matter into the post once autumn has killed everything.

My little set up doesn't produce very much but my goodness the flavor is much stronger compared to store bought, especially tomatoes.

I am Just guessing. Maybe it's the tap water. It goes through multiple rounds of filteration to make it suitable for drinking and now it's poured into the soil that does not require so pure water. Or it could be the pot itself.. a large pot along with the stands and accessories to grow a dozen plants will be less green compared to open farming .

Could be that reusing waste water or using greener pots could reduce it and yet have more carbon footprint than open farming..

i cycle the rain runoff from my roof through fish ponds - well, really 100 gallon stock water tanks. I don't feed or otherwise take care of the fish, but i do add water as needed and rotate plants between all my ponds and a nearby lake (lake is only input; i never put back into the lake). The runoff from the tanks goes to fields with small hills and native groundcover, but i can grow food in those areas.

The tanks and roof added a lot of carbon, but the tanks take CO2 out of the air and turn it into nitrogen via fish poop - and plants love nitrogen.

I doubt that, the water here is very filtered here (Switzerland), the stuff that comes out of these pipes makes me afraid to drink it...

Initial footprint if you have all the resources and commit to the homegrown food for along enough you will eventually net.

Everything is a step toward a goal. You will own NOTHING. Useless Eliters will OWN YOU. A boot stomping on a human face forever.

we are in the 'cull teh useless eaters' phase now. Ukraine, palestine, white nations with the bioweapon injections and third world invading army, toxic particulate sprayed from planes, toxins in food and water... and on it goes

The plan is GENOCIDE, ASSET-STRIP, ENSLAVE. BANKERS. they use I.O.U's from insolvent foreign bankers to finance all the killing. The suckers call those worthless I.O.U.'s Dollars. Imagine pushing a button and instantly with no cost, creating a trillion "dollars" in an account and then handing it out to your friends to buy up Property from under the people, or weapons to kill their neighbors. GENOCIDE ASSET-STRIP ENSLAVE

Right.

It would be surprising if it were not the case.

People focus on the sheer scale of large rural growing operations, and forget that that scale is exactly what keeps the per-unit cost, and carbon cost, low.

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