Are you sure about that? Intuitively I would expect commercially-produced food is far more efficient than everyone growing tiny amounts on a balcony.
... until you get thrips, spend hours investigating the best natural remedies and buy jugs of neem oil to start mixing natural pesticides, and end up having to throw out the thrip-infested basils (which is half of them by now). Then you spend a few more hours investigating why you now have fungus gnats all over the house, and start looking into alternative soil media, hydro, and semi-hydro, and you start filling up the odd corners of your house with various liquid fertilizers, and you spend a few hundred on grow lights because you live an an apartment with no balcony and your windows don't get enough light.
Source: started growing herbs over the summer
Still a fun hobby though! I wouldn't give it up for anything, but if I valued my gardening time at a pay rate equal to my work time, I've spent thousands upon thousands of dollars for probably < $100 worth of food
I have plenty of room, and enjoy fresh basil all summer (and pesto all winter!) but I understand I'm the exception.
Tried growing potatoes several times - fail. They rot in the ground, or the voles eat them before I can get at them, or they just don't produce. Sigh. Back to the grocery store.
The principles we employ at Permapeople take into account all of these things, and promote the growing of ones own food without excessive inputs, and positive outputs (food, compost, more living soil for the next generation).
Bringing food production into the hands of people who WANT to participate is what this is about.
Its a lot of fun to get things working, and then when you do: the plants do all the work.
No, doing it the first few times on a balcony - this won't be efficient. But, going through a few seasons and tweaking your plant code a couple iterations, maybe refactoring (the soil) a couple times: this will get you a long way towards highly productive gardening.
Start with a good compost, get your seeds started earlier in the season than you might think (window seedboxes), get things in the soil, pay attention to the plants, use your local resources, and most of all .. love what you do. All gardening can be rewarding.
Even if its not efficient at first. The more you do it, however, the better things get. Also: make that compost awesome.
But that energy comes most probably from fossil fuels. If we can be more efficient in the delivery of this energy, we can improve what is called the aggregate efficiency.
We can deliver from sources close to us, demanding a bit more energy to deliver 1 ton of potatoes but being able to source this energy from renewable sources. We can do that because the delivery is shorter and closer to us. No need to ship freight or carry the potatoes in a truck for 1500km.
Cheaper fuel also means cheaper prices.
Another way to beat the energy aggregate cost would be that if the produce is micro farmed, either by yourself or by a local entity, is that you can use less fertilizer as the soil is not run to exhaustion. Less weedkiller as you can pluck the weeds yourself. Being in a controlled environment also means less plagues, or if a crop plague comes, less pesticide used. Fertilizers, pesticides, weed killers... All that comes from fossil fuels.
Totally, but all of that also allows us not to have 30-50% of the population working in farming. If you have enough money and enough time, you can absolutely live with a smaller foot print by producing your own food, but it's not something that scales well. And I'd argue that you probably have skills that would serve humanity better if you applied them to larger problems than plucking weeds, that is: you could have a much larger impact on saving humanity/the planet/the universe/your soul by not producing the food yourself and spending the time you save on other things.
Let's imagine everyone decided to grow their own garden like the author suggests. What does one need to start a garden? The common items are shovels, timber, soil, hoses, wires, fertilizer, knee pads, gloves, pots, pesticide, and many other things. Obtaining these items requires physically driving to one's hardware store. Most people drive SUVs. This means there is a sudden influx of people driving their gas guzzling machines to obtain these basic items. We also have to consider the reality that multiple trips will be made. People commonly forget to purchase basic things, need to make returns, or realize they are short on supply (such as soil) and need to purchase more. Now consider other realities. Most people don't know how to grow. Even fewer people know how to grow a plant to its maximum potential. It takes many seasons for individuals to learn the best techniques. Think about the wasted resources spent on this. Now think about the excess waste commonly found in gardens by those who finally learn how to grow. I see this all the time. Gardens filled with oversupply of produce. More than what even their friends want to take home. Consider the yield of produce in respect to time, labor, cost of materials, and CO2 emissions. For every shovel, glove, hose, pot, etc. purchased, for every car drive made, and for every supply chain used to produce these goods, is only put to work on a small plot of land in one's backyard. They are not used to their full potential. This is both a waste of resources and an unnecessary increase in CO2 emissions. If these same resources were used on an actual farm, then they will be used for larger portions of land which will in turn yield more produce. In effect, the costs are being spread across the land, thus making them more effective.
I'd like to explain this in the opposite perspective. The absurdity seems to become much more apparent this way. The author says that these industries are inefficient as appose to simply growing in one's backyard. If it truly were more efficient, then wouldn't it be most effective if industries simply adopted this? They are looking to save money after all. Instead of purchasing one giant tractor, why not revert to shovels and an army of physical labor? Instead of hauling supplies on a few semi-trucks, why not dispatch an army of SUVs? Instead of having one massive farm that spans hundreds of acres, why not break it up into thousands of 500 sq/ft "mini gardens", each of which has its own dedicated set of shovels, hoses, gloves, knee pads, etc. And for every "mini garden", instead of growing being dictated by farm owners with many generations of growing experience, they will be grown by individuals who hardly have any experience at all.