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Some stuff you can def grow yourself easily and not have to buy at the store. I don’t have to buy tomato’s all summer just from a few plants. Never buy herbs. But yeah sustenance farming I am not. Support local farmers!
Local farm has a dirt cheap produce subscription. $40 a week for locally grown produce!
That’s super expensive… 40 a week for just veggies? I spend 40 a week on all my groceries at most.
Average is $270 per week in the USA.
$270 includes everything like Keurig coffee pods, ground beef, and laundry detergent- not just vegetables.
That’s fair, but the comment above said that they “spend 40 a week on all my groceries at most.”
That’s cool, I wanted to point out that saying cheap and then a price point without reference isn’t really helpful because price varies so much.
Also, 270 per week per person!?!? What the fuck, that can’t be true, that’s more than what I extrapolated it would cost me in the European expensive countries when I visited and went to random grocery stores. As always, the american dream seems to be a scam fetish xD.
I spend 1/3rd of that on all of my groceries combined per month. If I was spending that much per week I would be over 1000$ in debt after a single month. Is the average person really that rich? And what food are they buying that they need to spend that much?
This is baffling to me as a poor person.I’m thinking that price is per household not person. I hope that’s the case. But I’m seriously impressed that you can swing $90/mo for food. That’s amazing.
Where do you live? I’m in central Europe and hit the local currency equivalent of 60$ per person per week…
I live in a quite expensive Spanish area and we usually spend 50ish for 2 people’s worth of food. We do go out or order food on the weekend sometimes but being vegetarian we don’t spend more than 15€ on produce a week at most so 40 a week sounds a lot.
American grocery store produce is really expensive now. $40 for a week of veggies would be a good deal in my area. Plus you’re supporting local agriculture.
Sure, but they didn’t specify they were american, did they?
Wasn’t saying you should have assumed, just corroborating. But also doesn’t the $ imply he’s American?
It’s not you who said I should assume, it was them who didn’t specify, implying we should asume, sorry if I made you think otherwise. Canadians and Australians afaik aso use dollars, just not USD.
In any case, this was quite the small complaint I had, so I’ll just drop it haha. Have a great day.
Haha gotcha you too!!
Sure, but I don’t have to pay for the food they produce, just some seeds. Seeds are way cheaper than whatever is available from the local grocery.
It might yield a relatively small amount but I’m not feeding a city. I only need enough for me and my family.
If I can save a couple hundred bucks over the year, not buying produce at the shop, I’ll fucking do it.
The economy isn’t doing me any favors.
You’re getting a lot of hate here, but you’re not entirely wrong. Cost aside, home gardens are massively more carbon intensive than modern industrial agricultural methods. Community gardens are generally better.
https://phys.org/news/2024-01-food-urban-agriculture-carbon-footprint.html
That said, gardens do still offer a ton of other benefits, both for your mental health and your taste buds. But let’s not completely decentralize our agricultural system.
A lot of industrial produced food is cheap because of child, forced, and otherwise exploited labor (undocumented workers, for example). Heavily mechanized farming (mostly used for grains) is cheap because of the vast amount of fossil fuel “energy slaves” used. And that’s only cheap because the costs are externalized.
Anyways, growing your own food can definitely be cheaper than buying it. Of course, not if you start plants under lights, build raised beds and fill them with purchased soil, buy organic pelletized fertilizer, or stuff like that. It can be nearly free to grow your own food (if you don’t count the cost of your own labor) by saving seeds and intercepting materials from waste streams (wood chips, lawn clippings, manure, used coffee grounds, etc) to “feed your soil.”
@FiniteBanjo it is true, but what no one has directly mentioned yet is, that home grown provides a high bar on what industrial agriculture can ask for as a price. If it gets so expensive that growing your own is more cost effective for yourself, you don’t need to pay for overpriced products. That’s a possible competition, obviously only for those that are fortunate enough to have the fitting and needed resources to grow(being poor is expensive).
Quality ≠ quantity
Ironically Jerusalem artichokes
It’s better to encourage native fauna by planting native flora than plant a vegetable garden that you give up on after 2 months and then gets overrun with foreign weeds.
And still a vastly more efficient use of our resources than chemical-fest irrigated lawns.
Yeah fuck lawns. I mow mine but I don’t feed or water it. The weeds can overtake the grass and I wouldn’t care.
Who the fuck prioritized efficiency over quality in their backyard garden?
My handmade solid maple and walnut furniture will never reach the yield or cost-effectiveness as IKEA. I guess I’ll just have to burn my shop down
You are missing the point.
It’s not about your shop. It’s about everyone making their own furniture… which doesn’t scale and isn’t feasible.
This is a totally specious argument. Everyone doesn’t have to make 100% of their own furniture any more than every one has to grow 100% of their food.
If I make two chairs it’s more efficient than 1 chair and I only need to spend maybe 70% more time than 1, not 100% I sell/barter one chair to my neighbor, who, because they have grown 6 tomato plants instead of 4 (at most 10% more of their labor), has excess tomatoes and gives me some in exchange.
Funny enough ‘efficiency’ industrially tends to just mean what makes the most money anyways, so most crop’s have been trained to be nutrient sparse, yet large
Who the fuck prioritized efficiency over quality in their backyard garden?
The Billions of human beings who rely on it to live.
The more you grow and eat at home, the less the food industry needs to burn fuel to ship. I know you folks in the US hate doing anything to help out with the world, but if you took the saying of be the change you want to see, imagine the tens of millions of acres being wasted on lawns being put to environmental and nutritional use. Imagine instead of putting leaves into plastic bags to get shipped to a landfill, or burning, houses normalized having compost piles. You get to put waste paper and cardboard in there too instead of bagging it.
I challenge all of yall to grow beans this season. They grow fast, they grow easy, theyre pretty nutritionally complete, they fertilize your soil themselves. Make use of your land.
It makes sense for it to be the same as solar power: just because most of energy generation is done in big facilities and even some kinds of solar generation (such as solar concentrators) can only be done in large facilities, doesn’t make having some solar panels providing part of one’s needs (or even all of one’s needs for some of the time) less cost effective in Economic terms or a good thing in Ecologic terms.
So it makes sense to grow some of one’s food, but maybe not go as far as raise one’s own beef or even aim for food self sufficiency, both for personal financial reasons and health reasons. That it’s also good in Ecological terms (can lower the use of things like pesticides and definitelly reduces transportation needs) is just icing on the cake.
Im pretty sure the easy decentralization of solar is a big reason its gotten so much pushback from politicians and lobbyists.
Can’t have people give less of their income to rent-seekers…
Yup we shoud normalize gardening and canning. It’s a thing my grandparents knew. Their families survived times of world wars, dust bowls and the great depression. They probably didn’t have much choice in the moment but even when times got better they kept up a wonderful little garden. Kid me didn’t get why they didn’t just buy the things they needed.
I love the conveniences of modern farming and I use it every day. But like all big industialized systems they can be fragile. Covid was a huge problem for a lot of indistries and thankfully farming wasn’t really one of them. But if it was countless people would have struggled.
I’m not really a prepper or anything crazy but I don’t want to forget the lessons learned just a few decades ago- gardening is great and worth the effort.
What a bullshit blanket rude comment. Lots of folks in the US are working hard to affect change at their personal and local level. You should edit your comment because it’s nationalistic and disparaging.
Notice how the US is among the largest polluters per capita by quite the margin.
Are we calling out the qatari, bahraini and UAE assholes here aswell?
I’m comfortable saying yes to that
Based
Don’t leave out Australia and Canada, since Australia is worse and Canada is next on the list after the USA.
Go ahead and tell everybody how Australia, USA, and Canada are such bad countries.
Meanwhile, with the freedom afforded to me as a land owner in the USA I work from home, harvest solar energy with solar panels to run my electronics, and am growing my own produce and eggs in a backyard farm. As an individual I’m probably doing more for the environment than most people reading this whole Lemmy post.
Lol. Check your privilege.
A. Do a carbon footprint analysis of your life, if it’s above 2,5 tons coe/year you’re a net burden on the planet. My country is as well, although considerably lower than the US.
B. It is possible for you to be a paragon of environmentalism and still live in a country with inefficient systems for water, infrastructure, zoning, industry and food production. Not to mention live in a culture of unsustainable lifestyle. Many Chinese or Indian persons are simply too poor to have a major impact on the environment, but their national industrial practices drive up the average pollution to levels comparable to the US (although still lower). Most US people aren’t as poor, and also have shitty industry standards, and also the means to change that without losing your standing internationally.
C. Multiple countries are shitty, in fact most of the non-developing world countries are a net burden.
D. As opposed to the other countries at the top, the US has had the economy, data, and access to resources to be able to something about it for generations, whereas most have had half the time and considerable need of modernising.
E. The US is much larger than the other countries, and could with quite simple measures make great impact and help pressure other great polluters.
I checked my privilege, and found that it was cool. I don’t have a carbonometer to check the other stuff so you can work on that if you want.
Again that doesn’t change shit. My point is that a nation is not a monolith.
You wouldn’t make a statement like they did about a race, or a people from another country, so it isn’t appropriate here either.
Edit It is simply untrue that all Americans “hate to help the world”, and therefore that statement is bullshit.
Nah Americans need to do better
Imagine instead of putting leaves into plastic bags to get shipped to a landfill, or burning, houses normalized having compost piles.
I appreciate your argument but there’s no need to throw in a strawman. Leaves in plastic bags have been illegal in most US states for decades. Yard waste must be in paper bags.
Ive never seen yard waste in a paper bag, I have seen loads of plastic bags. pumpkin faces for autumn are extremely popular here.
These states and cities have yard debris bans:
maybe its an enforcement issue but from what I’ve seen in Arkansas its all plastic bags. Video with examples https://www.thv11.com/article/news/local/little-rock-stop-yard-waste-pick-up/91-4745aa35-0cd5-4261-b87a-8ac44a2cfc3a
Assuming it used all the same tools and techniques, making only minor replacements of tractors for voluntary domestic labor … I don’t see why it couldn’t reach averages in a similar magnitude. Given them larger plots where they could use industrial tools and they should produce about the same on average.
Eother way there attempts more self sufficiency are to be commended… So the I’m not sure of the point of the post really.
If we had a socialist style of market economy like Vietnam we’d produce more crops.
Also in a correctly valued economy we wouldn’t have to subsidize farming.
I feel like there are helpful and harmful fantasies, and villainizing the foundation of all modern life in favor of unrealistic self-sustenance is leaning harmful.
We have the means to all enjoy good produce for minimal costs, we don’t need to change to a worse system that costs us more.
Honestly, you don’t have to do much to villainize some aspects of industrial farming. It’s mostly only possible due to the haber-bosch nitrogenation process, which was invented by the same guy who invented chemical warfare, and the process itself uses lots of petrochemicals and dumps a lot of nitrogen into the natural environment. That’s not even getting into the use of migrant workers, or the patenting of dna over some crops, and the food monopolies that exist in some countries.
I also don’t think it’s a case of “there can be only one system”… And I don’t run into a lot of people saying that.
For myself, this isn’t one of the more pressing issues in the world. I don’t really think people have enough land to be able to be self-sufficient, but gardening is a nice hobby.
Food markets vary from nation to nation, and have political aspects I’m fairly disinterested in, so can’t really comment on that.
Bye!
This only true in places that aren’t environmentally supportive of agriculture. My family never had to buy vegetables. Granted we had about 2 acres of farmable land. We didn’t sell produce, we harvested and froze until we needed it
Edit: Initial start up is definitely not as cost effective as buying from the grocery, but once you’re able to harvest your own seeds, it’s not that expensive to sustain your production
Counterpoint: if you, personally, can save some dollars so you’re mainly spending on the things you can’t grow, that’s hardly a bad thing. Also, working with soil is known to be good for you. Exposes you to soil bacteria that are known to boost mood.
And it sounds corny as fuck and I didn’t really take it seriously until I did it, but homegrown produce can be so incredibly much better than what you get off an industrial farm.
Just let people feed themselves and be happy, fuck.
They’re not feeding themselves, though, they’re primarily reliant on buying what they cannot produce themselves.
You can have both and it doesn’t need to compete with industrial farming or meet some business model. It just needs to meet the needs and goals of a household.
But it lets you grow the stuff you want how you want and eat it fresh without taking days and trucks on a highway to get it to you. If it didn’t have a positive impact why did they push victory gardens so much in WW2?
It feels good, teaches valuable skills, makes your neighborhood more resiliant and gives you healthy things you want to eat. It’s more than simply therapeutic.
You can have both, or you can have just industrial, but you cannot have only homegrown non-industrial.
