The average American family had an annual income of ~$3000 (in today’s dollars), So, yeah, poor.
No you won't, at least not with greens. Did you even try to do the math for the required amount of food a single person needs per-year ? Even if you go with rabbits, which are easy to raise, you can only self produce a small amount of meat per year, maybe ~150lb once you get to "scale".
The reason why food is grown by large industrial farming companies is because they can grow it ~100 times cheaper than you could.
If everyone had to grow their own food, then everyone would starve to death.
The idea of locally grown food in everyone's backyard is a fairy tale that just sounds nice, but would actually be horrible.
No, it is because people don't want to grow food. My tomatoes cost me 2 minutes of time. I don't know how much you want to value my time at, but lets say I am pretty awesome and deserve $100/hour. That's $3.33 cents for all the tomatoes I can eat. Where are the industrial farming companies producing tomatoes for 3.3 cents per 100 pounds?
>If everyone had to grow their own food, then everyone would starve to death.
If that were true, we wouldn't exist. People did grow their own food for thousands of years. If everyone had to grow their own food, we'd be fine. All mechanization did was free up people from agricultural labor to do other jobs, humans predate tractors.
>The idea of locally grown food in everyone's backyard is a fairy tale that just sounds nice, but would actually be horrible.
It is a reality for lots of people, and we're pretty happy about it.
This works when everyone owns many acres of land per person, and is spending their entire life working the fields, doing hard labor, and doing very little else with their life yes. We don't live in that world anymore, though.
I suspect there isn't even enough physical land on the earth to support this inefficient method of farming.
We have significant evidence of how this worked out for people. That world that you are describing, where everyone spent their entire life just trying to barely feed themselves, was a horrible place, for everyone.
This period of time was called "the history of the world before the industrial era". And lots and lots of people died. So no, they were not fine.
> It is a reality for lots of people, and we're pretty happy about it.
By "a lot" do you mean a very small percentage of the total population?
> My tomatoes cost me 2 minutes of time.
What you do with your tiny backyard garden is irrelevant. It is mathmatically impossible for you to be feeding yourself entirely on that, unless you have multiple acres of land, which I doubt is what you are describing. Your anecdote does not overrule physics.
Exactly, we live in a world with machines. Making it easier, not harder.
>I suspect there isn't even enough physical land on the earth to support this inefficient method of farming.
The calories produced per acre is higher, not lower. We need less land, not more. Why do you think it is inefficient?
>That world that you are describing, where everyone spent their entire life just trying to barely feed themselves, was a horrible place, for everyone.
That's a modern myth. We have detailed records of rural life in the 1500s. People worked fewer hours than they do now.
>By "a lot" do you mean a very small percentage of the total population?
Yes. It only takes one person doing it to prove your claim that is impossible is false.
>What you do with your tiny backyard garden is irrelevant
No it is not, it is the entire point.
> It is mathmatically impossible for you to be feeding yourself entirely on that, unless you have multiple acres of land
It takes less than half an acre of land to feed a person growing food for yourself.
>Your anecdote does not overrule physics.
Please point me to the law of physics which states plants don't grow if stale2002 doesn't want them to.
Sure. But 1200 humans working in 1200 gardens is also a lot more economical than 1200 humans sitting at home playing Fortnite all day because there are no jobs.
The idea of employment guarantees as welfare policy has been getting traction, and programs like this where raw output isn't the main goal would be good candidates.
No it is not. I personally care about people being able to do what they want with their free time.
The situation you describe is only "efficient" if you value everyone's free time and happiness at 0. I care about people's happiness, on the other hand.
The main goal of society should be to provide people with things that they want, and that includes leisure time.
I personally want people to have a choice of what to do with their time, and not have values forced on them.
Just tranq them all with a guaranteed supply of opiates then. Problem solved.
People's needs and wants are socially conditioned. It's not like their "wants" just sprang out of thin air. They were created by the culture and social expectations around them. And many of those social expectations make people feel obligated to feel useful.
That means they need to be provided with avenues where they can feel useful instead of doping themselves with addictions to fill the sense of purposeless anomie that they fall into when alienated from public life. Make work programs, like urban forestry or gardening, are good ways to do this as they beautify the spaces where we live and are unlikely to be done adequately without some societal coordination.
We can use labor in a very inefficient (where yield is concerned) way if we think it will confer ecological, aesthetic, or sociological side-benefits, as would having lots of private gardens.
Fortnite is just an example of something people fall into doing when they don't have any other productive opportunities available to them.
In particular, if your solution is simply "spend less time on [your current] leisure activities!", it can be applied to either aggricultural system. In the case of specialized agriculture, it simply means spending more time on the individual's specialization or really anything with a greater opportunity value than growing one's own food (if your goal is to maximize earnings, it's tough to do worse than spending an hour per day growing your own food to save ~$5).
That said I think it's rather naive to assume that everyone in the world has a garage or other indoor space to spare, the resources to climate control it, etc. The world's hungry don't live in single family homes in California.
I feel as you do: local, near chemical free, food. Plus these days we'd have zigbee or sigfox sensors to ensure certain things and save time.
You can increase yields with more work, but you can often get away with only watering when it hasn’t rained for a few days.