John Robb at Global Guerrillas has this piece on subsistence agriculture. Be sure and read all the links and comments.
Friday, 06 February 2009
RC JOURNAL: Money Garden?
Burpee is selling a new frugal package called the Money Garden. Sales pitch: $10 in selected seeds can "potentially" yield $650 in produce.
"Victory gardens" are smart way to hedge against short term system failure and as a cost cutting measure. However, a longer term solution for decentralized agriculture needs to be much, much more productive than traditional gardening. Subscription plots/farming, low cost sensor networks (water, light, PH, etc.), high intensity plot plans, accelerated local composting systems, lawn garden entrepreneurs, tinkering networks, etc. will be needed to flesh out an innovative ecosystem that will drive the productivity curve. Given these innovations, its possible to see a situation were 80-90% of food consumption is locally derived and sold at a small fraction of current costs and at a much higher level of quality/freshness.
Resilience needs to be productive/affordable to become dominant.
Posted by John Robb on Friday, 06 February 2009 at 09:02 AM | Permali
4 comments:
We're doing it right now, not with gardens (a hard place here for gardening) but with animals. My wife's Jersey cow produces two gallons of milk per day. Got a couple of Jersey calves that might do better than her, in time. Kid's place next door has a dozen hens and a Daschund to keep them in line on their free roaming status. Their eggs are not like what you buy in the store. Kids are making cheese from the cow's milk, it is tasty. Drinking that milk, eating the cheese, and using the butter help provide backbone to our little local ecomomy.
Selling the produce helps to establish local connections. This is helpful, since we are new here, the last decade was spent on the other side of the county. Very important, those local connections.
I've heard talk about the idea of selling shares in a producing milk cow. Seems as if that concept might be occurring in some places. You don't sell milk, but market shares in a cow and give the milk away for free. This seems to be happening in Kalifornia. Anybody that knows about the blowback from this, I'd like to know.
can't do anything too well if you don't have food. therefor a survival value is a small garden plot to feed youself after the supermarkets gone to hell. anybody whom can sniff at this is a robot! from the fringe, Wildflower 09
Consider aquaponics. Perch apparently do well, and they're good eatin.' There's a magazine and website out of Australia that has a wealth of information, and start-up costs look pretty manageable.
Defcon1 here:
Have enough seeds for at least 3 years, will be building a chicken house and greenhouse this spring, getting a hand pump for my secondary well, diesel and gasoline storage tanks, and the old, unused silo will soon have an elevated platform. If we have time, will be building a fruit cellar, too.
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