By some definitions, humans are in fact now robots.

Jesus enslaves

This sounds excessive, that’s almost 1.1$/day, amounting to more than 2kWh/24hrs, ie ~80W/hr? You will need to invest in a TDP friendly build. I’m running a AMD APU (known for shitty idle consumption) with Raid 5 and still hover less than 40W/h.

This isn’t speculation on my part, I measured the consumption with a Kill-a-watt. It’s an 11 year old PC with 4 hard drives and multiple fans because it’s in a hot environment and hard drive usage is significant because it’s running security camera software in a virtual machine. Host OS is Linux MInt. It averages right around 110w. I’m fully aware that’s very high relative to something purpose built.

You will need to invest in a TDP friendly build

Right, and spend even more money.

Residential electricity isn’t cheap

This is a point many folks don’t take into account. My average per Kwh cost right now is $0.41 (yes, California, yay). So it costs me almost $400 per year just to have some older hardware running 24x7

It’s such a pity you aren’t able to engage in meaningful conversation.

Oh well.

“Sorry for not being able to back up my assertions with facts, data, or even whole paragraphs”

Okay but how does this feed 8 Billion People?

I went back and looked at some of your posts on this thread because I was thinking “they can’t really be that unimaginative” and lo and behold, it’s true, you can be!

There is no alternative. None.

There are always alternatives.

It seems like there would more effective and direct ways (with less farce and fallacy) than asking a loaded question that people might see as a sincere request for information and an opportunity to spark a bit of interest.

You are the one who misinterpreted and answered a question that was not asked of you. There was no farce or fallacy in my question in the context of that particular discussion.

Have a nice day.

I appreciate your effort in that, but I was actually replying to the OP to make the point that “there are associated costs” is not a valid criticism of home gardening.

There is no precise answer to the associated costs. It’ll be different for every circumstance.

So in other words it could be anywhere from zero to “a lot”.

There are just too many variables and factors to consider.

Which makes it very hard to say that “associated costs” are prohibitive in growing one’s own food.

I happen to think Militant Vegans should be eaten or composted but even I will agree that your first sentence is broadly correct. Industrialized agriculture and CAFO operations are to blame for this so you can generally say that consuming animal products is to blame.

Your second point is highly speculative and not based on any factual evidence. The speculated worst case scenario seems to be maybe 20x COVID-19, or 140 million worldwide.

As a vegan, I should think you’d celebrate even that high rate of attrition. It would mean, overall, far fewer delicious animals being consumed.

I’m not your “bro”.

I’m using examples from commercial small-scale farms because that shows what’s possible when done correctly and by competent people, even at hand scale. I know many home gardeners who are extremely competent and frankly using the example of incompetent home gardeners or those who “drop it at the second week” compared to competent industrial farmers is completely disingenuous and wholly illogical.

the fact that 90% of people starting this will drop it at the second week,

[citation needed]

I’d urge you to consider what “yield” is and means and how “yield” plays out over the whole length of the industrialized food chain.

The classic example from a producer’s perspective is that commodity level production has to be sorted and doesn’t get equal value for everything produced. So you may only get top dollar for 25-50% of what you grew and far less - possibly even zero - for the rest. Incredibly, it really is sometimes cost-effective to let the produce rot in the field if prices don’t support a profit.

Then farther down the chain you have increasing losses and waste. By some estimates that’s as much as nearly 40% of all food produced. See also here.

These factors only very rarely are brought up in these discussions in part because folks have very narrow conceptions of what “yield” means.

There are associated costs to even small homegrown crops

But do you know what they are? How much precisely?

Appreciate the link to the paper. Will be an interesting read.

But at first glance here’s a wee problem with the study: It takes the worst practices of urban farms and compares them with the best practices of industrial farms. It is not comparing “home grown produce” from the OP, where some of the principle offenders - not using materials for a long time - may, in fact, be used for a long time. It also doesn’t study small-scale non-urban farms. Which to me IS a decentralization but by people who know what they are doing.

One example is composting, where it correctly surmises that people who don’t know how to compost correctly… wait for it now, don’t compost correctly and produce higher GHGs.

And you are mischaracterizing the results and omitting a key finding: "However, some UA crops (for example, tomatoes) and sites (for example, 25% of individually managed gardens) outperform conventional agriculture. "

I garden all the time, it won’t feed any single nation on earth except maybe Principality of Sealand. You’re either being disingenuous or not understood the conversation taking place.

I’m sure your personal experience gardening for yourself is valid, but it would be disingenuous to take it as valid for a larger scale commercial operation that wants to feed people on more than a 1:1 basis.

I’ve had this discussion dozens if not hundreds of times over the years and the one thing that always stands out is that the claims of “X won’t feed Y” never come with substantive data and always have to side-step the original premise. At best they come with personal anecdotes that tend to be amusingly irrelevant.

In fact the logic of my basic premise - that small farms can and do feed people efficiently - is rather simple and well-supported by the data. For posterity let me work through a representative scenario.

I’ll use the example of the smallest small farm I know to kind of show the boundaries of the problem. It’s a real farm near me - out of respect I won’t give it’s real name but let’s call it Fox Farm. You can find examples like this all over.

This farm is just under 2.5 acres, but that includes the house, a barn and a greenhouse so probably 2 acres in production. It’s well positioned near a town of about 5,000, has good soil, is right on a busy road and has easy access to lots of manure from several cattle operations within a mile or two. Fox Farm’s owner has been farming for about 12 years and has really mastered hand-scale operations - his only “large” equipment is a walk-behind tractor with a rotary plow. He runs the whole thing with just him and his wife.

Fox Farm sells direct via their small farm stand and at up to three farmer’s markets. The last time we spoke about it they were earning a decent living - their “take home” was around $55k after all expenses. At that time total revenue was a bit over $100k annually. You may say, oh that’s not much but (a) their revenue and margins get better every year; (b) they are quite happy with this and are able to raise a family and save for the future; © that’s not a production problem it’s a selling problem due to the town size and the fact that most markets operate only part of the year.

How many people do they feed? They have about 150 regular customers, but we can do some quick math: You could use the $100k figure and divide it by the annual grocery budget per person to get a representative figure - so $100000 / $3865 (California average) yields just under 25 individuals. That’s of course if they got 100% of their food from this one farm.

So in rough terms you could say that a single 2 acre farm can entirely feed 25 people and provide a decent living to the farmer as well. Now I can tell you from my experience on 15 acres that as you scale a bit more you gain (and lose) some efficiencies but probably it’s about 10-15% more per acre every time you double in size but that gain diminishes a lot past about 20 acres for a bunch of management reasons but mainly because of your ability to actually sell it all. Selling produce is way way harder than growing it.

I know for a fact that small farms work because I have not only my personal experience but the experience of several farms around me. If you don’t believe me go see for yourself. Seek out the nearest three farms under 100 acres in your area and ask them. I feel I have to point this out even though it should be obvious: your garden is not very productive relative to something run by a professional farmer. Not only will we get way bigger yields for any one crop but at this scale we’ll get multiple crops out of the same patch of dirt in a season using carefully planned rotations. As just one example, I will plant peas (nitrogen fixers!) using T-posts and a simple trellis. When the peas are done the tomatoes go in and use the same post-and-weave trellising. This is partly why you should never think of small farms in terms of acreage but rather in terms of revenue.

1. Don’t throw mud. Behave like an intellectual and remember the human.

Try this one cool trick: Don’t give up on it.

Not to mention, per kilogram, it’s more polluting than simply buying at a grocery store

Absolute nonsense. If you are going to make such ridiculous claims you should probably take the time to back it up with some kind of data. Good luck with that.

Simply adding up the food miles gets you more “pollution” with store bought than local farms.