Small-scale, local farming is where it’s at. Growing a bucket of potatoes on a balcony or helping out at a community garden are small but achievable steps to bring the food closer to us. In addition to sustainability, it promotes knowledge of how to produce our own food and reduces dependence on large-scale monoculture farming.
It’s nice to walk a few paces and pick up an ingredient for dinner with the satisfaction that you nurtured it. But mainly, I just don’t feel like going to the grocery store as much lol.
I do sure wish I had a balcony. I grew peppers and cherry tomatoes on my windowsill a few years in a row but the effort isn’t worth it for an apartment…
I feel ya! We work with what we can and if the space you have isn’t feasible, then that’s okay if it simply doesn’t work out.
That being said, here’s a few options to consider but do what you want. :)
One option is to grow some herbs since those tend to get pricey and they therefore offer the best bang for your buck. Plus they take up little space. Starting from seeds is the most cost effective (only a couple dollars for 1000s of seeds). Sow them in an empty plastic egg carton, nursery pots, or other upcycled plastic container. Then, you can germinate and grow under grow lights. Don’t bother with “grow light” marketed ones. Just the brightest, whitest generic LED bulb will do. If you run it all day, it’ll only cost a couple cents per month. Then, you can harvest fresh herbs year-round! Lamps can be found for cheap and sometimes free on Facebook marketplace.
Another option is finding a community garden in your area.
I think most of the things you say are true, but small local farming isn’t going to solve world hunger. The bigger a farm gets the more efficient it can operate. The progress we made as a species boils down to how much more efficient we can do stuff.
For sure! Industrial-scale farming has been integral to the population growth of our modern society. It doesn’t hurt to alleviate a small amount of pressure from those systems at a local scale in a sustainable way. I mainly just find it fun to grow a few veggies here and there and thought others may be interested. :)
Absolutely, I planted some tomatoes and very spicy peppers. All of them failed (planted in the wrong month I guess). Definitely a learning experience and definitely something I’ll try next summer.
I really hope the plants survive the winter, but I might have to start from seed again
Industrial production of food is not the problem. Capitalism is.
I mean, good for you if you want to play in a garden with plants, but I don’t want to do that. And this kind of production is not enough to feed everyone.
Nobody is claiming an issue with large-scale food production, or that small, local gardens will feed everyone. Also, nobody is telling you what to do.
Rather, that there are benefits to growing even a little bit of your own food should you choose to do so. There’s no need to talk down and I hope you’re alright, because that’s a lotta strawmen.
And that’s ok! Nobody expects to live off of a small garden, nor is it feasible for everybody to grow everything they eat.
It provides many benefits already, such as being a fulfilling activity as you said. It also cuts down on food waste since you can harvest when you eat it and leave it on the plant for a bit longer otherwise. It also reduces trips to the grocery store and reduces emissions of importing food over long distances. Finally, it’s much cheaper if you grow from seed and upcycle plastic containers for planting. Especially if you grow expensive crops like fresh herbs.
Yeah more ad hominem attacks. That’s a really good way to convince someone you’re correct, getting angry and lashing out for the crime of asking questions and trying to foster an open discussion.
Look, you’re acting under the impression that I’m trying to convince you of something when I know you’re not capable of having your opinion changed because you’re sure you’re right. The Internet is full of people like you. You read an article somewhere or mirror others like you who talk about the proper ways to argue, again with the goal of defending your awful takes instead of entertaining learning new info, but the truth is you just like to argue.
Of course I think my current opinions are correct, I wouldn’t hold them otherwise. That doesn’t mean I’m incapable of changing my mind through persuasive argument. Aren’t you also trying to defend your worldview? It’s an excellent tactic for trying to refine to yourself what you actually believe putting your views out there for public scrutiny.
I think, the trick is to not over think it. Just go with your first impulse. Be quick, be lazy, because most people are and when you reply like most people, you are “no robot”.
There’s a difference between working for your own and your communities good and working for someone else while not being allowed to keep your (fair share of) product/profit.
That’s not how farming started though. They started farming so that they can feed themselves and their community. It eventually devolved into that, but it’s not how it started.
Early farming would have been communally owned land. But hunter gatherer life was not remotely as relaxed as dudes on yhe Internet would make it seem
I mean an-prim is like the dumbest ideology ever unless you actually think 50+% infant mortality and everyone who needs glasses being unable to survive is cool.
I think both of you are not considering two major aspects:
Farming can feed more people on a given fertile area than hunting and gathering can.
Farming is area exclusive, e.g. there is a set amount of people farming in one area and considering this area to be theirs, excluding everyone else from usage.
It is very much possible, that in terms of providing food for the existing population both are equally viable. But with farming you could create larger more densely packed populations, which in turn provided means to exclude others by force. So while hunting and gathering was not necessarily a bad way of life, it did not allow for imperialism and was subsequently diminished by the imperialists.
Hunting and gathering wasn’t peace and love. There were wars and resources access problems already. Farming is simply much more efficient. Hunting can only feed people until you reach the natural reproduction of the animals. Same for gathering and plants. Domestication and farming is the process of increasing the volume of food you can have access too. Thus you can feed more people more reliably and with less space.
Human population on earth is directly linked to food access.
I totally agree. Thats why i made the argument “for an existing population”. In order to support a growing population changing to farming was the right choice. But not all populations had the ambition or necessity to grow, as we see with many indigenous people that survived quite well until being met with expanding settler societies.
So hunting and gathering wasnt necessarily an inferior lifestyle in terms of running a stable society. Qnd in the long haul it is very much possible that humanities growth leads to its downfall so severely, that a nomadic lifestyle will reemerge as it tends to be more environmentally sustainable.
So while hunting and gathering was not necessarily a bad way of life, it did not allow for imperialism and was subsequently diminished by the imperialists.
Have you seen nowadays how they fish? They destroy whole huge areas leaving no fish behind. This is a type of imperialism. The problem is capitalism in its nature
And for that kind of fishing you need large vessels, built in stationary warfts, using stationary ports. The materials are made in stationary complex apparatusses to extract and shape metals from ore and the ore is mined in stationary mines.
All of this is only possible as a result of settling
Sure. So your idea is that people should be mandated to travel and change places every X years? Or what? I don’t get it.
Isn’t the problem the disproportionate accumulation of goods, resources and money? AKA capitalism? I mean theoretically, if you restrict these, you can also settle in one place without taking advantage and destroying everything around it.
The thesis was that people settled because it was superior in terms of supplying the population back then. All i was saying is that at the time that mustnt have been the case. It was more effective in the capitlaist/imperialist/expansionist mindset that is fucking is over now.
Of course with the current 8 billion people living on earth a nomadic lifestyle is not viable. But that is a very different question from the question if it was viable 10.000 years ago, when there were maybe a few hundred thousand to a few million humans on earthin total.
And they existed about 2000-1000 years ago. Humans started settling and farming as far back as 10.000-12.000 years ago.
Of course by then populations have increased tremendously. But in the spirit of the meme that probably wasn’t the best overall course of action, was it?
We can ignore all the other nomadic tribes doing just as much evil shit as city dwellers throughout history the moment they have the opportunity and means, sure.
Several mass extinctions have been caused by evolution creating a lifeform that is too successful. The difference between humans and them is that we can recognize we are the problem and consciously adapt.
Some of us, anyways.
Regardless, that adaptation won’t be by abandoning agriculture.
We have more food than we know what to do with and people are still starving. Growing your own food provides a reward someone like you not only can’t experience, but if you did you wouldn’t be able to understand it.
This is what “AI training” looks like, folks. The companies developing AI constantly tells us how awesome it is, but it still needs the help of humans to recognize basic sh*t like cars, buses, crosswalks and traffic lights. They didn’t choose those images by accident.
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