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Comment by archerx | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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...

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 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...

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