With public focus on global warming being at an all-time high, experiments in sustainable backyard agriculture like this one are gaining interest and momentum. Gardeners want more control over what they eat and how it’s grown and produced. Take a look…
I must admit, I’m always a little critical when I see experiments of his type mainly because the proponents always have more land than the average household to farm. Sure, any gardener can implement some of the strategies, but to provide enough food for the whole family is, in most cases, unlikely.
What I’d really like to see, and I would guess it occurs already in allotment gardens, is the growing of one or two certain crops and then sharing them with other gardeners so that some of your needs are met. Still, these methods won’t produce all your needs so the question is, how does sustainable agriculture work to eke out broad-acre farming?
Any ideas?
Great ideal. But I don’t think in today’s society it will work very well. I grew up on a farm in the middle of the United States. I am 43 now so this has been a few years ago. There were my parents and 5 kids. Both of my parents worked on the farm. My mother took care of the garden, chickens and us kids. We were pretty much what this video would call sustainable. We had a acre or more garden. We grew everything we ate. During the summer we would can and freeze the extra to be eaten during the winter. The only things my mother bought from the store was sugar, flour and yeast for making bread. We raised our own cattle, hog and chickens that we slaughtered and processed ourselves. My father had said that if we didn’t have the garden we wouldn’t have been able to make it a couple of the years 55+ years they have lived on the farm.
I could keep going on about the life we had but my point is that one person would need to stay home with the kids to tend to the garden, can or freeze the extra food from the garden. That doesn’t include the animals. It won’t work for every family to do this. Most people even if they had the space would not want to work that hard to get their produce. If they did there might be less obese people in the U.S.
I don’t know what the answer is or who has it. But for people to do this there would have to be a horrific incident that would set us back at least 75 years or more for this to take effect. A lot more could be said on this subject.