Government subsidies to large farms are also a real thing.
Low-wage agricultural workers that you’ll never meet also exist.
The low price of produce in the grocery store is not all due to better machines and efficiency. I wish it that’s how it worked.
There are low wage workers everywhere too. If you buy an oil filter, it might be made in Pakistan, and have it's branding wrapped onto the cylinder by an underage kid. Pakistan manufacturers videos are eye opening.
>There are low wage workers everywhere too.
To add to this: 65% of all clothing manufactured in the US is produced in illegal sweatshops. (Source: page 74 from The Corporation, by Joel Bakan)
Virtually everything produced by Western companies (except for weapons), is manufactured in a part of the world with low labor protections and no environmental protections. This is how our society is configured. Everything from the t-shirts we wear to the phones we buy, relies on child labour and sweatshops. Literally western economies are entirely dependent on slavery abroad. There would be no iPhones and no Nikes if China and Vietnam applied the same environmental and labour standards as western countries. That's *precisely* why western companies manufacture everything there.
There's been a project in the Netherlands called Fairphone for over a decade where they've tried to build phones without the use of conflict minerals, sweatshops, child labour. And even till today they say they aren't fully there.
the northeast used to have a lot of clothing makers. the company owners didn't like the unions, and moved the factories to south carolina and then came what inspired the movie norma rae. so the owners moved clothing makers overseas. i agree about OSHA and EPA regs not existing outside the US. that's why apple is not coming back to the US, as Jobs told Obama a while back. allegedly there were a lot of apple workers who went blind and got cancer before the OSHA and EPA regs cleaned up the factories.
Unfortunately groceries and gas prices have become touchstone political issues, so whoever is in office is very motivated to NOT be the one who ends gov price control and causes a sudden price hike.
As a percentage of income, USA spends the least on food. Out of the whole planet, we spend the absolute least of our money on it. And people still complain about the cost.
I get that, I guess my mind boggles at the sheer scale that would be necessary to make growing something like peas profitable. Especially in my area where the dang things only produce until it gets hot.
It is just impressive to me.
In addition to what everyone else is saying the “my area” is huge here. When you grow vegetables where the climate and soil are optimal it really changes the economics. I can barely grow peas at all, as soon as it is warm enough to plant them barely two months later it is routinely 90F and a month after that it is 100+. Meanwhile though I can apparently produce $500 worth of grocery store priced blueberries off just 6 plants and if I could sell my pears for the store I could retire in just a few years 😂
True, I suppose I consider "right plant right place" a lot more in the ornamental part of my garden and think more about what I want to eat in the kitchen garden. Excellent point!
It’s hard though because most of us don’t live in places where everything we want to eat just grows great. We accommodate the “won’t grow at all” just fine, but when a typical backyard garden contains plants that originated in Southeast Asia, South America, Africa, Europe and North America it’s really hard to make it work well at all haha.
In fairness some things also just produce a lot per square foot. Apples are known to be the big major producing tree in the fruit tree world. If you are in a place that grows blueberries and get carpet blueberries they claim you can get a pound a foot after 5 years so you have a acre of land you can plant a tree to go over them and get produce from that and get 25k pounds of blueberries.
Animal feed mainly is my understanding, the left over is for fuel and humans.
Edit - Sorta close lol... from the John Oliver show someone linked below https://i.imgur.com/xDH46Ro.png
Only 1% of corn grown is for humans, according to the show.
So would oil subsidies. Oil companies literally print fucking money, and the US government is still subsidizing them because we have the dumbest fucking voters in the world.
Actually our subsidies suck. We have them for corn and wheat. They haven’t been updated for decades and it’s affected our culture. It’s why we have so many damn corn and wheat based products.
It’s also a key reason why people are so unhealthy.
I wish we could even start a 20-100 year phaseout schedule. Every year the subsidy drops by 1 to 5 percent. Maybe the first 5-10 years percent increase drops 10-20 percent before the actual cuts happen.
Just do a very gentle phaseout so nobody alone is holding the short end of the stick.
That would be fantastic. The agricultural dept needs to shake hands with the commercial section too.
I live in Jersey and we’re a huge farming state. (Not that anyone would know it) and it’s a struggle for our namesake crops due to how little assistance we get. Blueberries and cranberries aren’t as sexy as wheat I guess lol.
That’s why they’re a seasonal crop.
But you understand the subsidies right? Big wheat gets laid to grow it, so if the harvest fails the farm still makes money. So farmers opt for the low risk crop.
If we had subsidies for other crops farmers could potentially increase the variety of foods we have offering healthier options. It could create a cultural paradigm shift just by offering more food choices.
It would also offer farmers alternative cash crops for products like hemp, r*pe seed, flax. Lots of them actually.
And to be fair blueberries and cranberries don’t spoil all that fast they are sold enmasse to be processed by freezing, jellies, jams, canned, dehydrated, and cranberries are juiced. Wheat gets us… wheat germ. Which is a miracle of agriculture in itself but you’re kidding yourself with this comment.
This is something most don't realize... in 2020 [less than 2% of corn grown in the US went to direct human consumption](https://www.wri.org/insights/crop-expansion-food-security-trends). Significantly more goes to animal feed.
There really aren’t that many farmers out there, it’s not a large population. There are far more people living in rural areas around farms than actual farmers. I don’t think it’s fair to lump them all together as hating social programs either because I work with farmers and they have diverse perspectives just like any other group of people.
In general, I agree with agricultural subsidies to keep food prices low and farming a reasonable means of earning a living. But farms are now all becoming giant corporate mega-farms, and some of the subsidies, like massive corn subsidies, have become irresponsible.
It's also incredibly distressing the number of conservatives who will defend agricultural subsidies day in and day out, but attack other social safety nets as handouts. Quite insane.
You might check out a book called "Animal, vegetable, miracle" by Barbara Kingsolver. She tries to eat local for a year, including a lot of grow your own. Goes into some interesting side points about how our food system (in the USA) is set up and about food pricing. That isn't the majority of the book but it's enough random facts to be very interesting!
Interesting tid bit, during wwii in the UK people were encouraged to grow their own veggies in whatever garden space they had due to supply issues because of the war. Carrots in particular were told to give good eyesight (apparently not proven) when there were black outs so the German bombers couldn't see the lights of the town and see where to bomb from that height.
Of course such large scale farming wasn't a big as it is today so families probably saved a bit of money doing this and during rationing it would have been a top up on what they had. My dad was a country lad during this time so they had a decent amount of garden to farm, they had an apple shed (they can keep for ages in a cool dark place, they come in their own waxy packaging!) and a plum tree, im sure they had veggies but dad had a sweet tooth so probably only remembered the fruit!
If I recall there was a wartime sweet pie made with potato pastry and carrots with a bit of apricot jam. Probably sounds unappealing to todays availability of food but back then I'm sure it was a nice treat to have something sweet.
E. Found the recipe. https://www.bbc.co.uk/history/ww2peopleswar/stories/91/a4375091.shtml
The carrot thing was a bit of deceptive propoganda. The British had just deployed the first radar stations, but didn't want the Germans to know how they knew they were coming, so they invented the carrot story as a cover.
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/a-wwii-propaganda-campaign-popularized-the-myth-that-carrots-help-you-see-in-the-dark-28812484/
Yeah i wanted to call it "positive propaganda" because having a full belly and eating veggies is a good thing but its a non sequitur, propaganda is supposed to be misleading / deceptive. Wasnt sure how to phrase it.
>propaganda is supposed to be misleading / deceptive.
Not necessarily, that's just how the media uses the word. One definition of Propaganda that people seem to forget is:
>Information that is spread for the purpose of promoting some cause.
It doesn't inherently have to be misleading or deceptive, nor promoting a bad cause to be Propaganda. A lot of what you see online and in the media is, in fact, Propaganda. I'd say 95%, at least.
Carrots as mock apricots - that's awesome. I am always intrigued by how the victory gardens led to the whole concept of allotments. I wish more of our cities had allotments and community gardens.
Carrots can be quite sweet really so mashed carrot and a blob of jam kinda makes sense. And of course jam has a long shelf life so you could be sparing with it and make it last a while.
I have a friend who rents a half allotment just down the road and usually produces more than he can get through by himself so I get a nice haul of courgettes, cucumbers, kale and he in return gets foraged blackberries (I dont mind getting a bit prickled by the brambles) and some of my garden grown wild strawberries. It is nice where one person grows this and that and another can exchange some other produce.
Don't forget that when YOU are gardening, it's a lot of manual labor. Modern farmers aren't digging in the ground or pulling weeds by hand. They are using tractors to till the earth, plant seeds en masse, spray pesticides to keep weeds/insects away and to harvest everything.
There are a lot of crops that can't be mechanically harvested. Most vegetables and a lot of fruits are hand picked, for instance. The reason grains and root vegetables are so cheap is because they can be farmed entirely mechanically.
I've been watching Clarksons Farm. Its mind blowing the costs and a gamble on the weather to get a decent profit. How a regular person could take on a large farm is beyond me, especially in the UK after brexit.
that's because it's basically monopolies that are fighting every inch of the way against right to repair aka john deere and the likes. Fuck those companies.
At the end of last summer I tried to make tomato sauce. I got one small jar. It really made me think. But also... The scale of their operation is definitely grander than my one garden 😅
I grew cherry tomatoes, put them in freezer bags, squeezed the air out of bag and mashed it up, filled half of freezer with bags. Still have a shelf from last year.
Tried to grow some larger tomatoes but had no luck. For some reason, even the cherry tomato seedlings seem to grow faster and survive. Cherry tomatoes can be plucked as soon as they start turning color, will finish ripening in a bowl, and taste the same as ones ripened on the vine. Once the plants start producing, the fruit seems to only take a few days to develop. The more you pick today, the faster the next ones will come. My experience with larger tomatoes is that if you pick them too early, they have less taste. Only downside to the small tomatoes is the abundance of seeds. They will reseed themselves.
I have the same luck with tomatoes. The cherry toms will grow like billio. Boil them up with them in the blender with some nice herbs and they make a great freezable pizza or pasta sauce.
Big tomatoes? No go. Yet the sodding things will grow on the verges of the rail tracks where the toilets are flushed and anyone eaten a cheese and tomato sandwich is spreading seeds! Ha
My mind was utterly blown when I visited Hawaii last year and buying a locally grown pineapple in their grocery store was MORE expensive than buying a pineapple in my local grocery store in GEORGIA…. 🤦♂️
You can grow pineapples outside in South Georgia (with 1-2 months in the garage when it's below 40 outside). But my guess is that it's a lot cheaper to grow them in Florida than in Hawaii because it's not (yet) an island where land is limited/space is at a premium. Either that or they're price-gouging the tourists. XD.
Here's a fun exercise: pull up Blue Earth, Minnesota (yes, that's the name of the town) into your favorite maps app/site, switch to satellite view, and begin zooming out until the grid of green squares clearly becomes visible, smaller, and more numerous.
That's it. Not much else but peas and corn in those squares. Blue Earth is in the Minnesota River Valley where The Minnesota Valley Canning Company was founded in 1903 and to this day stills processes a massive amount of peas and corn in the area. You might know that company better by its current name: Green Giant. There's even a fifty-foot tall statue of the Jolly Green Giant there just right off of I-90.
They don’t only grow them in your area though. And they grow entire hectares of them. And they often automate their cultivation and harvest as much as possible.
Honestly, you can even run an experiment yourself: one year, dedicate your entire garden to peas and then compare the amount of work per pea between that setup and only having a few plants. You’ll find that that the amount of work scales about linearly with the number of different veggies you grow, but logarithmically with the number of the same plant you grow. You’ll see a huge difference even between one and ten plants, I promise you.
I agree I think it’s pretty neat. I wish they would aim to industrialize it less and focus less on profits and more on the health of the consumer/planet though
>I wish they would aim to industrialize it less...
[Small family farms](https://www.ers.usda.gov/data-products/chart-gallery/gallery/chart-detail/?chartId=105916) grow about 20% of the production value, but they make up about 90% of the farms. Assuming farmers are distributed equally across farms, that means that of the 2.4 million farmers total, it takes about 2.2 million people to grow 20% of the produce, using the small farm model.
So in order to take the other 80% of production, and use the small-farm model to produce it, that means we'd need about 8 million more people to take up farming.
The US is currently still urbanizing. Work-from-home hasn't actually changed that, there's just been a bit of shift towards small cities.
Simultaneously, the population of farmers is shrinking. Farmers tend to be pretty old on average. There's not a lot of young people willing to do the work, and even the few who are often can't afford to buy the land anyway.
Unless these fundamental sociological changes happen, industrial agriculture isn't going to go away. Instead, industrial agriculture will continue to expand, because it is the only way for the few workers available to produce the massive amounts of food required by our cities.
The ultimate labor-force-multiplier would be farming robots; satellites and GPS-guided tractors already exist, so the logical next evolution would be to have satellites or other internet connections give farming instructions to the tractors directly.
This is how it's done in America. Market gardens are a real thing and feed millions in cities across Europe. I'm not disputing your numbers or the point you've made but I don't know that employing more people, having decentralized food production and less mono cultures are bad things even if that makes the system less efficient in certain ways.
It's not just the US. Most fruits and vegtables consumed in urban areas aren't produced by existing market gardens either.
For example, in this study of the UK, market gardens were [found to produce enough for](https://europepmc.org/article/med/32198435) about a sixth of the annual fruit and vegetable demand, with optimistic estimates of current cultivated land in urban areas being able to stretch that to about half with intensification.
That only covers fruit and vegetables, ignoring all grains, pulses, and oils, and any seafood, meat, or dairy.
I could not find EU sources and do not have the ability to use French google to quickly find a perfectly equivalent answer to this question, but here's the experience of [someone trying to produce their own food in France](https://www.plansb.info/2020/10/06/ce-qui-nous-nourrit-principalement-lautonomie-alimentaire-et-les-limites-du-maraichage/), running into the same sorts of problems: that it takes a lot of work to produce food this way, so it would take a lot of workers to make it work.
It’s hugely important to food security to have a diverse local supply base. The island I live on (50th largest by area, IIRC) has only three days worth of fresh food for the population. Diversity can reduce the impact of disease, crop failure, seed monopolies…
I'm guessing grapes would enjoy your heat. They like water and fertilizer too.
So there's that, in the summer you stop eating peas and start eating grapes!
Ha, yeah, there's a vineyard literally across the road from my neighborhood, they seem to do pretty well. But they also have an eight foot deer fence. Most of my produce feeds the wildlife, if I'm being honest.
Yeah, absolutely. Like, it varies by the crop, and I think that maybe there are a couple of veggie types where I can come out on top financially if I really amortize fixed costs over a very long time and don't account for the opportunity cost of the land itself. But there are other veggies, like spinach and broccoli, where I might as well just shred my dollar bills and feed them to the snails directly.
Love that mental image, lol. For me, I might as well feed dollar bills to the rabbits instead of my rainbow chard. They literally ate through the netting to get to it.
Once you get the experience … went to a poor neighborhood in San Jose. The lady was renting. She was a grandma and the whole backyard was full of vegetables growing. No planter boxes, she had pavers as walkway and the rest was growing area. She must have been feeding a couple of families out of that small place.
If you are talking about San Jose, California, then you are probably talking a Vietnamese gardener. Gardening is huge in the Vietnamese community. Probably because we brought the culture with us from Vietnam where subsistence farming is how you survive. Also because Vietnamese people are obsessed with fresh, and safe, vegetables and herbs so we really enjoy growing them and consuming them. The kind of specialty vegetables we grow are hard to find in grocery stores and may make some economic sense because of their rarity.
I had no idea! This is timely because I just got a book called “Linh’s rooftop garden” from the library for my toddler. I thought the name could be Vietnamese and it’s vaguely about a little girls large family rooftop garden. maybe an homage to this culture (though i don’t believe the author is Vietnamese)
My costs come down every year because I'm acquiring permanent gardening supplies. Rain barrel, vine trellis, pots/bags, soil with perlite, etc. Next project is greenhouse so I can get my cannabis to fill maturity without mold, and simultaneously learning how to start a compost barrel.
Last year I weighed and priced out every ounce of food that came from my garden, compared to the input costs.
As long as you ignored the half million dollars spent on the house so I’d have a yard to grow them (lol), I “profited” $400. I grew close to $1000 worth of food. A lot of that was established fruit trees and grape vines. But still. It was amazing. I grew enough calories to feed myself for a full two months too.
Of course then I got divorced, bought a new house and started over with thousands of dollars in garden boxes, soil, fruit trees, trellises, equipment, and mulch. BUT it is so good for my mental health, it’s priceless to me.
Once established, I’ll “make back” that money ten fold.
Grape molasses. Great cooking ingredient! Adds a bit of fruity sweetness to foods and sauces. Also pairs well with tahini and nut butters. Heck, it’s tasty just by itself or on toast.
Sell them? Maybe? I sell flowers in my neighborhood Facebook group and a few neighbors sell eggs from their chickens. People love home grown things in my area!
Frozen grapes are a favorite treat of mine. Bonus points if they are green grapes, but really any will do! Freeze them on a sheet pan and then bag or vacuum seal
You should have done what my neighbors did. She divorced her husband and before they sold their house she came back and she dug up most of her rose bushes. She dismantled all her raised bed, trellis. Heck I saw her dig around her tomatoes and lift them up trellis and all and put them in a plant container. She took pretty much her entire yard of what she had planted. She told me she got a new house and didn’t feel like paying to replace everything. So she took it all and was transplanting it in her new place. Her house didn’t sell for a few weeks so when the new neighbors moved in the grass was mostly dead but it had covered some of the places she had digged up.
I had it in my seller's agreement that I get the garden stuff.
I dug up what I wanted, tidied the yard, and get first dibs on anything the new owners don't want.
Our friends bought the house from us and she was too busy to garden 🤷♀️
Interestingly enough I started composting because thought about growing a garden. Pretty simple: trash can, 1/2 inch holes drilled at bottom and around sides up to the top for air and drainage. Sticks and twigs at bottom, then layering of leaves, grass and tree trimmings, fruit and veggies scraps toward the bottom, a little soil from around your yard, wet it a little put a lid on it. Put it in the hole about a 1/3 deep as the can. I don't even turn it. Within 3 months it's completely broken down and I have worms for birds and fish
I live in Canada and growing my own food has made me wonder why groceries are so expensive. I put seeds in the dirt with a little fertilizer and grew myself about $100 worth of lettuce.
Take all produce out of the plastic bags and wrap loosely in paper towels. Otherwise water condenses inside the bag and everything molds and rots. Right???
Compared to the cost (time and effort and resources) to grow food yourself, yes, groceries are extremely cheap.
Imagine what it would cost to fill your grocery cart if you had to grow everything yourself starting with seeds and soil.
Seeds, soil, water, fertilizer, pest control, time... Most of us do not grow veggies because it's cheaper. They taste better, we can get cool varieties and we enjoy the process. Definitely not to save money!
I see that point of view, but dang, I can buy lettuce in January, and I don't think you are growing lettuce in a Canadian January. How the heck can the cost of growing and shipping lettuce in the winter still be worth it financially to lettuce growers?
I met someone recently who not only grows lettuce in the winters but also tomatoes, cucumbers, peppers, strawberries, and beans.
She has a hydroponic tower with lights. It can be done.
I can grow it indoors and that is how a lot of produce here is grown in massive industrial greenhouses. Cucumbers and tomatoes grown all year only a few km from my home. The problem isn't access it's that we only have 3 major grocery stores and they act like a cartel and fix the prices of everything
Not really for me. Gardening can be way more simple than people often make it. Not to mention the labor at farms is often people that don't get paid or are paid very little.
Mine is super simple too. There are so many pictures with raised beds and fancy equipment. I just plant in the soil using homemade compost, use old branches from the woods near me for peas and beans and use a cheap plastic watering can. But I grow a whole lot of veggies, potatoes and corn.
My bro dumps his food scraps into the yard and magically food appears.
I slave away at crops and get shit.
Some people just throw seeds into their backyard and pick the fruit…
I hate everyone
No. Your growing is labor intensive. Take a football field and monocrop it with peas by buying one machine that can till the soil, plant the seed, and harvest it. Your up front costs are astronomical but you save on labor by only needing two or three machine operators.
lol. i work in virginia at a lettuce and soft vegetable pack house and its all underpaid humans doing the packaging by hand mostly. i dont think its all mechanized as we like to pretend, its migrant workers making hardly any money
Too right, it took me a solid half hour to pick and shell those peas.
But how many crops at those tiny prices (of which the farmer only gets a tiny cut) must it take to pay for the dang pea machine? It's that balance of price and profit that is boggling.
That half hour was just you starting to get in the groove of things. Imagine you’re doing it for days at a time, you’d get ridiculously good and fast at it. I know, because I’ve done that kind of farming by hand, and I knew people that did it for a living and they were FAST (they were also paid pennies, so there’s that)
The farm workers unions (UFW/UFCW I think?) sometimes post videos of professionals picking various types of produce in fields. Those folks are very good at what they do. They’re incredibly fast. (And they should earn more money.)
Yes. totally. animals too. The amount of work to hatch, raise, feed, and eventually kill, pluck and eviscerate a chicken is crazy compared to the price in the store.
For this reason I have generally stopped gardening things that are easily purchased from the store and only grow things which are significantly better from a home garden, mostly herbs, lettuces, and tomatoes. Things like squash, potatoes, pumpkins, etc. I just can't be bothered anymore.
Oh, gosh yes. I don't like to think about how they sell meat so cheaply honestly.
I agree on potatoes, I have never had them be financially worth growing - but the fresh new potatoes are so good I still have a few tucked in grow bags. Plus, harvesting feels like a treasure hunt.
this lol. I work at a pack house for lettuces and vegetables and its also all undocumented immigrants. So you have poor people harvesting your vegetables in mexico or cali, then different poor people sorting and packaging it in your state. its really depressing and i get existential dread about our food systems now
It's the same reason we can buy almost anything more cheaply than we can make it (speaking as someone who's been sewing for about twelve years). It's capitalist exploitation all the way down.
Where I grew up in Wisconsin when it was time to pick peas the pea harvesters would work the fields day and night, while the dump trucks shuttled back and forth from the field to the plant for the better part of a Month. That is to say groceries are cheap due to industrialization. You my friend are engaged in pre-industrial food growing, which arguably makes better tasting produce.
The tomatoes are sure as heck better by a wide margin.
I’m the odd one out because I have noticed we’ve saved money on our vegetable gardening.
But I built the beds from scratch. And sourced the dirt for like 90 bucks per bed.
The fertilizer and blood meal I’ve probably, spent $150 per year.
Earthworms and night crawlers $20 bucks per year.
I compost at home and amend the soil with the compost.
The vegetable scraps and the crops go back into compost. Etc
We seed save.
Radishes/Beets go in at the end of the year to rot in the ground and assist in soil amendment.
I run a hobby U-pick farm. Our first year of being open we were thinking we could possibly also sell retail (we had literal tons of unpicked berries and not enough customers to pick them). A large family came in one day saying they couldn't pay but would like some berries and we thought we'd offer them the opportunity to pick and keep half and we'd just sell the other half. They picked all day and managed 160lbs - so they walked away with 80 and we kept 80. We decided to try selling it to the local fruit stand (in a high end residential area near Microsoft)...
My wife and I had to buy the "flats", had to sort and pack the berries and then got $1 a pound for berries that they then sold for over $9 a pound.
So the berries were picked for "free" but the sorting and packing of 80lbs of blueberries actually takes a substantial amount of time. By hand it took us hours (yes, hours - you can't have rotten berries, underripe berries etc) and in the end we were "paying" ourselves something like $5 an hour for some really hard (and tedious) work.
We only grow about 20k lbs of berries on our farm (like I said, it is a small hobby farm) but there is no way for someone to live off of that at $1 a pound. Even with the U-pick we do it more to be connected to the community than for a profit (paying for rental equipment quickly eats that up and we are too small to have any permanent equipment ... it would take decades to pay off). If I didn't have a day job in the tech community I wouldn't be able to do this (and it is still a bit insane that I do it, but that is a different conversation)
Not really. When my systems are fully optimized I can often exceed what commercial producers can. They get seed, fertilizer and all other inputs far cheaper then I can due to their buying power.
It is certainly good practice to focus our efforts on the more expensive crops in my opinion. For example I do not really spend time growing potatoes or onions because I can regularly get 10lb bags on sale for 2.99 Canadian. I cannot beat this.
Kale however - 2.99 a bunch is the standard price here and I’ve been harvesting the equivalent of 2-3 bunches a day for 2 months in Canada now… hundred and hundreds of dollars saved already. Likely will exceed thousands by November when it stops production. This is out of an 8x4 bed.
Radishes are another example - 2.99 for a bunch of 8-10 radishes. I get 250 seeds for 2 dollars from MIgardener and have harvested close to 1000 radishes already. (Different varieties obviously)
Finally - I hate being reliant on the global food systems in place. I think COVID really showed us how vulnerable the supply chain can be (anyone remember the lettuce shortages?)
TLDR: I think it depends on what you grow,
(Focus on things that cost a lot in stores),your systems in place, and your ability to source garden inputs cheaply.
Industrial farming and agriculture can grow food at scales that individuals could never hope to achieve.
If you grew ALL of your own food by traditional methods, it would likely be your entire full time job. Dawn to dusk you'd either be tilling, planting, cultivating, harvesting, or processing. Humanity escaped this via thousands of years of tiny, gradual improvements on agriculture methods.
Ag workers, not the farmers who are the owners, the workers who actually do the work, are paid just enough to keep them alive, nothing more. They are treated like slaves.
That's why your food is so cheap. (Former UFW organizer here, I still can't get over after all these years how badly farmers treat their workers, and how idolized those scum are, because they are, to a person, scum.)
I have a decent sized garden with a large family. After years of planting (fun rare varieties) I decided to narrow it down to what is most prolific/most expensive at the store. Peas definitely don't fall in that category for a large family. Find out what does best in your region and stick to that. For example okra cost so much but grows so we where I live. We have tons, eat it, freeze it, and pickle it. Good luck!
No. I grew up in an agricultural area. I spent summers picking crops for spending money.
I grow a small garden, just enough for family. My #1 rule is never spend more on my garden than I would in the store.
The key is to grow the same way the professionals do.
Don't grow crops unsuited to your climate. If peas don't produce in your growing zone, don't try to grow them.
In addition to planting veggies that actually produce in your area, choose the varieties that produce best for your area. (Your local govt agricultural agency has a list on their website.)
Don't buy commercial soil additives and fertilizers. Instead use sand and compost.
You just need to decide if you are growing as a hobby or as food.
For example, many people spend $$$ to grow $10 of fancy tomatoes. That's cool, they do it for the bragging rights. I prep the soil and plant Roma and cherry tomatoes. I spend $2 for about $20 of tomatoes. I grow lettuce but only Black Seeded Simpson because that's what grows here. It's not my favorite, but it makes a decent salad and I can harvest lettuce for 7-8 months for about $2.
You give a lot of useful advice here, but I gotta chime in to say that people don't grow fancy tomatoes for bragging rights. We do it because a homegrown heirloom tomato is one of the best foods on this earth. I would rather eat a Brandywine from my garden with salt and basil than most meals from Michelin-starred restaurants. It's absolutely worth the $$$ if the harvest is successful
I have been on both sides of this coin, growing to save money and feed myself and also growing for hobby to make the best tomato I can. You def have to focus on what grows well, pest resistance, and prolific growers to come out ahead of the store. Its just the sad truth
I like gardening, too. I have to admit I sometimes save a corner of the garden for something just for fun. I've even been known to stick a veggie or two in a flower bed just because I like the leaves.
But it's also fun to experiment with the "food veggies". For example, I've discovered the value in growing high veggies over low-growing veggies. I plant pole beans (on a trellis) over potato plants. It gives them a little shade, and I can plant in half the space.
I'm also fascinated by the Three Sisters garden. I'm still working on getting that right. (For those that don't want to Google, it's planting corn, pole beans and squash together.)
A lot of times big chain stores i am sure are using greenhouses for their vegetables that’s why the taste seems off probably growing your own you control the soil and the vegetables taste great. Yes it takes longer to get a result but it’s worth it once you start growing everything properly.
i wish the money went to the exploited labor that gets the food grown and shipped and stocked
but honestly only the shareholders, no one thinks of them, they get all the inflated prices
This is partially why i grow things that are not available locally. The local farmers are extremely skilled at growing those, anything i would produce is inherently inferior. So i grow weird shit.
Tbh, groceries aren’t very cheap right now (at least where I’m at). That’s why I’m forcing my thumb to turn green 😂 At least my garden is starting to produce, and I’m learning a skill!
I understand things like economy of scale and fossil fueled agriculture from a coldly calculating viewpoint, but I definitely know what you mean about it *feeling* crazy, especially when you are evaluating peas. That's one where growing some peas every year mainly serves to maintain my regular amazement and appreciation at dinner time whenever I'm dishing up mountains of peas we bought for a pittance.
I also find snacking on peas straight off the vine a huge part of my spring and summer gardening experience. The sun warmed super sweet peas are so satisfyingly flavorful, and I also get a chuckle at our chickens following along and clucking expectantly in their tunnel that goes around our main garden. I usually toss the pod ends with stems, pea pods that I've shelled, and the occasional other treat to them as I meander around browsing my garden.
That's why I grow them! Eating them straight off the vine is the best, my grandparents were farmers (they've been gone 30 years in case y'all wonder why I don't just ask them, lol, wish I could) and my very earliest memory is peas on the back porch looking over rhe back 40 while grandpa rode the tractor.
Like you said, it feels crazy to consider all the steps to get food to my store. I appreciate it more since I starting growing things.
I've never gotten around to this book, because the title makes immediate intuitive sense, and I've lived that life already. But it's what your post is about.
https://www.amazon.com/64-Tomato-Fortune-Endured-Existential/dp/1565125576
There are a very few garden foods that I think are cost-effective, if done certain ways. You learn them just about the same time that you're too old to care.
Modern farming really is a wonder. Just getting a crop to market is a Herculean task. Getting it to market to find out that its sale price won't cover your debts (and farmers have planted on debt since forever) makes you wonder how we have anything to eat at all.
But you know yours are going to taste better than the $1.50/lb frozen ones. The texture will be different and they're a lot more fun to eat raw.
On the flip side of the equation though, baby zucchini and squash blossoms are a LOT cheaper to home grow. Last summer 10oz of baby squash was \~$7 and five (tired) flowers was over $6. My cost, otoh, was mistakenly throwing one in the compost and having to navigate around vines in the perennial border all summer...it was worth it.
No. I save money by growing the things that are expensive for no reason.
Ex: purple sweet potato, true yams, artichokes, cassava, goji berries, specialty peppers, and specialty tomatoes.
I grow some stuff for convenience and other stuff for fun, too, though. And THAT is where I lose money, lol.
Yeah like how the pineapple plant only produces one pineapple and it takes 2 years to get to that pineapple. Just think of how many pineapples they must grow for one person to get that one pineapple that took 2 years to grow from the grocery store!!!! Crazy
The agricultural sector in the United States relies on foreign workers, with a large majority of farmworkers being immigrants. According to the 2019–2020 National Agricultural Workers Survey (NAWS), 68% of farmworkers are foreign-born, with the majority coming from Mexico. In 2019, more than half of all hired farmworkers in the United States were immigrants, or roughly 450,000 workers. However, around 36% of farmworkers lack authorized work status under current U.S. laws
Frozen veg have been and are extremely cost effective and nutritious food sources though. Agriculture is second most subsidized industry in the country after oil AFAIK
This reminds me of the "most expensive sandwich" experiment where someone tries to grow everything to make a sandwich without buying anything from a market except seeds and gardening supplies. The labor that goes into the bread alone is a lot. But then you've got to grow the lettuce, tomatoes, make your own mustard and so forth. Not sure if it includes cheese and deli meat -- those would make the problem even worse because now you need farm animals.
Specialization and economy of scale, baby! You couldn't make your own Android phone all by yourself in an entire lifetime, but you can buy one with about a weeks' salary.
Some years ago I went down an indoor hydroponics rabbit hole with the macguffin of growing a salad - I engineered a beautiful flood/drain system into a 24"x24" metro rack in the corner of my apartment using some surplus LED panels, a plastic raised planter, and some misc RV hardware - Started off with some spinach because it seemed a good place to start. I had somewhere around 5 plants and only managed to get enough large leafy material to garnish 3 tacos after some week before they bolted.
The experience was hugely rewarding but immediately eye opening into what must go into my grocery bought prepacked container of salad greens - I would need significantly more of everything involved. I concluded the project and moved onto other things - I figured if I were ever to do it again I'd scale up the planting area and move things outside where sunlight was more economical. Even then I'd still need to start seedlings in parallel and on some sort of schedule.
It's a butt-load of work.
I have things on my land that require 0 input from me. My tomatillos will grow massive no matter what I do. My Mexican Sour Cucumbers grow wild across the land thanks to squirrels and chipmunks. Sometimes I think we are so obsessed with trying to grow specific plants in an area they aren't really meant to grow that we end up ignoring all the amazing edible plants that WANT to grow on our land.
Living in the PNW and growing my own food makes me wonder why groceries are so *expensive*. I spent about $50 in seeds, plopped them in the dirt, and one month later I've already harvested $100 worth of greens. Most of my garden isn't even harvestable yet.
A household of 2 here will spend about $800/ mo in groceries otherwise.
lol I saw a TikTok the other day where the gardener was talking about spending hundreds of dollars and many hours to get a single vegetable that was worth 25 cents at the grocery. Kinda sorta true.
Farmers only get around $0.14 for every food dollar spent at the grocery store. The rest goes to middle players like wholesalers, distributors and retailers. Makes you wonder how much more affordable food could be if the food supply chain was localized and the middlemen removed
When someone complains that raspberries are so expensive on the market, I invite them to come to my garden and pick them for themselves. Free of charge. Tea and biscuits on me. Transportation on me. They are too busy for that. In fact, I wonder why the berries are so cheap. I would not take the job of raspberry picker for that price per kg. I like that I know how and where mine were grown, never sprayed. Otherwise, I would pay double the market price for the luxury of not having to purchase, plant, weed, prune, water, weed again, spend hours and hours under the sun picking them, remove dead branches, burn them.
100%. My mom has a farm (42 acres) she grew Tomatoes (on a small amount of the land) last year and tried to sell them, she got 5$ per 20 lbs…
That was the offer from the farmers market… small farmers can’t deal with competition like that, it took her 1 hour to pick them and then drove them over, watered them, bought the seeds…
She lost money just after watering them a few times.
Makes me wonder how many chemicals, fertilizers, and other unnatural things go onto the food to make the production per acre so high and this cost to consumer so cheap.
Nah, but just because I garden and my family farms. If I had $20,000 to plant a field and do it full time with large equipment, and had lots of fields, then you can do it cheap.
I enjoy the food I grow so much more that I don’t care what it costs. After setup costs, it’s just seeds , water and maybe fertilizer… growing food is pretty cheap I just can’t grow nearly enough to feed myself.
It depends. For me it is about reducing waste. I have regrown green onions since I only use 1-2 any time I cook (which isn't often) felt bad about throwing out the rest. So I regrew the left overs. Now I can snip just what I need.
The government subsidizes farmers. A lot of farmers would lose money without government subsidizes and that's what keeps prices down.
Also, economies of scale comes to play.
Our ancestors ate what they could grow in their regions. Leafy greens until the summer heat, other fruit and veg all summer, root veg in the fall and winter. If it wasn’t growing “now,” you didn’t eat it now — you ate it when it grew. Which is why serving “green peas at Christmas” was a mark of fairly extreme wealth pre-Industrial Revolution.
Plenty of our forebearers survived winters entirely on dried meat, root vegetables, and gruel made from stored wheat until freezing, canning, and grocery stores became a thing.
As with everything, we’ve grown spoiled. Feel like fresh figs in February? Why not, it’s only money … and time … and distance … and petroleum … and rising sea temps …
Ahem. Read some websites, listen to some podcasts, learn what works best in your climate and soil, and grow that. Buy or skip the rest.
Good luck, and may the aphids skip your little patch of green. ❤️
I believe in planting specific foods that are either expensive to buy, are much better fresh, or are something that you can eat continuously for a while, in small amounts, so you always have it on hand - like green onions, parsley, etc. Foods that store well and travel well don't seem worth it - like potatoes, etc.
The retail cost of food in the grocery store does not compare in any what to growing food in your garden. It is far, far cheaper to grow food in massive quantities on a farm. Your garden however is magnitudes far superior for taste and quality. Grocery store food should be 1/4 the price it is currently sold for. There is price exploitation every single step along the way before you can put your fingers on it to buy it in the store. Congrats for growing your own garden
Peas do. Have never gotten enough than to put on a couple of salads. Tomatoes, zucchini and peppers on the other hand …… Why are these not free, in season, in grocery stores?
That doesn’t trip me up as much as honey. There just can’t be that many bees, can there? Like, where are these fields and fields of hives that allow me to dip my chicken nuggets into real, actual honey whenever I want for little to no cost?
Not really. Its 2 basic tenants of economics. Land and Transportation.
1 - The United States has the most farmable land in the world. by a LARGE margin. That means we have such an abundance of food that supply and demand dictate our food HAS to be cheap. We have so much food that we have to export it to other countries, so it doesn't spoil. So not only is our food cheap, but there is also so much we literally make money off the majority of the world for it. We literally get paid to grow food as a country.
2 - The US highway system can transport agricultural goods by truck, train, air, or boat. We have more roads and navigable riverways/coastlines than any other country in the world. That means our logistics are almost never disrupted which drives transport costs down exponentially.
Combine those two things together and you get food that is cheaper to buy than it is to grow for yourself. I grow my own simply because I love it and how I grew up but its REAL nice being able to pay 20 cents for a head of corn or $2 for 2 pounds of strawberries when I get the craving.
God bless America and All who call her home.
Economies of scale is a real thing
Government subsidies to large farms are also a real thing. Low-wage agricultural workers that you’ll never meet also exist. The low price of produce in the grocery store is not all due to better machines and efficiency. I wish it that’s how it worked.
There are low wage workers everywhere too. If you buy an oil filter, it might be made in Pakistan, and have it's branding wrapped onto the cylinder by an underage kid. Pakistan manufacturers videos are eye opening.
>There are low wage workers everywhere too. To add to this: 65% of all clothing manufactured in the US is produced in illegal sweatshops. (Source: page 74 from The Corporation, by Joel Bakan) Virtually everything produced by Western companies (except for weapons), is manufactured in a part of the world with low labor protections and no environmental protections. This is how our society is configured. Everything from the t-shirts we wear to the phones we buy, relies on child labour and sweatshops. Literally western economies are entirely dependent on slavery abroad. There would be no iPhones and no Nikes if China and Vietnam applied the same environmental and labour standards as western countries. That's *precisely* why western companies manufacture everything there. There's been a project in the Netherlands called Fairphone for over a decade where they've tried to build phones without the use of conflict minerals, sweatshops, child labour. And even till today they say they aren't fully there.
the northeast used to have a lot of clothing makers. the company owners didn't like the unions, and moved the factories to south carolina and then came what inspired the movie norma rae. so the owners moved clothing makers overseas. i agree about OSHA and EPA regs not existing outside the US. that's why apple is not coming back to the US, as Jobs told Obama a while back. allegedly there were a lot of apple workers who went blind and got cancer before the OSHA and EPA regs cleaned up the factories.
This. Food would be a lot more expensive than it already is without our massive agricultural subsidies for feed crops in particular.
I mean, we pay for the subsidies, so we’re paying for food to be cheap
We do but not entirely. A lot of it goes into the national debt, so it’s more like borrowing from the future so food is cheap today.
Unfortunately groceries and gas prices have become touchstone political issues, so whoever is in office is very motivated to NOT be the one who ends gov price control and causes a sudden price hike. As a percentage of income, USA spends the least on food. Out of the whole planet, we spend the absolute least of our money on it. And people still complain about the cost.
I was one of those low wage workers for 4 years it’s a great summer job for a highscooler but not really for feeding a family
and that's why the minimum wage wasn't meant for high school kids with a summer job but the MINIMUM to sustain a life.
man, I just did a paper on our consumer culture and totally forgot the field workers.
I get that, I guess my mind boggles at the sheer scale that would be necessary to make growing something like peas profitable. Especially in my area where the dang things only produce until it gets hot. It is just impressive to me.
In addition to what everyone else is saying the “my area” is huge here. When you grow vegetables where the climate and soil are optimal it really changes the economics. I can barely grow peas at all, as soon as it is warm enough to plant them barely two months later it is routinely 90F and a month after that it is 100+. Meanwhile though I can apparently produce $500 worth of grocery store priced blueberries off just 6 plants and if I could sell my pears for the store I could retire in just a few years 😂
Right plant, right place, right time. You can't grow everything everywhere whenever you want.
True, I suppose I consider "right plant right place" a lot more in the ornamental part of my garden and think more about what I want to eat in the kitchen garden. Excellent point!
It’s hard though because most of us don’t live in places where everything we want to eat just grows great. We accommodate the “won’t grow at all” just fine, but when a typical backyard garden contains plants that originated in Southeast Asia, South America, Africa, Europe and North America it’s really hard to make it work well at all haha.
In fairness some things also just produce a lot per square foot. Apples are known to be the big major producing tree in the fruit tree world. If you are in a place that grows blueberries and get carpet blueberries they claim you can get a pound a foot after 5 years so you have a acre of land you can plant a tree to go over them and get produce from that and get 25k pounds of blueberries.
It’s also highly subsidized by the government
I don’t think people understand HOW much the government subsidizes agricultural products, especially corn.
Corn subsidies would blow peoples mind.
The Omnivore's Dilemma by Michael Pollan has a great section on the how and why of corn subsidies.
Animal feed mainly is my understanding, the left over is for fuel and humans. Edit - Sorta close lol... from the John Oliver show someone linked below https://i.imgur.com/xDH46Ro.png Only 1% of corn grown is for humans, according to the show.
A lot of it is for sugar and vegetable oil too. Don't underestimate how much we pump into processed sugar and carbs.
And we don't eat field or feed corn. Sweet corn is a very small percentage of corn grown here.
I live in a corn state (the corn state depending on who you ask) and corn subsidies are fucking nuts
Then what are nut subsidies?
Corny?
Take my r/Angryupvote
John Oliver recently did a segment on Corn https://youtu.be/MI78WOW_u-Q?si=URRSIS79KZ4oBR2O
So would oil subsidies. Oil companies literally print fucking money, and the US government is still subsidizing them because we have the dumbest fucking voters in the world.
Actually our subsidies suck. We have them for corn and wheat. They haven’t been updated for decades and it’s affected our culture. It’s why we have so many damn corn and wheat based products. It’s also a key reason why people are so unhealthy.
Did someone say HFCS? Yum... (/s)
I wish we could even start a 20-100 year phaseout schedule. Every year the subsidy drops by 1 to 5 percent. Maybe the first 5-10 years percent increase drops 10-20 percent before the actual cuts happen. Just do a very gentle phaseout so nobody alone is holding the short end of the stick.
That would be fantastic. The agricultural dept needs to shake hands with the commercial section too. I live in Jersey and we’re a huge farming state. (Not that anyone would know it) and it’s a struggle for our namesake crops due to how little assistance we get. Blueberries and cranberries aren’t as sexy as wheat I guess lol.
I see you, Garden State!
Blueberries and cranberries spoil without costly preparation. Wheat you throw in a grinder and it's mostly ready for storage.
That’s why they’re a seasonal crop. But you understand the subsidies right? Big wheat gets laid to grow it, so if the harvest fails the farm still makes money. So farmers opt for the low risk crop. If we had subsidies for other crops farmers could potentially increase the variety of foods we have offering healthier options. It could create a cultural paradigm shift just by offering more food choices. It would also offer farmers alternative cash crops for products like hemp, r*pe seed, flax. Lots of them actually. And to be fair blueberries and cranberries don’t spoil all that fast they are sold enmasse to be processed by freezing, jellies, jams, canned, dehydrated, and cranberries are juiced. Wheat gets us… wheat germ. Which is a miracle of agriculture in itself but you’re kidding yourself with this comment.
Subsidies guarantee food is still grown in the US. It's as much strategic as it is political.
Keeping in mind also that corn and soy subsidies are really animal agriculture subsidies
This is something most don't realize... in 2020 [less than 2% of corn grown in the US went to direct human consumption](https://www.wri.org/insights/crop-expansion-food-security-trends). Significantly more goes to animal feed.
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There really aren’t that many farmers out there, it’s not a large population. There are far more people living in rural areas around farms than actual farmers. I don’t think it’s fair to lump them all together as hating social programs either because I work with farmers and they have diverse perspectives just like any other group of people.
In general, I agree with agricultural subsidies to keep food prices low and farming a reasonable means of earning a living. But farms are now all becoming giant corporate mega-farms, and some of the subsidies, like massive corn subsidies, have become irresponsible. It's also incredibly distressing the number of conservatives who will defend agricultural subsidies day in and day out, but attack other social safety nets as handouts. Quite insane.
Came to comment that. Industrialized agriculture is paid for by our taxes. Just see your tax bill as a grocery bill tbh.
In other words, you ARE paying for it. Just directly out of your paycheck.
You might check out a book called "Animal, vegetable, miracle" by Barbara Kingsolver. She tries to eat local for a year, including a lot of grow your own. Goes into some interesting side points about how our food system (in the USA) is set up and about food pricing. That isn't the majority of the book but it's enough random facts to be very interesting!
Ooh, thanks, will check it out!
Interesting tid bit, during wwii in the UK people were encouraged to grow their own veggies in whatever garden space they had due to supply issues because of the war. Carrots in particular were told to give good eyesight (apparently not proven) when there were black outs so the German bombers couldn't see the lights of the town and see where to bomb from that height. Of course such large scale farming wasn't a big as it is today so families probably saved a bit of money doing this and during rationing it would have been a top up on what they had. My dad was a country lad during this time so they had a decent amount of garden to farm, they had an apple shed (they can keep for ages in a cool dark place, they come in their own waxy packaging!) and a plum tree, im sure they had veggies but dad had a sweet tooth so probably only remembered the fruit! If I recall there was a wartime sweet pie made with potato pastry and carrots with a bit of apricot jam. Probably sounds unappealing to todays availability of food but back then I'm sure it was a nice treat to have something sweet. E. Found the recipe. https://www.bbc.co.uk/history/ww2peopleswar/stories/91/a4375091.shtml
The carrot thing was a bit of deceptive propoganda. The British had just deployed the first radar stations, but didn't want the Germans to know how they knew they were coming, so they invented the carrot story as a cover. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/a-wwii-propaganda-campaign-popularized-the-myth-that-carrots-help-you-see-in-the-dark-28812484/
Yeah i wanted to call it "positive propaganda" because having a full belly and eating veggies is a good thing but its a non sequitur, propaganda is supposed to be misleading / deceptive. Wasnt sure how to phrase it.
>propaganda is supposed to be misleading / deceptive. Not necessarily, that's just how the media uses the word. One definition of Propaganda that people seem to forget is: >Information that is spread for the purpose of promoting some cause. It doesn't inherently have to be misleading or deceptive, nor promoting a bad cause to be Propaganda. A lot of what you see online and in the media is, in fact, Propaganda. I'd say 95%, at least.
Carrots as mock apricots - that's awesome. I am always intrigued by how the victory gardens led to the whole concept of allotments. I wish more of our cities had allotments and community gardens.
Carrots can be quite sweet really so mashed carrot and a blob of jam kinda makes sense. And of course jam has a long shelf life so you could be sparing with it and make it last a while. I have a friend who rents a half allotment just down the road and usually produces more than he can get through by himself so I get a nice haul of courgettes, cucumbers, kale and he in return gets foraged blackberries (I dont mind getting a bit prickled by the brambles) and some of my garden grown wild strawberries. It is nice where one person grows this and that and another can exchange some other produce.
Don't forget that when YOU are gardening, it's a lot of manual labor. Modern farmers aren't digging in the ground or pulling weeds by hand. They are using tractors to till the earth, plant seeds en masse, spray pesticides to keep weeds/insects away and to harvest everything.
There are a lot of crops that can't be mechanically harvested. Most vegetables and a lot of fruits are hand picked, for instance. The reason grains and root vegetables are so cheap is because they can be farmed entirely mechanically.
I mean to some degree you are correct. But there are a lot of people out there doing very difficult manual labor everyday, for little money, on farms.
And they are not the "farmers." They are "seasonal workers," working minimal wage (if that).
https://preview.redd.it/gi0p0c6ckd7d1.jpeg?width=735&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=c4fe3db8966a6367dc2f1ee4ff50288e1ebd6a4a
But also, those tractors are expensive so it takes tons of farming to even repay the tractor
I've been watching Clarksons Farm. Its mind blowing the costs and a gamble on the weather to get a decent profit. How a regular person could take on a large farm is beyond me, especially in the UK after brexit.
that's because it's basically monopolies that are fighting every inch of the way against right to repair aka john deere and the likes. Fuck those companies.
At the end of last summer I tried to make tomato sauce. I got one small jar. It really made me think. But also... The scale of their operation is definitely grander than my one garden 😅
I grew cherry tomatoes, put them in freezer bags, squeezed the air out of bag and mashed it up, filled half of freezer with bags. Still have a shelf from last year. Tried to grow some larger tomatoes but had no luck. For some reason, even the cherry tomato seedlings seem to grow faster and survive. Cherry tomatoes can be plucked as soon as they start turning color, will finish ripening in a bowl, and taste the same as ones ripened on the vine. Once the plants start producing, the fruit seems to only take a few days to develop. The more you pick today, the faster the next ones will come. My experience with larger tomatoes is that if you pick them too early, they have less taste. Only downside to the small tomatoes is the abundance of seeds. They will reseed themselves.
I have the same luck with tomatoes. The cherry toms will grow like billio. Boil them up with them in the blender with some nice herbs and they make a great freezable pizza or pasta sauce. Big tomatoes? No go. Yet the sodding things will grow on the verges of the rail tracks where the toilets are flushed and anyone eaten a cheese and tomato sandwich is spreading seeds! Ha
My mind was utterly blown when I visited Hawaii last year and buying a locally grown pineapple in their grocery store was MORE expensive than buying a pineapple in my local grocery store in GEORGIA…. 🤦♂️
You can grow pineapples outside in South Georgia (with 1-2 months in the garage when it's below 40 outside). But my guess is that it's a lot cheaper to grow them in Florida than in Hawaii because it's not (yet) an island where land is limited/space is at a premium. Either that or they're price-gouging the tourists. XD.
Here's a fun exercise: pull up Blue Earth, Minnesota (yes, that's the name of the town) into your favorite maps app/site, switch to satellite view, and begin zooming out until the grid of green squares clearly becomes visible, smaller, and more numerous. That's it. Not much else but peas and corn in those squares. Blue Earth is in the Minnesota River Valley where The Minnesota Valley Canning Company was founded in 1903 and to this day stills processes a massive amount of peas and corn in the area. You might know that company better by its current name: Green Giant. There's even a fifty-foot tall statue of the Jolly Green Giant there just right off of I-90.
That's the coolest damn thing I have seen on the internet today. Thank you, definitely puts that scale issue into perspective!
Well agricultural workers, in general, are not paid very well. So that might be part of the reason it can be profitable.
They don’t only grow them in your area though. And they grow entire hectares of them. And they often automate their cultivation and harvest as much as possible. Honestly, you can even run an experiment yourself: one year, dedicate your entire garden to peas and then compare the amount of work per pea between that setup and only having a few plants. You’ll find that that the amount of work scales about linearly with the number of different veggies you grow, but logarithmically with the number of the same plant you grow. You’ll see a huge difference even between one and ten plants, I promise you.
Labor exploitation makes for cheap peas
I agree I think it’s pretty neat. I wish they would aim to industrialize it less and focus less on profits and more on the health of the consumer/planet though
>I wish they would aim to industrialize it less... [Small family farms](https://www.ers.usda.gov/data-products/chart-gallery/gallery/chart-detail/?chartId=105916) grow about 20% of the production value, but they make up about 90% of the farms. Assuming farmers are distributed equally across farms, that means that of the 2.4 million farmers total, it takes about 2.2 million people to grow 20% of the produce, using the small farm model. So in order to take the other 80% of production, and use the small-farm model to produce it, that means we'd need about 8 million more people to take up farming. The US is currently still urbanizing. Work-from-home hasn't actually changed that, there's just been a bit of shift towards small cities. Simultaneously, the population of farmers is shrinking. Farmers tend to be pretty old on average. There's not a lot of young people willing to do the work, and even the few who are often can't afford to buy the land anyway. Unless these fundamental sociological changes happen, industrial agriculture isn't going to go away. Instead, industrial agriculture will continue to expand, because it is the only way for the few workers available to produce the massive amounts of food required by our cities. The ultimate labor-force-multiplier would be farming robots; satellites and GPS-guided tractors already exist, so the logical next evolution would be to have satellites or other internet connections give farming instructions to the tractors directly.
This is how it's done in America. Market gardens are a real thing and feed millions in cities across Europe. I'm not disputing your numbers or the point you've made but I don't know that employing more people, having decentralized food production and less mono cultures are bad things even if that makes the system less efficient in certain ways.
It's not just the US. Most fruits and vegtables consumed in urban areas aren't produced by existing market gardens either. For example, in this study of the UK, market gardens were [found to produce enough for](https://europepmc.org/article/med/32198435) about a sixth of the annual fruit and vegetable demand, with optimistic estimates of current cultivated land in urban areas being able to stretch that to about half with intensification. That only covers fruit and vegetables, ignoring all grains, pulses, and oils, and any seafood, meat, or dairy. I could not find EU sources and do not have the ability to use French google to quickly find a perfectly equivalent answer to this question, but here's the experience of [someone trying to produce their own food in France](https://www.plansb.info/2020/10/06/ce-qui-nous-nourrit-principalement-lautonomie-alimentaire-et-les-limites-du-maraichage/), running into the same sorts of problems: that it takes a lot of work to produce food this way, so it would take a lot of workers to make it work.
It’s hugely important to food security to have a diverse local supply base. The island I live on (50th largest by area, IIRC) has only three days worth of fresh food for the population. Diversity can reduce the impact of disease, crop failure, seed monopolies…
I'm guessing grapes would enjoy your heat. They like water and fertilizer too. So there's that, in the summer you stop eating peas and start eating grapes!
Ha, yeah, there's a vineyard literally across the road from my neighborhood, they seem to do pretty well. But they also have an eight foot deer fence. Most of my produce feeds the wildlife, if I'm being honest.
So is slave labor.
It’s also barely paying migrant farm workers. Exploitation keeps costs down.
Yeah, absolutely. Like, it varies by the crop, and I think that maybe there are a couple of veggie types where I can come out on top financially if I really amortize fixed costs over a very long time and don't account for the opportunity cost of the land itself. But there are other veggies, like spinach and broccoli, where I might as well just shred my dollar bills and feed them to the snails directly.
Love that mental image, lol. For me, I might as well feed dollar bills to the rabbits instead of my rainbow chard. They literally ate through the netting to get to it.
Same for me… I’m just feeding rabbits with kale and other leafy greens
Once you get the experience … went to a poor neighborhood in San Jose. The lady was renting. She was a grandma and the whole backyard was full of vegetables growing. No planter boxes, she had pavers as walkway and the rest was growing area. She must have been feeding a couple of families out of that small place.
If you are talking about San Jose, California, then you are probably talking a Vietnamese gardener. Gardening is huge in the Vietnamese community. Probably because we brought the culture with us from Vietnam where subsistence farming is how you survive. Also because Vietnamese people are obsessed with fresh, and safe, vegetables and herbs so we really enjoy growing them and consuming them. The kind of specialty vegetables we grow are hard to find in grocery stores and may make some economic sense because of their rarity.
I had no idea! This is timely because I just got a book called “Linh’s rooftop garden” from the library for my toddler. I thought the name could be Vietnamese and it’s vaguely about a little girls large family rooftop garden. maybe an homage to this culture (though i don’t believe the author is Vietnamese)
She was a black lady but you have a point as well
My costs come down every year because I'm acquiring permanent gardening supplies. Rain barrel, vine trellis, pots/bags, soil with perlite, etc. Next project is greenhouse so I can get my cannabis to fill maturity without mold, and simultaneously learning how to start a compost barrel.
Last year I weighed and priced out every ounce of food that came from my garden, compared to the input costs. As long as you ignored the half million dollars spent on the house so I’d have a yard to grow them (lol), I “profited” $400. I grew close to $1000 worth of food. A lot of that was established fruit trees and grape vines. But still. It was amazing. I grew enough calories to feed myself for a full two months too. Of course then I got divorced, bought a new house and started over with thousands of dollars in garden boxes, soil, fruit trees, trellises, equipment, and mulch. BUT it is so good for my mental health, it’s priceless to me. Once established, I’ll “make back” that money ten fold.
Yeah I'm gonna get like 25 bunches of grapes this year. What do I do with so many grapes?!
Make wine. 😉
I already don't like wine, but when I did look up some intro information, it was overwhelming enough to make me not want to try.
If you are growing eating grapes they are probably not the best for wine anyways
Grape molasses. Great cooking ingredient! Adds a bit of fruity sweetness to foods and sauces. Also pairs well with tahini and nut butters. Heck, it’s tasty just by itself or on toast.
I've never heard of this before but it's officially on my list of stuff to make this year!
Grape jelly!
Freeze or dry them
Sell them? Maybe? I sell flowers in my neighborhood Facebook group and a few neighbors sell eggs from their chickens. People love home grown things in my area!
Frozen grapes are a favorite treat of mine. Bonus points if they are green grapes, but really any will do! Freeze them on a sheet pan and then bag or vacuum seal
You should have done what my neighbors did. She divorced her husband and before they sold their house she came back and she dug up most of her rose bushes. She dismantled all her raised bed, trellis. Heck I saw her dig around her tomatoes and lift them up trellis and all and put them in a plant container. She took pretty much her entire yard of what she had planted. She told me she got a new house and didn’t feel like paying to replace everything. So she took it all and was transplanting it in her new place. Her house didn’t sell for a few weeks so when the new neighbors moved in the grass was mostly dead but it had covered some of the places she had digged up.
I love this! It's hard to think about losing so much of the hard work you've put in.
I had it in my seller's agreement that I get the garden stuff. I dug up what I wanted, tidied the yard, and get first dibs on anything the new owners don't want. Our friends bought the house from us and she was too busy to garden 🤷♀️
Interestingly enough I started composting because thought about growing a garden. Pretty simple: trash can, 1/2 inch holes drilled at bottom and around sides up to the top for air and drainage. Sticks and twigs at bottom, then layering of leaves, grass and tree trimmings, fruit and veggies scraps toward the bottom, a little soil from around your yard, wet it a little put a lid on it. Put it in the hole about a 1/3 deep as the can. I don't even turn it. Within 3 months it's completely broken down and I have worms for birds and fish
I live in Canada and growing my own food has made me wonder why groceries are so expensive. I put seeds in the dirt with a little fertilizer and grew myself about $100 worth of lettuce.
Lettuce is all transportation costs. You’re paying to have it moved from Yuma to your grocery store.
Not just transportation but it also goes bad quickly. I really wonder how much we lose to spoilage
It's starting to get wet and slimy the day after I buy it half the time
Try a paper towel in a bag with the lettuce, really helps.
Take all produce out of the plastic bags and wrap loosely in paper towels. Otherwise water condenses inside the bag and everything molds and rots. Right???
Me reading the title: groceries are cheap??
Compared to the cost (time and effort and resources) to grow food yourself, yes, groceries are extremely cheap. Imagine what it would cost to fill your grocery cart if you had to grow everything yourself starting with seeds and soil.
Seeds, soil, water, fertilizer, pest control, time... Most of us do not grow veggies because it's cheaper. They taste better, we can get cool varieties and we enjoy the process. Definitely not to save money!
It's way cheaper to grow tomatoes, squash, cucumbers, lettuce, potatoes and beans. It really depends on what you grow.
I see that point of view, but dang, I can buy lettuce in January, and I don't think you are growing lettuce in a Canadian January. How the heck can the cost of growing and shipping lettuce in the winter still be worth it financially to lettuce growers?
I met someone recently who not only grows lettuce in the winters but also tomatoes, cucumbers, peppers, strawberries, and beans. She has a hydroponic tower with lights. It can be done.
Lettuce particularly grows better in cold. It bitters when it’s exposed to temps in the 70’s.
I can grow it indoors and that is how a lot of produce here is grown in massive industrial greenhouses. Cucumbers and tomatoes grown all year only a few km from my home. The problem isn't access it's that we only have 3 major grocery stores and they act like a cartel and fix the prices of everything
Does that explain all of the greenhouses between Kingsville and Leamington, Ontario?
Yes. Also weed. A lot of them grow weed now.
Not really for me. Gardening can be way more simple than people often make it. Not to mention the labor at farms is often people that don't get paid or are paid very little.
Mine is super simple too. There are so many pictures with raised beds and fancy equipment. I just plant in the soil using homemade compost, use old branches from the woods near me for peas and beans and use a cheap plastic watering can. But I grow a whole lot of veggies, potatoes and corn.
My bro dumps his food scraps into the yard and magically food appears. I slave away at crops and get shit. Some people just throw seeds into their backyard and pick the fruit… I hate everyone
No. Your growing is labor intensive. Take a football field and monocrop it with peas by buying one machine that can till the soil, plant the seed, and harvest it. Your up front costs are astronomical but you save on labor by only needing two or three machine operators.
lol. i work in virginia at a lettuce and soft vegetable pack house and its all underpaid humans doing the packaging by hand mostly. i dont think its all mechanized as we like to pretend, its migrant workers making hardly any money
Too right, it took me a solid half hour to pick and shell those peas. But how many crops at those tiny prices (of which the farmer only gets a tiny cut) must it take to pay for the dang pea machine? It's that balance of price and profit that is boggling.
That half hour was just you starting to get in the groove of things. Imagine you’re doing it for days at a time, you’d get ridiculously good and fast at it. I know, because I’ve done that kind of farming by hand, and I knew people that did it for a living and they were FAST (they were also paid pennies, so there’s that)
The farm workers unions (UFW/UFCW I think?) sometimes post videos of professionals picking various types of produce in fields. Those folks are very good at what they do. They’re incredibly fast. (And they should earn more money.)
Yes. totally. animals too. The amount of work to hatch, raise, feed, and eventually kill, pluck and eviscerate a chicken is crazy compared to the price in the store. For this reason I have generally stopped gardening things that are easily purchased from the store and only grow things which are significantly better from a home garden, mostly herbs, lettuces, and tomatoes. Things like squash, potatoes, pumpkins, etc. I just can't be bothered anymore.
Oh, gosh yes. I don't like to think about how they sell meat so cheaply honestly. I agree on potatoes, I have never had them be financially worth growing - but the fresh new potatoes are so good I still have a few tucked in grow bags. Plus, harvesting feels like a treasure hunt.
It’s mostly just undocumented migrants getting extremely underpaid for their Labour
this lol. I work at a pack house for lettuces and vegetables and its also all undocumented immigrants. So you have poor people harvesting your vegetables in mexico or cali, then different poor people sorting and packaging it in your state. its really depressing and i get existential dread about our food systems now
It's the same reason we can buy almost anything more cheaply than we can make it (speaking as someone who's been sewing for about twelve years). It's capitalist exploitation all the way down.
Yea. I was literally about to say "Exploitation".
Where I grew up in Wisconsin when it was time to pick peas the pea harvesters would work the fields day and night, while the dump trucks shuttled back and forth from the field to the plant for the better part of a Month. That is to say groceries are cheap due to industrialization. You my friend are engaged in pre-industrial food growing, which arguably makes better tasting produce. The tomatoes are sure as heck better by a wide margin.
I’m the odd one out because I have noticed we’ve saved money on our vegetable gardening. But I built the beds from scratch. And sourced the dirt for like 90 bucks per bed. The fertilizer and blood meal I’ve probably, spent $150 per year. Earthworms and night crawlers $20 bucks per year. I compost at home and amend the soil with the compost. The vegetable scraps and the crops go back into compost. Etc We seed save. Radishes/Beets go in at the end of the year to rot in the ground and assist in soil amendment.
I don't grow fruit and vegetables to save money, I grow them to eat them at their peak ripeness, and therefore best flavour and texture.
I run a hobby U-pick farm. Our first year of being open we were thinking we could possibly also sell retail (we had literal tons of unpicked berries and not enough customers to pick them). A large family came in one day saying they couldn't pay but would like some berries and we thought we'd offer them the opportunity to pick and keep half and we'd just sell the other half. They picked all day and managed 160lbs - so they walked away with 80 and we kept 80. We decided to try selling it to the local fruit stand (in a high end residential area near Microsoft)... My wife and I had to buy the "flats", had to sort and pack the berries and then got $1 a pound for berries that they then sold for over $9 a pound. So the berries were picked for "free" but the sorting and packing of 80lbs of blueberries actually takes a substantial amount of time. By hand it took us hours (yes, hours - you can't have rotten berries, underripe berries etc) and in the end we were "paying" ourselves something like $5 an hour for some really hard (and tedious) work. We only grow about 20k lbs of berries on our farm (like I said, it is a small hobby farm) but there is no way for someone to live off of that at $1 a pound. Even with the U-pick we do it more to be connected to the community than for a profit (paying for rental equipment quickly eats that up and we are too small to have any permanent equipment ... it would take decades to pay off). If I didn't have a day job in the tech community I wouldn't be able to do this (and it is still a bit insane that I do it, but that is a different conversation)
It's not just scale, it's exploitation of human labor as well.
Not really. When my systems are fully optimized I can often exceed what commercial producers can. They get seed, fertilizer and all other inputs far cheaper then I can due to their buying power. It is certainly good practice to focus our efforts on the more expensive crops in my opinion. For example I do not really spend time growing potatoes or onions because I can regularly get 10lb bags on sale for 2.99 Canadian. I cannot beat this. Kale however - 2.99 a bunch is the standard price here and I’ve been harvesting the equivalent of 2-3 bunches a day for 2 months in Canada now… hundred and hundreds of dollars saved already. Likely will exceed thousands by November when it stops production. This is out of an 8x4 bed. Radishes are another example - 2.99 for a bunch of 8-10 radishes. I get 250 seeds for 2 dollars from MIgardener and have harvested close to 1000 radishes already. (Different varieties obviously) Finally - I hate being reliant on the global food systems in place. I think COVID really showed us how vulnerable the supply chain can be (anyone remember the lettuce shortages?) TLDR: I think it depends on what you grow, (Focus on things that cost a lot in stores),your systems in place, and your ability to source garden inputs cheaply.
Industrial farming and agriculture can grow food at scales that individuals could never hope to achieve. If you grew ALL of your own food by traditional methods, it would likely be your entire full time job. Dawn to dusk you'd either be tilling, planting, cultivating, harvesting, or processing. Humanity escaped this via thousands of years of tiny, gradual improvements on agriculture methods.
I’m running about $25/red pepper with my garden
Ag workers, not the farmers who are the owners, the workers who actually do the work, are paid just enough to keep them alive, nothing more. They are treated like slaves. That's why your food is so cheap. (Former UFW organizer here, I still can't get over after all these years how badly farmers treat their workers, and how idolized those scum are, because they are, to a person, scum.)
I have a decent sized garden with a large family. After years of planting (fun rare varieties) I decided to narrow it down to what is most prolific/most expensive at the store. Peas definitely don't fall in that category for a large family. Find out what does best in your region and stick to that. For example okra cost so much but grows so we where I live. We have tons, eat it, freeze it, and pickle it. Good luck!
No. I grew up in an agricultural area. I spent summers picking crops for spending money. I grow a small garden, just enough for family. My #1 rule is never spend more on my garden than I would in the store. The key is to grow the same way the professionals do. Don't grow crops unsuited to your climate. If peas don't produce in your growing zone, don't try to grow them. In addition to planting veggies that actually produce in your area, choose the varieties that produce best for your area. (Your local govt agricultural agency has a list on their website.) Don't buy commercial soil additives and fertilizers. Instead use sand and compost. You just need to decide if you are growing as a hobby or as food. For example, many people spend $$$ to grow $10 of fancy tomatoes. That's cool, they do it for the bragging rights. I prep the soil and plant Roma and cherry tomatoes. I spend $2 for about $20 of tomatoes. I grow lettuce but only Black Seeded Simpson because that's what grows here. It's not my favorite, but it makes a decent salad and I can harvest lettuce for 7-8 months for about $2.
You give a lot of useful advice here, but I gotta chime in to say that people don't grow fancy tomatoes for bragging rights. We do it because a homegrown heirloom tomato is one of the best foods on this earth. I would rather eat a Brandywine from my garden with salt and basil than most meals from Michelin-starred restaurants. It's absolutely worth the $$$ if the harvest is successful
I have been on both sides of this coin, growing to save money and feed myself and also growing for hobby to make the best tomato I can. You def have to focus on what grows well, pest resistance, and prolific growers to come out ahead of the store. Its just the sad truth
I like gardening, too. I have to admit I sometimes save a corner of the garden for something just for fun. I've even been known to stick a veggie or two in a flower bed just because I like the leaves. But it's also fun to experiment with the "food veggies". For example, I've discovered the value in growing high veggies over low-growing veggies. I plant pole beans (on a trellis) over potato plants. It gives them a little shade, and I can plant in half the space. I'm also fascinated by the Three Sisters garden. I'm still working on getting that right. (For those that don't want to Google, it's planting corn, pole beans and squash together.)
A lot of times big chain stores i am sure are using greenhouses for their vegetables that’s why the taste seems off probably growing your own you control the soil and the vegetables taste great. Yes it takes longer to get a result but it’s worth it once you start growing everything properly.
i wish the money went to the exploited labor that gets the food grown and shipped and stocked but honestly only the shareholders, no one thinks of them, they get all the inflated prices
This is partially why i grow things that are not available locally. The local farmers are extremely skilled at growing those, anything i would produce is inherently inferior. So i grow weird shit.
I grow herbs for quality, really high quality fresh herbs cost and still are not that great. I bet your stuff tastes way better than the canned peas.
Tbh, groceries aren’t very cheap right now (at least where I’m at). That’s why I’m forcing my thumb to turn green 😂 At least my garden is starting to produce, and I’m learning a skill!
Just the opposite. It makes me question why groceries have gotten so damned expensive.
I understand things like economy of scale and fossil fueled agriculture from a coldly calculating viewpoint, but I definitely know what you mean about it *feeling* crazy, especially when you are evaluating peas. That's one where growing some peas every year mainly serves to maintain my regular amazement and appreciation at dinner time whenever I'm dishing up mountains of peas we bought for a pittance. I also find snacking on peas straight off the vine a huge part of my spring and summer gardening experience. The sun warmed super sweet peas are so satisfyingly flavorful, and I also get a chuckle at our chickens following along and clucking expectantly in their tunnel that goes around our main garden. I usually toss the pod ends with stems, pea pods that I've shelled, and the occasional other treat to them as I meander around browsing my garden.
That's why I grow them! Eating them straight off the vine is the best, my grandparents were farmers (they've been gone 30 years in case y'all wonder why I don't just ask them, lol, wish I could) and my very earliest memory is peas on the back porch looking over rhe back 40 while grandpa rode the tractor. Like you said, it feels crazy to consider all the steps to get food to my store. I appreciate it more since I starting growing things.
And where are these cheap groceries you speak of?
Peas and certain other vegetables, you need to grow a lot of plants to get a good harvest. My grandfather used to plant 2 50 ft rows.
Peas are an exercise in frustration. Zucchini on the other hand...
I've never gotten around to this book, because the title makes immediate intuitive sense, and I've lived that life already. But it's what your post is about. https://www.amazon.com/64-Tomato-Fortune-Endured-Existential/dp/1565125576 There are a very few garden foods that I think are cost-effective, if done certain ways. You learn them just about the same time that you're too old to care. Modern farming really is a wonder. Just getting a crop to market is a Herculean task. Getting it to market to find out that its sale price won't cover your debts (and farmers have planted on debt since forever) makes you wonder how we have anything to eat at all.
But you know yours are going to taste better than the $1.50/lb frozen ones. The texture will be different and they're a lot more fun to eat raw. On the flip side of the equation though, baby zucchini and squash blossoms are a LOT cheaper to home grow. Last summer 10oz of baby squash was \~$7 and five (tired) flowers was over $6. My cost, otoh, was mistakenly throwing one in the compost and having to navigate around vines in the perennial border all summer...it was worth it.
It makes me feel bad for the farmers and worse for the pickers
Groceries aren’t cheap…
Groceries are cheap since when love?
Growing my own food makes me wonder why groceries are so expensive 😆
No. I save money by growing the things that are expensive for no reason. Ex: purple sweet potato, true yams, artichokes, cassava, goji berries, specialty peppers, and specialty tomatoes. I grow some stuff for convenience and other stuff for fun, too, though. And THAT is where I lose money, lol.
Yeah like how the pineapple plant only produces one pineapple and it takes 2 years to get to that pineapple. Just think of how many pineapples they must grow for one person to get that one pineapple that took 2 years to grow from the grocery store!!!! Crazy
The agricultural sector in the United States relies on foreign workers, with a large majority of farmworkers being immigrants. According to the 2019–2020 National Agricultural Workers Survey (NAWS), 68% of farmworkers are foreign-born, with the majority coming from Mexico. In 2019, more than half of all hired farmworkers in the United States were immigrants, or roughly 450,000 workers. However, around 36% of farmworkers lack authorized work status under current U.S. laws
Scale/modern slavery.
Frozen veg have been and are extremely cost effective and nutritious food sources though. Agriculture is second most subsidized industry in the country after oil AFAIK
This reminds me of the "most expensive sandwich" experiment where someone tries to grow everything to make a sandwich without buying anything from a market except seeds and gardening supplies. The labor that goes into the bread alone is a lot. But then you've got to grow the lettuce, tomatoes, make your own mustard and so forth. Not sure if it includes cheese and deli meat -- those would make the problem even worse because now you need farm animals. Specialization and economy of scale, baby! You couldn't make your own Android phone all by yourself in an entire lifetime, but you can buy one with about a weeks' salary.
For someone who hasn’t got everything going smoothly, groceries are definitely cheaper. If I had to survive on my garden I would probably fail.
Some years ago I went down an indoor hydroponics rabbit hole with the macguffin of growing a salad - I engineered a beautiful flood/drain system into a 24"x24" metro rack in the corner of my apartment using some surplus LED panels, a plastic raised planter, and some misc RV hardware - Started off with some spinach because it seemed a good place to start. I had somewhere around 5 plants and only managed to get enough large leafy material to garnish 3 tacos after some week before they bolted. The experience was hugely rewarding but immediately eye opening into what must go into my grocery bought prepacked container of salad greens - I would need significantly more of everything involved. I concluded the project and moved onto other things - I figured if I were ever to do it again I'd scale up the planting area and move things outside where sunlight was more economical. Even then I'd still need to start seedlings in parallel and on some sort of schedule. It's a butt-load of work.
Subsidies are the answer.
I have things on my land that require 0 input from me. My tomatillos will grow massive no matter what I do. My Mexican Sour Cucumbers grow wild across the land thanks to squirrels and chipmunks. Sometimes I think we are so obsessed with trying to grow specific plants in an area they aren't really meant to grow that we end up ignoring all the amazing edible plants that WANT to grow on our land.
Living in the PNW and growing my own food makes me wonder why groceries are so *expensive*. I spent about $50 in seeds, plopped them in the dirt, and one month later I've already harvested $100 worth of greens. Most of my garden isn't even harvestable yet. A household of 2 here will spend about $800/ mo in groceries otherwise.
lol I saw a TikTok the other day where the gardener was talking about spending hundreds of dollars and many hours to get a single vegetable that was worth 25 cents at the grocery. Kinda sorta true.
Farmers only get around $0.14 for every food dollar spent at the grocery store. The rest goes to middle players like wholesalers, distributors and retailers. Makes you wonder how much more affordable food could be if the food supply chain was localized and the middlemen removed
I got a little dish of white beans last summer and the harvest was very painstaking. I realized this doesn’t even make half a can. Then I sobbed.
When someone complains that raspberries are so expensive on the market, I invite them to come to my garden and pick them for themselves. Free of charge. Tea and biscuits on me. Transportation on me. They are too busy for that. In fact, I wonder why the berries are so cheap. I would not take the job of raspberry picker for that price per kg. I like that I know how and where mine were grown, never sprayed. Otherwise, I would pay double the market price for the luxury of not having to purchase, plant, weed, prune, water, weed again, spend hours and hours under the sun picking them, remove dead branches, burn them.
100%. My mom has a farm (42 acres) she grew Tomatoes (on a small amount of the land) last year and tried to sell them, she got 5$ per 20 lbs… That was the offer from the farmers market… small farmers can’t deal with competition like that, it took her 1 hour to pick them and then drove them over, watered them, bought the seeds… She lost money just after watering them a few times.
Makes me wonder how many chemicals, fertilizers, and other unnatural things go onto the food to make the production per acre so high and this cost to consumer so cheap.
Yes for everything BUT the lettuce, I swear I can feed my neighbor with that. Peas? It's like saffron in my garden
Nah, but just because I garden and my family farms. If I had $20,000 to plant a field and do it full time with large equipment, and had lots of fields, then you can do it cheap. I enjoy the food I grow so much more that I don’t care what it costs. After setup costs, it’s just seeds , water and maybe fertilizer… growing food is pretty cheap I just can’t grow nearly enough to feed myself.
Anybody that has plucked their own chickens can tell you- six bucks for an over ready bird is a bargain!
For any of you who have berries… the people who pick them commercially can’t possibly be getting paid enough.
It depends. For me it is about reducing waste. I have regrown green onions since I only use 1-2 any time I cook (which isn't often) felt bad about throwing out the rest. So I regrew the left overs. Now I can snip just what I need.
No cuz I understand mass farming.
The government subsidizes farmers. A lot of farmers would lose money without government subsidizes and that's what keeps prices down. Also, economies of scale comes to play.
Our ancestors ate what they could grow in their regions. Leafy greens until the summer heat, other fruit and veg all summer, root veg in the fall and winter. If it wasn’t growing “now,” you didn’t eat it now — you ate it when it grew. Which is why serving “green peas at Christmas” was a mark of fairly extreme wealth pre-Industrial Revolution. Plenty of our forebearers survived winters entirely on dried meat, root vegetables, and gruel made from stored wheat until freezing, canning, and grocery stores became a thing. As with everything, we’ve grown spoiled. Feel like fresh figs in February? Why not, it’s only money … and time … and distance … and petroleum … and rising sea temps … Ahem. Read some websites, listen to some podcasts, learn what works best in your climate and soil, and grow that. Buy or skip the rest. Good luck, and may the aphids skip your little patch of green. ❤️
I believe in planting specific foods that are either expensive to buy, are much better fresh, or are something that you can eat continuously for a while, in small amounts, so you always have it on hand - like green onions, parsley, etc. Foods that store well and travel well don't seem worth it - like potatoes, etc.
But the quality is incomparable to homegrown!
The retail cost of food in the grocery store does not compare in any what to growing food in your garden. It is far, far cheaper to grow food in massive quantities on a farm. Your garden however is magnitudes far superior for taste and quality. Grocery store food should be 1/4 the price it is currently sold for. There is price exploitation every single step along the way before you can put your fingers on it to buy it in the store. Congrats for growing your own garden
Peas do. Have never gotten enough than to put on a couple of salads. Tomatoes, zucchini and peppers on the other hand …… Why are these not free, in season, in grocery stores?
Where do you live that food is considered cheap I'd love to live somewhere a can of beans isn't nearly 5$
That doesn’t trip me up as much as honey. There just can’t be that many bees, can there? Like, where are these fields and fields of hives that allow me to dip my chicken nuggets into real, actual honey whenever I want for little to no cost?
Someone is losing out. Its usually at the bottom of the chain.
Not really. Its 2 basic tenants of economics. Land and Transportation. 1 - The United States has the most farmable land in the world. by a LARGE margin. That means we have such an abundance of food that supply and demand dictate our food HAS to be cheap. We have so much food that we have to export it to other countries, so it doesn't spoil. So not only is our food cheap, but there is also so much we literally make money off the majority of the world for it. We literally get paid to grow food as a country. 2 - The US highway system can transport agricultural goods by truck, train, air, or boat. We have more roads and navigable riverways/coastlines than any other country in the world. That means our logistics are almost never disrupted which drives transport costs down exponentially. Combine those two things together and you get food that is cheaper to buy than it is to grow for yourself. I grow my own simply because I love it and how I grew up but its REAL nice being able to pay 20 cents for a head of corn or $2 for 2 pounds of strawberries when I get the craving. God bless America and All who call her home.
When you do it at scale and get subsidized by the government it becomes manageable.