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Comment by asdkhadsj | Hacker News Reader

Just read the beginning so far, but it sounds like home-grown is safe (even if not self-started plants)? Ie, the article (so far) makes it sound like it's an issue of soil microbiome. If that's the case, and I no-dig grow my own veggies, I'd be okay?

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They are saying corn is toxic because it has round-up chemicals in it - and they can't be washed off.

So growing food in your backyard, assuming you don't spray it or have heavy metals in your soil that are ingested by the crop, are likely fine.

How alive is your backyard's soil? A lab would have to analyze it. It may or may not have the right minerals, depending on what you're trying to grow.

You can also buy simple take home soil test kits that do the job just fine, FWIW.

Can't you just get ecological produce or elsewise produced without round up?

> How alive is your backyard's soil? A lab would have to analyze it. It may or may not have the right minerals, depending on what you're trying to grow.

I brought in a lot of compost to "start" it, so who knows what is in there. Furthermore my home is recently purchased, and the previous owners did the land no benefits (unkept dogs in the lawn, terrible looking dirt, etc). However I'm working towards / practicing no dig, heavy mulching of both green and brown (both in beds and out of beds) to promote natural breakdown and soil improvements, and tumbler composting (to combat rodents).

I plan to soil test in a few years, once I've become more established. Right now I'm primarily concerned with establishing whatever is sustainable for me, and then measuring what I might need to tweak. We'll see how it goes, hah - I'm pretty new to all of this; and I have more yard than I (an indoor man) knows how to deal with :D

> corn is toxic because it has round-up chemicals in it

If this is known to be the case, how does this pass food safety?

/s Is the water you use for irrigation chlorinated or fluorinated?

You jest, but someone's been vandalizing stop signs in my area with bumper stickers that read something about "they're putting fluoride in the water!"

It amuses me somewhat, because most of the people here are either on wells or the water coop, and AFAIK the latter only chlorinates. But, education never stopped a good conspiracy from roping in true believers...

You'd probably be ok, if you only ate the veggies you grew yourself. But what about meat, dairy and other animal products? What about bread, rice and other cereals?

I have a friend who is incredibly conscious about such things and they convinced a farmer to raise chickens on non-gmo, organic feed; chickens are free range, and treated humanely. They called it the “holy grail” chicken.

Yes, they did inspect the chicken, feed, etc.

Total cost to purchase is $20/lb. majority of the cost coming from feed.

Regardless if you can pick apart my story or how honest the entire process is, I’m not sure this is sustainable. Who can afford such prices?

If this is the case (and true at face value), what are our choices?

I don’t want to be a Debby Downer, just passing along info.

> Who can afford such prices?

Not sure about $20/lb - I guess this means most don't eat chicken often - but...

https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2015/03/02/389578089/yo...

It may well be that we just have to spend more on food and less on rent (for example). In aggregate it wouldn't be much of an issue if over a period of 10-20 years food prices increased and something else (due to limited individual budgets) decreased.

The interesting part is that current lowest-cost food production is a semi-random walk of various optimization paths to arrive at the status quo. That someone tried a different path, optimizing different parameters doesn't give any guarantees that further attempts could or could not go as low in price, or maybe at get to an overall higher value to a wider set of end consumers even if the price were higher.

We could be creating less waste, or healthier food products, the question is how do we systematically explore new spaces like that, even when there isn't immediate payoff. We shouldn't just rely on lucky whims of individuals - if nothing else our overall system conspires to a smaller ration of fewer individuals financially capable of indulging such exploration.

It’s possible to raise chickens as part of a broader regenerative system where much of the feed is an output from elsewhere in that system. This has been done profitably by folks like Joel Salatin, but it has its own constraints (for example, availability of pasture land).

you don’t necessarily need meat, dairy, other animal products, bread, rice, and other cereals.

You kinda really need at least a substantial subset of those

I think it depends on the history of your soil.

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