Tuesday, June 11, 2013

Russians Proving That Small-Scale, Organic Gardening Can Feed the World





This is an excellent reminder that agricultural productivity is mostly a function of the boots on the ground. A machine can optimize productivity for large field crops with little human input, but the actual output per acre is a fraction of what a single human being can produce on that same acre. Industrial farming blinds us to this but it is also core to the reforming of the human life way.

Machines find it difficult to provide care to the most productive plants that often need ongoing local intervention. Something simple that all can understand. A cherry tree is highly productive. Yet it is vulnerable to a nasty black rot. It not treated by simple removal, it will seriously damage the tree over several years. The same holds true for damaged branches and the like. My point of course is that the tree has to be inspected often enough and immediately treated to maintain health. This is all very easy on a small plot but never could be easily mechanized, nor should it.

My point is that a human can optimize with some access to machinery, a modest plot of land, beyond which it becomes burdensome. In the same way he can optimize animal husbandry with a few animals and integrate it with the plot. Beyond that we are making trade offs that are less than optimal.

No wonder Putin is angry about bees and pesticides.

Russians Proving That Small-Scale, Organic Gardening Can Feed the World


When it's suggested that our food system be comprised of millions of small, organic gardens, there's almost always someone who says that it isn't realistic. And they'll quip something along the lines of, "There's no way you could feed the world's growing population with just gardens, let alone organically." Really? Has anybody told Russia this?

On a total of approximately 8 million hectares (20 million acres) of land, 16.5 million Russian families grow food in small-scale, organic gardens on their Dachas (a secondary home, often in the extra urban areas). Because growing your own food happens to be a long-lived tradition in Russia, even among the wealthy.

Based on the 1999 "Private Household Farming in Russia" Gosmkostat(State Committee for Statistics) statistics, these Dacha families produced:

  • 38% of Russia's total agricultural output
  • 41% of the livestock
  • 82% of the honey
  • 79% of the sold cattle
  • 65% of the sold sheep and goats
  • 59% of the milk
  • 31% of the sold poultry
  • 28% of the eggs
  • 91% of the potatoes
  • 76% of the vegetables
  • 79% of the fruits
If Russian families can manage such production in their region's very short growing season (approx. 110 days), imagine the output most parts of the world could manage by comparison. Unfortunately in just the US alone, lawns take up more than twice the amount of land Russia's gardens do (est. 40-45 million acres).

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