True, and don't expect to be able to sustain yourself to any meaningful extent on food grown on your balcony. You could likely eat all of the potatoes you grow on a balcony over a yearlong period in a week. The most practical use of small spaces for gardening, IMHO, is to grow your own herbs.
That is not the only thing you can plant on a balcony. Taking canopy layers into account increases the available amount you can grow. It is practical to raise quail for eggs or meat in an apartment. Mushrooms can be cultivated in a kitchen cabinet.
Having raised quail, I just absolutely cannot fathom having them in an apartment. They're loud, they smell, and they really, really like flying around. If you raised quail in an apartment, I'm betting it would be in semi-inhumane small cage conditions.
As someone who has not bought food at a grocery store (outside of citrus and other fruits we cannot grow locally due to climate and my absolute fear of scurvy) for the last 5 years, and someone who has cultivated this specific lifestyle for the last 20, I genuinely do not see a way for an apartment of folks to provide for themselves. Nor do I see a functional way for a city neighborhood to do so.
It takes so much space just to feed our family of 3 for the year, and that's with trading goods that we cannot or do not want to raise ourselves.
I agree that it builds a stronger local community and all that. But OP's premise is still accurate - this is an unrealistic expectation of people growing their own self-supporting food. The space just isn't there - in urban areas.
There's an old book called "Five acres and independence" which I think is a reference to the amount of land you need to sustain a family. I don't know anything about the subject, really, but I just jumped off that number.
I'm not in America, but we can use it as an example to do calculation. It's probably approximate to a misleading degree, but since I'm a software developer with a degree in an unrelated field making internet comments, that doesn't put me off:
According to Wikipedia, the US is 3,796,742 square miles. Wolfram Alpha says that's 2.43 billion acres. Using Wikipedia's stated 2019 estimate of 328,239,523 people, that's 7.5 acres per person. So under forty acres for each family of five, roughly. So if we say 5 acres is a good number, in the US you're at 8x the amount of land needed for everyone to live off the land at a small scale. Is 1/8th of the US even arable land? What about all the other stuff we'd need, like factories, mines, schools, the cold fusion powered mag-lev network etc.? Will that fit in the rest? Maybe the occasional forest would be nice?
And then of course we need to consider that the US is no. 145 out of some 200 countries for population density. For the European Union, we arrive at 2.3 acres per person, so you'd need to distribute people evenly over roughly half of the land for each five-person family to have a five acre farm. For Africa, 5.8 acres per person.
But maybe that starting number is too high or too low. I just thought it was an interesting thought experiment.
The more I read about this the more I started doubting all the doom about sustainability. Granted, I think they were vegetarian (still had live birds for eggs) but.. I think the combination of pooling together ancient techniques with modern technology could provide better results than the "if GMO & Roundup are eliminated the WORLD WILL STARVE" type of propaganda that, the more I read up about things like Agent Orange and, well, propaganda, the more I want to hear from people like the Dervais kids (RIP Jules) and less from people who have never farmed before or maybe grew some herbs one year.
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/permaculture-for-the-f...
As far as going close to 100% growing your own food, that’s a pretty amazing accomplishment. I acknowledge that it is impractical for everyone to do with at this time.
However, there are cases where people had to do this and found ways to do it:
https://www.architectural-review.com/essays/cubas-urban-farm...
It just might be that we won’t really try until we are forced to by some kind of collapse scenario or another.
But, they do need a flight pen, for humane husbandry. They naturally like to run around and peck things. They need space to do that. Anyone who justifies cage raised quail because they like confined space is just trying to justify a bad decision.
>It just might be that we won’t really try until we are forced to by some kind of collapse scenario or another.
This is 100% what I believe the case will be. We won't try anything, at scale, until forced to. The reason I live the way I do is to prepare for (what I believe to be) the inevitable change/shift in the world in the next 3-5 decades.
That being said - mega-cities, and a majority of humans living in cities is a relatively new phenomena. I am not sure our current structure lends itself to 'local' living - that's my argument above. It takes a crap-load of space to feed a family.
Maybe the missing information is just how big of a cage we are talking about. What are you envisioning when you say that? Are you saying that, if a cage is made to allow them to do that, it would still be too big for a typical sized apartment?
I used to live somewhere where I can see wild quail running around the house every day. I remembered that they liked to hide in shrubs and overhanging trees. The mother might peak out and then run out from one cover to another, with a string of chicks following right a long. I rarely remember them flying out in the open.
Yes. They need an enclosed, short space in which to feel safe in order to lay eggs. To be happy and well-raised animals, they need a 'flight pen' which is a soft netted topped pen for literal flight. They are birds, and they do need to exercise that ability. Further, their flight pen allows for them to exercise their natural pecking and 'hunting'.
You could absolutely keep them in a small cage. And they would be inhumanely raised creatures.
>Maybe the missing information is just how big of a cage we are talking about.
Small cage. Large flight pen. If the flight pen is a thing, then yes, it's too large for an apartment.
> That being said - mega-cities, and a majority of humans living in cities is a relatively new phenomena. I am not sure our current structure lends itself to 'local' living - that's my argument above. It takes a crap-load of space to feed a family.
It seems you have thought this out a lot more than I have and have the practical experience to boot.
I too also think there is a good chance for a change/shift in the world around the time frame you are talking about. I’ve seen people talk about different collapse scenarios, including some of the weirder ones. It is less about preparing it for myself so much as preparing it for my unborn son and any of his siblings that follow after.
Granted, in some of the post-collapse scenarios I’ve seen, the mega-cities are likely to be shell. I live in Phoenix. I see a lot of space that could be used for growing ... but there is not a lot of water out here. This summer, I started relandscaping my yard to capture the monsoon rains, but they didn’t really come this year. It was effectively a drought. Phoenix is not built as a city that could survive without A/C, let alone much of the areas are distant from the canals. The Salt River that runs through here is dried up. For longer-term, I’m looking at moving the family to Northern Arizona, where we’d have a better shot.
I’m also thinking that the scale at which to grow food is probably going to be at a village size. It would require a different family structure too. The one tech I think that would really need to survive is the internet, though perhaps not in the form that it is now (with control of the internet aggregated into a small handful of players). I think the presence of the internet is what will make the difference between regressing back to horticulture, to something that helps us move forward. But whatever that “forward” is, it won’t be the familiar status quo.
It may take a crap-load of space to feed a family ... I think though, encouraging people to try to feed something of themselves can help them prepare in some way if there is a collapse; and if there isn’t one, I think it would help a lot. One of the things that growing at least some of your own food enables (even if you can’t grow all of it in an apartment), is that it links you into the food cycle. It seeds a sense of agency for the person. It starts the development of personal self-reliance, even if it is not completely self-reliant, or that it is impossible for megacities to support. In this way, it gives a little bit of capability and confidence that, someone can realistically assess their chances while they are still living in a megacity. And who knows, such a person might come up with some creative ways to do so, even if others decide that they need to build their life elsewhere.
So, give them a false sense of security? ;)
It's more akin to goats than cows. They're domesticated, absolutely. But they still want to get up to something; they're not content to sit in a box and eat all day.
Honestly, that sounds like a lawsuit waiting to happen, unfortunately. Just one person getting sick, even if it wasn't from your potato, could ruin a good time.
Saying that as the chilli tree at a friends place is always covered in chilli's ready to pick, even if we strip it bare and return a few weeks later. It's an overachiever. ;)