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by BurningFrog
591 days ago
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If you enjoy growing your own food, go ahead and have fun. If you think it can replace industrial farming, we need to have a serious talk. Growing your own food is also called "subsistence farming". It's how many of the poorest of the poor survive. It's back breaking work to get just enough to survive, and in bad years you get to watch your kids starve to death. One of the greatest and least appreciated miracles of the modern age is industrial farming, which produces huge amounts of food in small areas. Without it most of us 8 billion humans would die quickly. |
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It's a social responsibility that can dramatically reduce the demand for industrial agriculture, which is essentially unsustainable when used as the only source of food supply. As it depletes nearby resources by overworking the land it occupies, it has to pull on an increasingly distant and increasingly expensive supply chain. And as with all industrial processes, its prospects for for maintaining peak efficiency at all times are infintessimal because industrial scale supply chains get disrupted in industrial scale catastrophes. It's extremely productive but also extremely brittle to both physical and social tumult.
As recently as WWII, well into the era of industrial agriculture, US production and land use needs were spread thin enough that its people faced rationing. Home gardens were encouraged as a way to improve both nutrition and morale for families during a difficult time for the country, and the feasibility of those home gardens benefited from what had then still been a widespread cultural familiarity with how to grow such gardens effectively. Hard times will come again, and having a diffuse, local, personal food supply maintained by people aren't just learning how to do at the last minute will make a big big difference.
Grow your own food because you care about those kind of things.