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Comment by SEJeff | Hacker News Reader

There is also a slightly different way to grow food using a less intense fertilizer called "square foot gardening".

There is a best selling book about it and it works surprisingly well. The secret fertilizer for this, affectionately known as "Mel's Mix" recipe is available for anyone to make their own. It's not even terribly hard if you're willing to do a bit of composting outside on your own.

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Edit: "wheat" -> "corn"

"Square foot gardening" with hand labor isn't going to replace the 772 million metric tons of wheat and 1 billion metric tons of corn produced annually. Sorry, it just isn't.

Given that it's January, why not try the experiment of producing all the food you personally consume this year using the techniques in this book?

Growing a few tomatoes and a bit of lettuce is pretty easy, and is a fun and rewarding hobby. Producing every single calorie you consume using only hand labor and no chemical fertilizer is an entirely different kettle of fish.

We actually ran that experiment for several millennia. It produced societies in which 90+% of the population were slaves, serfs, or other unfree agricultural laborers.

I'd rather we not go back to that, personally.

Growing by hand for calories is a negative return activity. Industrial is just more energy efficient and who cares about artisanal sugar or cooking oil.

Hand-Grow some herbs and tomatoes on the other hand and now you’re making dough.

> Growing by hand for calories is a negative return activity.

Industrial agriculture, with the help of chemical fertilizers, has only been a thing since the early 19th century.

I find it hard to believe that agriculture, in all the centuries before that, was negative in return. How did sedentary humans feed themselves for these thousands of years before that if not with manual agriculture?

I don't think it's negative, but it's quite marginal. As noted above, in most traditional civilizations, upwards of 90% of the population was engaged just in growing food, generally as unfree labor. The remaining 10% were priests, nobles, and soldiers to keep the peasants in line and working hard.

Such societies typically also had famines every few years. We don't have famines in developed countries any more.

They also supplemented their growing with animals.

//wiki/Claviceps_purpurea

//wiki/Ignis_sacer

hope this may help... (-:

> Growing by hand for calories is a negative return activity.

Could you explain what this means? Does this imply animal husbandry was necessary for agriculture?

With ag automation, paradigm shift.

When historians looked into details, it turned out a serf worked less than 40 hours per week on average in the Middle Ages in France, less than modern workers. And he needed to feed both own family and his master.

Umm... hours worked isn't the only metric for quality of life. I'm pretty sure that 40 hours spent in agricultural stoop labor is not the same thing as 40 hours sitting in a comfy chair in front of a computer.

Also, you're just shining off the fact that they were serfs. I wouldn't want to be a serf even if I had to work only 10 hours per week. Would you? Not free to leave the land on which you were born, living in a hovel with no running water, toilet facilities, or central heating, maybe one change of clothes, fully subject to your master in all aspects of your life, including who (and even if) you were allowed to marry...

> And he needed to feed both own family and his master.

His master had to have 9 or 10 serfs doing that to produce enough surplus to support him. That was rather the point.

I am not arguing about quality of life. The point is that less than 40 hours per week (it can be in fact close to 30 as less than 40 is a conservative estimate) was enough for a single person to feed a family and have some extra using manual labor.

> was enough for a single person to feed a family and have some extra using manual labor.

No, that was ten serfs each working 30 hours a week to in aggregate grow enough food to subsist on and generate the master's demanded surplus. That was also only true in good years. In bad years a portion of serfs just died.

A serf's life sucked in every dimension. Even if they only "worked" 30 hours they spent the rest of their time in squalor. If you think working in a field is so attractive there's lots of farms looking for day labor. Try it out.

The number of hours per week wasn't even a factor in the original statement. You're trying to drag the conversation off on a tangent.

Come on, a "modern serf" would have access to (Civil liberties discussion aside):

- power tools

- solar/wind/battery for power independence

- internet for entertainment

- running water in the house

- cheap goods (clothes, etc are WAY MORE cheap and efficient to make now)

So I'd say the day-to-day job is theoretically even easier.

I don't think a modern serf would have any of those things, because a society in which 90% of the available human capital is devoted to manual agriculture does not have the available labor to produce any of those things. At least, not for anyone other than the 10% of "lords".

Most things grown in home gardens don't have a significant number of calories. Here's a planting schedule from that site:

https://squarefootgardening.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/S...

None of those are significant sources of fat or protein, and a few are at best moderate sources of carbs.

Potato and sweet potato can be produced in a local garden and provide enough calories and nutrients. For example, if one eats enough potatoes to get 2500 kilocalories (about 6 pounds), one get more than enough protein.

6 pounds? I'm skeptical that anyone can sit down and eat 6 pounds of potatoes. You should probably check your arithmetic here.

And no, you're not going to produce enough potatoes in a "local garden" to feed our cities, much less all of the people in the rest of the world who are fed by our croplands.

For one serving sure it is not trivial to eat that, but spread it over 3 meals and it is very OK

My grandmother told me that during WWII in Belarus many people in villages for 3 years eat pretty much only potatoes plus few berries/mushrooms and little fish. It was pointless to keep any animals as those would be taken either by Germans, local police folks or partisans. And all potatoes were grown with pure manual labor as the were no horses and petrol for any kind of machinery was simply not available.

Despite such diet people were not malnourished or underweight and even sold potato to get money for other stuff.

A rural village in Belarus in WWII (with available fields) is an entirely different thing from a city of 25 million in 2021 China.

And nearly a kg of potatoes at a meal? While that might be possible, I'm not sure I could manage it.

Also, I've noticed that the stories of the hardships that one's grandparents faced do not become less impressive as the years go by. :-)

I'm picturing a 5 pound bag of potatoes one might find at a grocery store. I think it might be larger than my torso.

I checked the math, they are correct.

The US food system at least is designed to generate a lot of food efficiently. This could definitely work, and the food is probably better. But being able to generate cheap calories on demand is a major priority.

Efficiency arguments aside, the best thing about home gardening is the buffer it provides for supply uncertainty, since we don't warehouse anything anymore or plan for disruption.

How actionable do you think this is to a farmer growing staple crops in sub-Saharan africa?

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