Sorry for the clickbait title but I thought a great video from a great but not well known channel.
I don’t commonly post here, but this caught my eye and I have professional expertise.
It simple enough. Larger farms in ideal growing regions with established infrastructure are massively more efficient by an order of magnitude.
Gardening is ‘probably’* carbon positive.
Its OK though. I still have my vege garden and so should you (or community garden).
It’s fun. It builds resilence into your community and local supply chain. And most hobbies are carbon positive, this one comes with benefits too.
In my city, personal/community gardens are a haven for bees and insects. However, there is a lot to be gained with scale if done responsibly.
It depends on how you measure efficiency. In terms of labor input, yes. In terms of food produced per area of land, smaller farms are actually far more efficient. So it’s not quite that simple.
Not sure if you watched the video but it goes into this topic a bit so if not it could be informative.
But yes home gardens have lots of benefits that go beyond carbon emissions. And since we have direct control of them, it may be easier to reduce those emissions than those from some distant farm.
This probably depends a lot on the gardening method. Like, your average gardener with no strategy is probably carbon positive. Ok, but what about biointensive gardening? What about permaculture gardening? What about guerilla gardening? What about aquaponics?
If you’re driving to the garden store to get fertilizer, then you’re probably carbon positive. If you’re composting yourself and building your soil, I don’t know.
Edit: looks like it’s covered in the video. Will follow up later.
It also helps the local fauna like bees, birds etc, which are usually destroyed by large agricultural farms.
- Pretty much any hobby is carbon positive. Gardening is almost certainly on the lower end of carbon positive hobbies.
- In the agriculture domain, growing plants for the sake of direct consumption is not the primary source of emissions - that would be animal based agriculture by far.
- Gardening promotes community resilience and health.
To add to your third point, helps people understand, respect and build a relation with our planet.
Like the kids thinking food just appears in the store or blindly trusting the weather report instead of measuring it yourself. Understanding has been taken away from us so we are easier to exploit by capitalism.
Wow, this video was superb, but then I started watching some of his other videos about his Edinicity concept, power generation within the city, and going through various types of batteries and their pro’s and cons. All of them have been fantastic videos. His presentation style is very quick and entertaining (to me anyway, but I’m a bit of a nerd) while still being information dense.
Thanks for sharing, Liberty! Excellent stuff.
Glad you enjoyed it! I’ve long been interested in permaculture but never had the land needed to implement many of their ideas. I was very excited to see a channel that takes some of the same creativity and utopian vision and applies it to urban life. And they are well organized and researched as well. I hope more people become aware of these ideas and we can start implementing them.
My only critique is that I haven’t seen a clear roadmap for how we can actually start to move towards these types of cities but maybe I just haven’t found that video yet.
Is there an article version for the argument?
Raised beds, fertilizer, hoses, etc all have a larger carbon foot print compared to the amount of food grown on the home scale. I’m sure a quick search would find one, it was a fairly recent study.
Not that I know of. He’s summarizing and critiquing some research that was done recently. Here’s an article about the research but the video does raise some caveats so take it with a grain of salt: https://theconversation.com/urban-agriculture-isnt-as-climate-friendly-as-it-seems-but-these-best-practices-can-transform-gardens-and-city-farms-221537
Thank you
I didn’t expect to see any rational articles about farming here. Well done.
I find myself more surprised at this not being as well known as you put it. The information was presented in a rational manner and I will be looking it over again in the near future.
