Carbon footprint of homegrown food five times greater than conventional
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Re: Carbon footprint of homegrown food five times greater than conventional
#2Right.
Re: Carbon footprint of homegrown food five times greater than conventional
#3Not at all surprising, having participated in both.
There are massive economies of scale at play between a 1000 acre farm and a backyard garden plot.
As a general rule of thumb, if it costs more to grow it at home, it probably has a bigger footprint. The embodied energy and carbon footprint for a few garden tools is more than enough to counteract the entire savings.
Not to say it is always the case. Home crops that grow in native soil with minimal support are great. I recommend tree kale like a madman to just about everyone with a garden.
https://gaertnerbuch.luberaedibles.com/en/tree-kale-8211-the....
Re: Carbon footprint of homegrown food five times greater than conventional
#4https://archive.md/VSolt
* The majority of the emissions do not come from the growing of the food themselves, the scientists say, but from the infrastructure needed to allow the food to be grown.
* “The most significant contributor to carbon emissions on the urban agriculture sites we studied was the infrastructure used to grow the food – from raised beds to garden sheds to pathways, these constructions had a lot of carbon invested in their construction.”
* The study, published in the journal Nature Cities, recruited 73 urban agriculture sites around the world, including Europe, the US, and the UK, and conducted a comprehensive life cycle assessment on the site’s infrastructure, irrigation and supplies.
* Fruit was found to be 8.6 times more eco-friendly when grown conventionally compared to in a city, whereas vegetables were 5.8 times better for the environment when left to the professionals.
But...
* some crops have a lower carbon footprint than others [...] Tomatoes grown domestically, for example, have a lower carbon footprint than conventional farming, as does asparagus.
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FWiW I'm in a rural area, surrounded by large broad acre grain crops and we grow about an acre and half of "home food" - figs, oranges, lemons, pears, tomatoes, potatoes, pumpkins, chili's, blackberries, grapes, etc.
It's all very 1930s level home garden stuff - setup by my father who was born in 1935 and who still picks up and spreads a double axle trailer worth of donkey shit (mixed with barley stubble straw) every month or so.
I'd rate it pretty damn efficient, water wise, and useful to trade for other stuff aout the area.
Re: Carbon footprint of homegrown food five times greater than conventional
#5https://archive.md/VSolt * The majority of the emissions do not come from the growing of the food themselves, the scientists say, but from the infrastructure needed to allow the food to be grown. * “The most significant contributor to carbon emissions on the urban agriculture sites we studied was the infrastructure used to grow the food – from raised beds to garden sheds to pathways, these constructions had a lot of…
> 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...
Re: Carbon footprint of homegrown food five times greater than conventional
#6https://archive.md/VSolt * The majority of the emissions do not come from the growing of the food themselves, the scientists say, but from the infrastructure needed to allow the food to be grown. * “The most significant contributor to carbon emissions on the urban agriculture sites we studied was the infrastructure used to grow the food – from raised beds to garden sheds to pathways, these constructions had a lot of…
> 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. tempreture | humidity | nurients, etc.
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.
Re: Carbon footprint of homegrown food five times greater than conventional
#7I 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.
Re: Carbon footprint of homegrown food five times greater than conventional
#8Right.
It would be surprising if it were not the case.
People focus on the sheer scale of large rural growing operations, and forget that that scale is exactly what keeps the per-unit cost, and carbon cost, low.
Re: Carbon footprint of homegrown food five times greater than conventional
#9I 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.
They're principally talking about "big city" urban market gardens for apartment dwellers that want to get dirty hands.
Think raised beds with wheelchair access, concrete paths, new toolsheds, 'new' tools from BigHardwareInc., bags of GrowNow trucked in across town, etc.
Our tools are all 20+ years old, repaired with old fencing wire, the manure we get is in bulk, grabbed from the source as we were going past anyway.
Re: Carbon footprint of homegrown food five times greater than conventional
#10I 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 title of the post is misleading. The study was about urban farms specifically not arbitrary food grown at home.
https://record.umich.edu/articles/study-examines-carbon-foot...