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Carbon footprint of homegrown food five times greater than conventional

telegraph.co.uk

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Re: Carbon footprint of homegrown food five times greater than conventional

#11

Post by eliaspro »

archerx wrote: post #7

I don’t see how. I have some big pots on my balcony that I use to grow veg in the summer. All I add is water and seeds. I don’t see where the CO2 is coming from. In fact I’m pretty the plants are absorbing CO2.

The plants don't simply grow in the pot, you had to get potting soil which had to be transported and was most likely packaged in plastic. You might have driven somewhere to get the seeds, etc. The pots had to be made from clay (needs quite some energy to be fired in a kiln) or plastic. And your scenario might be even one of the more optimal ones, with no additional land use...

Re: Carbon footprint of homegrown food five times greater than conventional

#12

Post by nmridul »

archerx wrote: post #7

I don’t see how. I have some big pots on my balcony that I use to grow veg in the summer. All I add is water and seeds. I don’t see where the CO2 is coming from. In fact I’m pretty the plants are absorbing CO2.

I am Just guessing. Maybe it's the tap water. It goes through multiple rounds of filteration to make it suitable for drinking and now it's poured into the soil that does not require so pure water. Or it could be the pot itself.. a large pot along with the stands and accessories to grow a dozen plants will be less green compared to open farming .

Could be that reusing waste water or using greener pots could reduce it and yet have more carbon footprint than open farming..

Re: Carbon footprint of homegrown food five times greater than conventional

#13

Post by locallost »

Pretty weak arguments, sounds like someone has an axe to grind. They say the majority of emission increases comes from the infrastructure needed. This makes sense if you build some infrastructure and do large scale agriculture as opposed to many people building infrastructure and doing small scale gardening. But it presupposes that the carbon footprint of the people doing gardening would otherwise be zero. Fact of the matter is, people need to do something with their lives, and if they don't do gardening, they'll do something else. I might spend my sommer in the garden as opposed to someone flying to Spain for a summer vacation. I have a friend that doesn't use his backyard for gardening, but he built a pool during COVID lockdowns. Is the carbon footprint of that lower than that of a garden shed? Doubt it.

Re: Carbon footprint of homegrown food five times greater than conventional

#14

Post by dsign »

Great! Damned if we do, damned if we don’t. And now we can feel bad for growing our own tomatoes.

I think it’s time we start considering the radical solutions. Not carbon capture, because there is always a way to smear those[^1] too. I say it’s high time to install the orbital hooks and start the exodus.

[^1]: I just found this example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Direct_deep-sea_carbon_dioxide...

Re: Carbon footprint of homegrown food five times greater than conventional

#15

Post by genewitch »

locallost wrote: post #13

Pretty weak arguments, sounds like someone has an axe to grind. They say the majority of emission increases comes from the infrastructure needed. This makes sense if you build some infrastructure and do large scale agriculture as opposed to many people building infrastructure and doing small scale gardening. But it presupposes that the carbon footprint of the people doing gardening would otherwise be zero. Fact of th…

If i use an 80 year old ford tractor to dig a trench and put trees that fell over during a hurricane in the trench and bury them, and plant on and around the hill that's made, i wager the carbon footprint is probably net negative. native groundcover and there are nurseries that start and sell 2 year old plants within a few miles. These are very old, established nurseries, the carbon footprint of their construction has amortized to nothing.

I don't want to read the article because it sounds like it'd get my blood pressure up. In the general sense not everyone can go net negative, but it doesn't matter because the benefits outweigh the potential for "carbon". To name just one benefit, genetic diversity.

Re: Carbon footprint of homegrown food five times greater than conventional

#16

Post by genewitch »

nmridul wrote: post #12
archerx wrote: post #7

I don’t see how. I have some big pots on my balcony that I use to grow veg in the summer. All I add is water and seeds. I don’t see where the CO2 is coming from. In fact I’m pretty the plants are absorbing CO2.

I am Just guessing. Maybe it's the tap water. It goes through multiple rounds of filteration to make it suitable for drinking and now it's poured into the soil that does not require so pure water. Or it could be the pot itself.. a large pot along with the stands and accessories to grow a dozen plants will be less green compared to open farming . Could be that reusing waste water or using greener pots could reduce it…

i cycle the rain runoff from my roof through fish ponds - well, really 100 gallon stock water tanks. I don't feed or otherwise take care of the fish, but i do add water as needed and rotate plants between all my ponds and a nearby lake (lake is only input; i never put back into the lake). The runoff from the tanks goes to fields with small hills and native groundcover, but i can grow food in those areas.

The tanks and roof added a lot of carbon, but the tanks take CO2 out of the air and turn it into nitrogen via fish poop - and plants love nitrogen.

Re: Carbon footprint of homegrown food five times greater than conventional

#18

Post by hgomersall »

genewitch wrote: post #15
locallost wrote: post #13

Pretty weak arguments, sounds like someone has an axe to grind. They say the majority of emission increases comes from the infrastructure needed. This makes sense if you build some infrastructure and do large scale agriculture as opposed to many people building infrastructure and doing small scale gardening. But it presupposes that the carbon footprint of the people doing gardening would otherwise be zero. Fact of th…

If i use an 80 year old ford tractor to dig a trench and put trees that fell over during a hurricane in the trench and bury them, and plant on and around the hill that's made, i wager the carbon footprint is probably net negative. native groundcover and there are nurseries that start and sell 2 year old plants within a few miles. These are very old, established nurseries, the carbon footprint of their construction ha…

It's the telegraph. Not reading it should be the starting position.

Re: Carbon footprint of homegrown food five times greater than conventional

#19

Post by JumpCrisscross »

defrost wrote: post #6
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> all very 1930s level home garden stuff Conventional farming is 2 to 3x more efficient in America than it was around WWII [1]. Home grown is delicious. But it's a luxury for a reason, even when dovetailed to a conventional farm operating at scale. [1] https://www.ers.usda.gov/amber-waves/2018/march/agricultural...

We're trading food with "conventional" Australian grain farmers with 4,000+ acres (we use both hectares and acres as many boundaries here predate the 1970s metric changeover) because we have the time to do fruit, jam, preserves, etc (fiddly stuff) and swap that for 20+ kg bags of flour, whole lamb, etc. We also run multispectral imaging drones to collate data from ANOVA crop variations to build databases on yield V.…

> Despite all that home grown figs, pears, tomatoes still swap well for other good and here at least we're not thinking of as luxury, just a way of life

To be clear, what you're doing sounds wonderful. I, too, strongly favour small-production food. And I suspect you're doing it more efficiently than other small or home farmers.

But foregoing the low-cost substitute to your higher-intensity preference is a luxury. It doesn't scale to working for everyone who might want it.

Re: Carbon footprint of homegrown food five times greater than conventional

#20

Post by strken »

locallost wrote: post #13

Pretty weak arguments, sounds like someone has an axe to grind. They say the majority of emission increases comes from the infrastructure needed. This makes sense if you build some infrastructure and do large scale agriculture as opposed to many people building infrastructure and doing small scale gardening. But it presupposes that the carbon footprint of the people doing gardening would otherwise be zero. Fact of th…

It's kind of stupid, yeah. My mum has a vegetable patch fertilised by compost, covered in mown grass, and surrounded by some wire that used to be part of a derelict turkey shed plus some old rusty steel fence posts she got from a garage sale.

Do you count the wire and the fence posts as if they were new? Do you assume the compost is average, even if it's turned properly in her specific garden? Do you count the decomposition of the grass even though it comes from her own property, and do you count it as methane even though it's spread thinly enough to avoid an anoxic environment? Do you count the shovel and wheelbarrow even though she'd still need to own them for other purposes?

You can come up with either a bad number or a good number depending on how you choose to represent specific carbon costs.

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