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Comment by doctor_eval | Hacker News Reader

Ive read that creating enough food for a family of 4 from a home garden requires something like 8 square meters of land, chickens, and loads of labour. It’s non trivial, and if you make a mistake you go hungry.

Assuming some putative ideal future Mr Fusion, plugging it into the wall would be a completely different proposition, require relatively little space, and zero household labour.

Considering the massive infrastructure and street furniture required to distribute electrons, the unit economics of home fusion would need to be terrible in order for centralisation to remain competitive against the significant benefits for reliability and decentralisation.

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> creating enough food for a family of 4 from a home garden requires something like 8 square meters of land, chickens, and loads of labour. It’s non trivial, and if you make a mistake you go hungry.

Not even close. Potatoes produce more calories per unit of land than anything else you can grow in a temperate zone garden. Intensively cultivated potatoes may produce 10,000 calories per square meter, but that would be a stupendously successful crop. In other words, to provide all the calories for a family of four, you'd need on the order of 1 to 2 square meters of potatoes per day.

Since you can't really live on potatoes alone, to get adequate nutrition across the spectrum of human needs, you need quite a bit more than that. You could feed a family of four for a year on less than a acre, if none of your crops failed or did poorly. I'd hate to be responsible for trying it on less than that though in the temperate US.

To be clear, I was responding to the OP by comparing the difference between centralised agriculture and centralised energy production.

As everyone has pointed out, you needs lots of land for food. Far less for energy, and so less reason to centralise it if there is a good alternative.

> Ive read that creating enough food for a family of 4 from a home garden requires something like 8 square meters of land, chickens, and loads of labour.

I'm pretty sure you can't feed a family from what you can grow on a balcony.

/edit: >Research in the 1970s by John Jeavons and the Ecology Action Organisation found that 4000 square feet (about 370 square metres) of growing space was enough land to sustain one person on a vegetarian diet for a year,

https://www.growveg.com.au/guides/growing-enough-food-to-fee...

I would be hugely surprised if we have a Mr. Fusion future where you toss garbage into it and get electricity. More likely is that you'd have to buy fuel pellets periodically. It's not free to package them into household-sized packages and ship them to every home.

Oh, god, I can even see the pain... just like inkjet cartridges. "Non-genuine fuel cartridge detected. Please remove and replace with a genuine cartridge."

> 8 square meters of land

Pretty sure this is off by a few orders of magnitude.

Why? Staple crops can be planted very close together and there are many crops that can coexist on the same plot.

Crop nutrients are obviously a concern, but if you're only trying to survive for a couple of cycles seems totally feasible and could be extended artificially.

Have you actually tested this in any way? How many calories/year do you grow in each square meter of your own garden?

In the real world, people doing this for a living find that they need literally 100 to 1000 times that much land to feed a family of four.

Have you actually tried to grow stuff?

I grow a lot of stuff and have for years and it’s an excessive amount of labor, you only get certain food during certain times of the year, sometimes for only for a few weeks, and that’s assuming you don’t have losses due to pests.

Agriculture is best left to the professionals for feeding societies.

On the contrary. I think everyone should try growing some of their own food. It's not only great for your physical health, but your mental health too! Also having some long-term food storage and water on hand is a great way to weather unexpected circumstances. It doesn't have to be an all or nothing thing. It's sort of like having a generator or battery storage for backup power... If everyone had it, the whole grid (or food availability) would be a lot more resilient. Imagine if all of Ukraine's residents had plenty of food and water in their homes for the next 2 months. That would be huge.

Being prepared by storing two months of food and water has nothing to do with growing your own food.

If your municipal water supply is compromise, the last thing you should be doing with water is pouring it on the ground.

Conservatively each person needs 1500 calories per day and that's cutting it close. That's about 2 million calories per year for 4 people.

Potatoes are one of the most calorie-dense vegetables by weight and by growing space. They have 350 calories per pound, so you need 5700 pounds of potatoes to feed a family of four.

A good potato yield is about 25,000 pounds per acre, so you need nearly a quarter acre of potatoes (1000 square metres) to feed your family for a year.

It's also worth noting that you're not going to be in shape to do much agricultural work on 1500 calories/day.

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