Initial footprint if you have all the resources and commit to the homegrown food for along enough you will eventually net.
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
#22Not 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 g…
Thanks for the info on tree kale, I didn't know about it but it looks amazing :)
Re: Carbon footprint of homegrown food five times greater than conventional
#23Pretty 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…
The Telegraph most definitely has an axe to grind… they’re a right wing, pro-Brexit, anti immigrant, climate change denying publication
Re: Carbon footprint of homegrown food five times greater than conventional
#24Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Luxury is entirely relative - to you perhaps, wherever you are, this all sounds like luxury.
For us it's a continuation of exactly what my father (still alive) did during WWII when his father and most older males were away overseas, trade was greatly diminished, many people were on the verge of starving, and he (primary school age) fended for his three younger siblings and his mother.
Today we no longer cart water from wells many miles away, we still use windmills (corregated iron sails, Australian not Dutch) to draw up bore water, etc.
As Luxury goes it's zero cost other than literal sweat equity, uses materials about the place (all the water that runs through the house goes to the garden), and has little in the way of fossil fuel usage (we do use a car to fetch manure from nearby stables as needed .. but that's optional in the sense that we can go back to hauling sans car).
The only we're not still doing is shooting | trapping rabbits.
Re: Carbon footprint of homegrown food five times greater than conventional
#25If I was being paranoid, Id say this is ground softening/ giving cover for, the councils to sell off allotment land, to make up for shortfalls in their budgets.
Allotments are chunks of land set aside for housholds to grow their own fruit and veg. Its generally an older gen (plus some younger woke) that use them, so nobody who the telegraph readers will care about. The councils have had a very hard time of it from the party in power due to many factors, and some are on the verge of bankruptcy. [1]
So being able to sell land that is genrally in walking distance to other residental zones to devlopers would be a welcome shot of cash. With the thin justification of "Its better for the enviroment" to keep most the would be defenders busy arguing if it is, or isnt, untill the deals are done, and they are lost.
It almost funny when the UK also has a general, saying that "Britain must train citizen army" [2], and allotments were promoted so the UK could feed itself when being blockaded. [3]
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/society/2023/dec/06/english-town... [2] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-68086188 [3] https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/earth/environment/9996180/H...
Re: Carbon footprint of homegrown food five times greater than conventional
#26If I was being paranoid, Id say this is ground softening/ giving cover for, the councils to sell off allotment land, to make up for shortfalls in their budgets. Allotments are chunks of land set aside for housholds to grow their own fruit and veg. Its generally an older gen (plus some younger woke) that use them, so nobody who the telegraph readers will care about. The councils have had a very hard time of it from th…
> Its generally an older gen... that use them, so nobody who the telegraph readers will care about
Wat? The average age of a Telegraph reader is 61 [1] (at least as of a decade ago).
[1] https://www.telegraph.co.uk/multimedia/archive/01863/Digital...
Re: Carbon footprint of homegrown food five times greater than conventional
#27I 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.
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Re: Carbon footprint of homegrown food five times greater than conventional
#28If I was being paranoid, Id say this is ground softening/ giving cover for, the councils to sell off allotment land, to make up for shortfalls in their budgets. Allotments are chunks of land set aside for housholds to grow their own fruit and veg. Its generally an older gen (plus some younger woke) that use them, so nobody who the telegraph readers will care about. The councils have had a very hard time of it from th…
> Its generally an older gen... that use them, so nobody who the telegraph readers will care about Wat? The average age of a Telegraph reader is 61 [1] (at least as of a decade ago). [1] https://www.telegraph.co.uk/multimedia/archive/01863/Digital...
Telegraph readers skew wealthy so probably own a private vegetable patch.
Re: Carbon footprint of homegrown food five times greater than conventional
#29I 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...
I actually got the dirt from outside because I was lazy, it was there and for free. The pots I have I have had them for almost 10 years now. I recollect the seeds from the previous harvest because I'm curious about breeding (I was slowly getting to a black sunflower for fun).
I don't even use fertilizer. I mix in all the remaining green matter into the post once autumn has killed everything.
My little set up doesn't produce very much but my goodness the flavor is much stronger compared to store bought, especially tomatoes.
Re: Carbon footprint of homegrown food five times greater than conventional
#30I 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 doubt that, the water here is very filtered here (Switzerland), the stuff that comes out of these pipes makes me afraid to drink it...