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Comment by barathr | Hacker News Reader

If you'd like to grow tree collard / tree kale varieties yourself, check out Project Tree Collard:

https://www.projecttreecollard.org/

They grow great in California (and places with a similar climate), producing harvestable leaves year round.

This is great. I have this vision we should all have two careers now. Our current M to F tech jobs and being farmers again. All of us. Like the industrial revolution has this last step. Back to farming but this time with tech.

Why still work monday to friday then, monday to wednesday should be sufficient. There is farming to be done after all.

Wouldn't this be inefficient, laborious, and dependent on a land distribution that's starkly at odds with the urban areas where this romanticized view of agriculture gets espoused by techies?

(TBC: Love hobby gardening, community gardens are cool, I hear some folks are doing cool stuff with urban agriculture, just seems weird to imagine it as a ubiquitous second career)

Home farming can make use of small spaces to farm some part of our diets. No need to transport the final product, o need to use a blanket of insecticides and herbicides because the manual labour of caring for each plant is very distributed. Regenerative farming is also trivial at this scale. Large scale farming is often as efficient as it is destructive.

It only sounds good on paper

But I’ve had a small garden for years and it’s 100% not worth it due to the small yield and extremely high labor.

And just because you have a small garden does not mean agricultural pests are easily managed… in fact they are still absolutely a massive problem.

Big farms are 100% better suited at growing crops. An hour I spend on my garden is probably only 30 seconds on a large farm if you compare on yield.

This is a problem I often see when folks grow annuals. Perennials are way lower labor, and one of the reasons I encourage community gardens to avoid being entirely focused on annuals.

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