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Grow a garden where? On what fucking land lmao
whatever land you can take.
some cities have programs that allocate park or unused land for community gardens. some even give you a small budget to build infrastructure like beds or buying dirt.
grow staple foods that have long storage life: squash, pumpkins, carrots, rutabaga, potatoes. these can stay on your shelf for 3-8 months if stored properly. personally I have about 12 (3-5lbs each) spaghetti squash sitting since harvest in November that will be fine until about August.
secondary are things you can freeze or dry: squash, peppers, peas, green beans, Lima beans, kidney beans, cabbage, beets. I dry most of these and toss them into soups and ramen.
tertiary are foods you can process and preserved through canning, drying, or freezing: tomatoes (sauce or breaded), okra (breaded), etc…
your diet will change, but you’ll feel good about what you’re cooking because you grew it.
good luck!
A vegetable garden? LOL so you can get one tomato after 6 weeks? What are you going to eat in the meantime?
People are completely clueless and disconnected from reality.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DPfmYNNo-4U
This is what one couple needs to actually grow stuff. And that’s just fruits and vegetables.
And what freaking inputs in the form of plastic, fertilizers, pesticides are they using?
You should always feel free to grow a garden, but you shouldn’t necessarily expect it to be cheaper than buying food. Especially the first year, if you don’t live in a place where you can just dig up some dirt and chunk seeds in it. Even if you do you should make sure the soil isn’t literally toxic first, especially since it’s common to have a buildup of things like lead or arsenic from now-outlawed fertilizers that can be absorbed by plants.
My grandparents planted maybe half an acre? Of crops for 10 people, and it was supplemental, not a complete replacement. It also takes a lot of work and can go to shit if the weather is bad. You can account for some of this by planting a variety of crops, trying to head off drainage and shade issues before they start, and with supplemental watering. But don’t expect everything to be super productive every year, especially in the age of climate change. My sister had some plants not put out at all last year (peppers).
That’s the thing. Gardening is more expensive than buying food, in the United States and Western Europe, now, because the real cost of food production is heavily subsidized by our governments and we guarantee yields by throwing tons of fossil fuels and their derivatives at the soil of corporate megafarms. There’s a nonzero chance that’s going to change shortly - probably within a generation - for a ton of reasons including but not limited to little Donnie assassinating the supreme leader of Iran for shits and giggles.
Grow a garden even if it’s not economically efficient. Do it now, when you aren’t relying on it for food, and get the issues with soil and drainage and so on worked out now. Learn to save seeds and select the best growing plants each year so that, as your climate changes, the varieties you grow change with it. That way you’ll have the skills to do it later, when you really need it.
It’s not just fertilizer:
it takes about 7.3 units of (primarily) fossil energy to produce one unit of food energy
Assessing the sustainability of the US food system: a life cycle perspective
With all the fertilizer, heavy equipment and agricultural practices the food production today is very inefficient from an energy perspective.
Without cheap, abundant energy available the whole food production system is not sustainable
Exactly. The Swedish government or something did some study recently to determine if we’d be able to be self-sufficient under a longer time if we needed to be, as we currently have a lot of food imports. The conclusion was “yes, but there won’t be as much food diversity”.
However, they completely ignored the fact that we only have a ~90 days strategic reserve of oil, and that basically all the machining used for farming runs on diesel. And there’s currently no goals to change that.
If we can’t import or refine diesel anymore, we will starve.
plug myself into the power socket for more efficient energy usage.
got it.
brb
I’m surprised to see this truth known on the Internet, I guess Lemmy actually is smarter than most other social media out there :o
One day we’ll learn to structure laws so that fertilised monoculture isn’t the only economically viable form of agriculture.
But agribusiness lobbies won’t allow that so…
You think food prices will come back down after it’s all over?
cue the padme meme!
FACT: Capitalism without regulation has a ratcheting effect on high prices.
Hahahahahahahahahahahahahaha!
As if you’d need to ask that question…
At least the schools aren’t teaching WOKE. Priorities. /s
When agricultural processes are invented that allow the population to grow by billions, what’s the first thing people do? Rush to fill the extra capacity. Sure would be nice if we had the prudence to maintain a buffer.
What is a pulse?
Lentils too
Beans
Natural gas is used to produce hydrogen, which is then used in the Haber-Bosch process to produce ammonia from nitrogen in the atmosphere. Only about 6% of natural gas is used to produce hydrogen, so even if the price were to rise substantially, we could divert natural gas from other uses and have plenty for making ammonia. We also have other ways of producing hydrogen, it’s just that natural gas is more established.
PEM electrolyzers paired with cheap solar in countries with high insolation can now produce hydrogen for less than the cost of natural gas, but we’re only recently starting to see the construction of the large-scale green ammonia plants needed to accomplish this. Egypt is currently constructing a 100-MW green ammonia plant powered by solar energy. Even if you didn’t have enough PEM eletrolyzers you could still just pass current through some salt water and produce hydrogen, albeit much less efficiently.
It’s not going to be a catastrophic issue.
Fun fact: Fritz Haber, the German guy that invented the Haber-Bosch process is the same Fritz Haber that developed a way to use the chlorine gas in chemical warfare. He was personally overseeing its effect in the battle of Ypres.
Clara Immerwahr, who was married to Fritz Haber and was a successful chemist in her own right, spoke out against his research as a “perversion of the ideals of science” and “a sign of barbarity, corrupting the very discipline which ought to bring new insights into life.” She ended her own life the day before he traveled to the eastern front to oversee the use of chlorine gas against Russian troops.
Dude knew his chemicals
Habe
rn wir einen an der Waffel? Ja
Thank you for explaining the process, because the pro-fuel-cell pact doesn’t understand that hydrogen isn’t free and production is still heavily reliant on fossil fuels.
“Oh it comes from ammonia”. Alright, where does the ammonia come from???
You’re just moving the problem around, not fixing anything.
Farmers almost uniformly over-apply N fertilizer. Having it be more expensive and forcing them to look into more efficient ways of applying fertilizer and managing nutrients is not a bad thing.
Unless it just causes the crop to cost more without any change in behavior.
Farmers are price-takers not price-makers. The prices they receive are driven by speculation on the commodities markets (even for crops not traded on the market).
Since they can’t control the price they receive for their crop, they are very sensitive to any change in the cost of inputs. Determining how much to spent on inputs is the part of their profitablity they can control. So widespread behavioral change is usually pretty close to immediate.
we could divert natural gas from other uses and have plenty for making ammonia. We also have other ways of producing hydrogen
We can’t do any of those in a scale large enough to replace the destruction and have it online for the next planting season on the North Hemisphere. Or the next one on the South Hemisphere either, btw. Or the following ones for each.
Authorities say:
NO!
(But actually its yes)
In case anyone was wodering how much damage a single idiot in the White House can cause.
I’m glad I started growing wolffia globosa. Gonna help supplement a lot of meals. Kinda sucks that I got sick and neglected it and got set back a few weeks, but I have enough to sees other colonies
Fertilizer “crisis” is a man made problem.
What are pulses?
Ohhh…
Legumes are plants in the pea family Fabaceae (or Leguminosae), or the fruit or seeds of such plants. When used as a dry grain for human consumption, the seeds are also called pulses.
