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Comment by heathrow83829 | Hacker News Reader

the difficulty of bringing produce to market is reflected in the cost structure. 90% of a food dollar goes towards all the efforts required to get food to the customer (transportation, packaging, warehousing, marketing, retail, etc).

this is why I think the solution is to have people grow their own fruits in their own backyards and front yards. customers will save a huge amount of money and it's better for the environment too.

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As an owner of an apple tree: that's great for about two months, but I don't have commercial quantities of cold storage.

We used to have a lemon tree. When it was producing, 80% of it went to waste. When it wasn't producing, we had to buy.

It was still worth it, though. It required very little maintenance (pruning once a year, replace the batteries on the auto-irrigation system a couple times a year), so it was basically free.

My parents have the biggest walnut tree I've ever seen in their yard. It's a similar situation as you described with the lemon tree. During fall we would get dumped with walnuts, filling multiple boxes; more than any of us care to eat in a year. So for many years, we've been sharing our walnuts with the neighbors, some of them I've only ever seen, when they ring to ask for the walnuts. In return they bring us some of their produce every now and then: cherries, onions, eggs, apples, apple cider, freshly baked cakes and jam. I would have loved to trade you some walnuts for those lemons.

What do you do with that many lemons anyway? Lemonade?

Asking as a person who buys about 4 lemons per year.

Sour flavor can cut down on the richness of very savory dishes. You can use it in sauces, directly on fish and meat. It will function similarly to vinegar. If you grill or broil it, the sour flavor mellows out.

You're assuming that the customer growing their own fruit could do it at lower overall cost. Logistics are fairly inexpensive all things considered, if they really represent 90% of the total cost of fruit it says a lot for how low agribusiness has driven down the cost of the other 10%.

I think for some types of produce, a home garden is an easy win when it comes to cost. Sure there are things that are very difficult (labor intensive, water intensive, etc.) to grow, so avoid those. But tomatoes, cucumbers, lettuce, beans, potatoes, peas, and beans are pretty easy to grow, and seed stock can be purchased cheaply. I haven't done this as an adult because I am so excessively lazy (but it's on my to-do list for this year, finally), but we had a vegetable garden when we were kids, and between my mom, my sister, and I, it was very manageable, and we ended up growing more than we could use, and gave some away to neighbors.

No one is stopping customers from growing their own food. What's stopping is the lack of expertise knowledge and time commitments it takes to harvest.

Not really. I buy bare-root tree from home depot, throw it into the ground, and get fruit in a few years. No fertilizer, no anything, just give it water and sun. It's not rocket science.

Firstly, half the produce we buy does not grow well in our climate. Secondofly, my parents both grew up on farms and have gardened most of their lives. They struggle to get a good yield between growing conditions, adjusting irrigation, and keeping the birds, hogs, deer, raccoons away.

Don't forget the bugs. My parents planted a cherry tree thinking the birds would be the biggest pest. Then we found every single cherry on the tree had a cherry fruit fly larva inside it. If you don't cover or spray them at the right time, the entire crop is ruined.

It's definitely science, and it definitely doesn't work that way for most people. Also, "a few years" is a long time between deciding you want fruit and getting to eat it.

> Also, "a few years" is a long time between deciding you want fruit and getting to eat it.

The best time to plant was a few years ago, the next-best time to plant is today.

This feels like a weird argument; you can decide you want to grow your own fruit today, plant that tree, and continue to buy fruit for the next few years until it's ready. This isn't rocket science. For most people it's not particularly likely that they're going to decide in the next few years that they don't like apples or lemons or whatever anymore.

Your lack of desire to either plan ahead or be patient doesn't invalidate the approach.

I wasn't making an argument against growing your own fruit, I was just helping explain why a lot of people don't do it. Personally, I am trying to grow blueberries.

Not just deer, but a number of insects will thank you for your generosity. And you will have to learn when and how to fight them in order to get a decent harvest.

Local deer everywhere agree: this is the solution

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