These are part of a propaganda strategy to make people feel like they're "helping".
Depends whether you're gardening for a global food shortage, or to supplement your own use, which I suspect is why most people have home gardens.
A home garden can supply a significant fraction of your food - especially if you do canning or otherwise preserve for winter use.
From the link in the parent post:
Fruit and vegetables harvested in these home and community plots was estimated to be 9,000,000–10,000,000 short tons (8,200,000–9,100,000 t) in 1944, an amount equal to all commercial production of fresh vegetables
> Depends whether you're gardening for a global food shortage, or to supplement your own use
No, the effect on supply is the same.
> A home garden can supply a significant fraction of your food
It takes 5+ acres in a decently arable region with fertilizer to feed one person. By the time you're providing for a significant fraction of your caloric intake, it ceases to be a "garden".
> an amount equal to all commercial production of fresh vegetables
I guarantee this is some misleading bullshit statistic. They've probably selected "fresh vegetables" to mean some very small subset of industrial agriculture, like vegetables that are never canned or frozen.
>>> It takes 5+ acres in a decently arable region with fertilizer to feed one person. By the time you're providing for a significant fraction of your caloric intake, it ceases to be a "garden".
This is incorrect, it takes around 1/2 an acre if it's vegetarian or 1.5 acres including chickens/ducks for meat and eggs. That's using a traditional organic farming. If you use Hydroponics (Plants grown in water with no soil) or Aeroponics (Hydroponics grown in towers) or Aquaponics (Hydroponics with aquaculture, where the fish provide both protein and the fertilizer for the plants) the yield is dramatically higher (5x-10x per sq ft) can be done year round and indoors. It's not a perfect solution, it takes knowledge to setup and run, a very small capital investment for startup, and a constant power source. That said it IS commercially viable, you can already today buy produce produced this way in almost any grocery store, and it's viable for home production. I personally have several systems running in my apartment ranging from off the shelf commercial systems (AeroGarden Back to the Roots...) to custom built aquaponics systems. On a pure dollar level it's more expensive per lb of food, no doubt but within reason I don't care about that. I grow better and fresher food and most importantly I control the supply chain.
We can and should use these kind of technologies to replace as much of the modern agriculture system as we possibly can. No of the this mentions the MASSIVE environmental improvement that switching to these systems would make, which is reason enough to do it.
> It takes 5+ acres in a decently arable region with fertilizer to feed one person. By the time you're providing for a significant fraction of your caloric intake, it ceases to be a "garden".
I'm sorry, but I just can't believe that. Is that fudged to account for livestock or waste or something? A single acre is what, 40*100m? That's huge, you could feed a whole family all year on potatoes, peanuts, greens, squash etc
well, no, if you're growing for personal use you can make a notable effect on your own supply/food costs. You don't have to solve the global food shortage to benefit from a personal garden and since the global food shortage will drive up prices, the financial benefit is even greater (as long as price increases in things like fertilizer don't eat up your cost savings).
You seem to be thinking about this from a personal finance angle instead of an economy-wide production angle.
It doesn't matter if a piece of corn is made in your garden or on a farm. The net effect on the corn supply is identical.
It takes orders of magnitude more input to grow a piece of corn in a garden than on a farm. That had better be offset by the personal enjoyment of the gardener.
You seem to be thinking about this from a personal finance angle instead of an economy-wide production angle.
Yes, I tried to be clear:
Depends whether you're gardening for a global food shortage, or to supplement your own use, which I suspect is why most people have home gardens.
No one's backyard garden in the USA is going to help feed someone in Africa, but even if the global food shortage doesn't mean food shortages in the USA, it's going to drive up prices, and a backyard garden can help offset that household expense.
You took specific objection to my comment that victory gardens were to make people "feel like they were helping". I meant this to imply some kind of externalized effect beyond just saving money.
It's also probably wrong that a home garden will net save you money unless you make like $3/hr. Again, unless you're extracting pleasure from gardening.
You took specific objection to my comment that victory gardens were to make people "feel like they were helping". I meant this to imply some kind of externalized effect beyond just saving money.
Yes, that's why I quoted it specifically and clarified that I was talking about a home garden.
It's also probably wrong that a home garden will net save you money unless you make like $3/hr. Again, unless you're extracting pleasure from gardening.
The people that benefit the most financially from a home garden are already low paid - those are the people that aren't going to struggle to afford food as prices rise. My sister has been gardening for years, a couple years ago she kept a spreadsheet and added up her savings based on retail prices of produce and her "revenue" from her garden (which covers most of the back yard of her 1/2 acre lot plus one apple tree) was over $2500 after deducting expenses (excluding labor).
She estimated around 2 hours/day tending the garden for a 6 month growing season, so that's around 360 hours of work, or around $7/hour, which is better than she'd take home working a minimum wage job and in exchange they get all of the organic produce they can eat in the summer, plus a lot of frozen or canned food in the winter. And she ends up giving a lot of it away to friends/family.
For a lot of people here, putting in 360 hours of work to earn "only" $2500 worth of food sounds like a terrible bargain, but for many people in this country, that's a great bargain.
Commercial production of vegetables, particularly those not considered essential, was artificially low during the war, constrained by government control of allocation of things like materials for packaging and freight cars for transportation, and by no draft exemptions for male workers from the farm to the market.
That's great and all. I think home gardens are great. But the topic is about food shortages in poor nations due to increases in grain prices. Home gardens does literally nothing to help anyone in poor nations who will be going hungry later this year.
Depends whether you're gardening for a global food shortage, or to supplement your own use, which I suspect is why most people have home gardens.
A home garden can supply a significant fraction of your food - especially if you do canning or otherwise preserve for winter use.
From the link in the parent post:
Fruit and vegetables harvested in these home and community plots was estimated to be 9,000,000–10,000,000 short tons (8,200,000–9,100,000 t) in 1944, an amount equal to all commercial production of fresh vegetables