I think this is what it has to eventually be. We all have a garden in our garage. We save tons on transportation costs throughout the chain. It has to be near zero work. People used to all have gardens in their backyard but stopped when they could afford the cheap produce at the store.
The missing context is that people did that out of necessity. Hundred years ago 56% of Americans were rather poor. Most non-city people had outhouses in the 1940s. America’s rise to wealth has been long and hard fought. Wealth didn’t just land into our laps.
The average American family had an annual income of ~$3000 (in today’s dollars), So, yeah, poor.
The average US family had an annual income of $956 in 1940. That is $17,268.43 in todays dollars, far more than $3k. And that was almost entirely earned by a single individual rather than both adults in the household working like now. Also, someone earning that little paid no income tax. The average house price in 1940 was $2938, which is $53k in today's money. Now the average family income is $70k, but that's mostly two people's income, they only get to keep $60k because of income tax, and houses are $200k. So we earn about twice as much, but houses cost about 4 times as much. It isn't nearly as clear cut a win for modern life as you make it out to be.
It’s my fault. Hundred years ago refers to previous turn of century, circa 1900, then went to 1940 about indoor plumbing for toilets. We were poor, not much above Mexican or Finnish standards (better, but hardly by much). It was anascrnt industrislization as well as WWi and WWii that catapulted us into a powerhouse.
That doesn't actually change much. Average income in 1900 was $438, which is $13,186.15 in 2018 dollars. And 1900 was a low point historically more so than now is a high point. The worst of the gilded age exploitation was happening then, causing huge poverty.
> I think this is what it has to eventually be. We all have a garden in our garage.
No you won't, at least not with greens. Did you even try to do the math for the required amount of food a single person needs per-year ? Even if you go with rabbits, which are easy to raise, you can only self produce a small amount of meat per year, maybe ~150lb once you get to "scale".
It's almost certainly less efficient when you account for spoilage (namely all of the crazy seasonal work you need to do every year to keep all of your surplus from spoiling so you can eat it out of season). The market is pretty efficient, it turns out.
Isn't it partially true though ? at first true maybe but given some time they start a margin chase ending up in picking plants that will look good 1 month later on shelves even though they're not the best nutrition wise.
>The reason why food is grown by large industrial farming companies is because they can grow it ~100 times cheaper than you could.
No, it is because people don't want to grow food. My tomatoes cost me 2 minutes of time. I don't know how much you want to value my time at, but lets say I am pretty awesome and deserve $100/hour. That's $3.33 cents for all the tomatoes I can eat. Where are the industrial farming companies producing tomatoes for 3.3 cents per 100 pounds?
>If everyone had to grow their own food, then everyone would starve to death.
If that were true, we wouldn't exist. People did grow their own food for thousands of years. If everyone had to grow their own food, we'd be fine. All mechanization did was free up people from agricultural labor to do other jobs, humans predate tractors.
>The idea of locally grown food in everyone's backyard is a fairy tale that just sounds nice, but would actually be horrible.
It is a reality for lots of people, and we're pretty happy about it.
> If that were true, we wouldn't exist. People did grow their own food for thousands of years. If everyone had to grow their own food, we'd be fine. All mechanization did was free up people from agricultural labor to do other jobs, humans predate tractors.
This works when everyone owns many acres of land per person, and is spending their entire life working the fields, doing hard labor, and doing very little else with their life yes. We don't live in that world anymore, though.
I suspect there isn't even enough physical land on the earth to support this inefficient method of farming.
We have significant evidence of how this worked out for people. That world that you are describing, where everyone spent their entire life just trying to barely feed themselves, was a horrible place, for everyone.
This period of time was called "the history of the world before the industrial era". And lots and lots of people died. So no, they were not fine.
> It is a reality for lots of people, and we're pretty happy about it.
By "a lot" do you mean a very small percentage of the total population?
> My tomatoes cost me 2 minutes of time.
What you do with your tiny backyard garden is irrelevant. It is mathmatically impossible for you to be feeding yourself entirely on that, unless you have multiple acres of land, which I doubt is what you are describing. Your anecdote does not overrule physics.
Where is the energy for your garage garden coming from? Plants need a lot of light. Most buildings do not have nearly intense enough light (house plants are low light plants that grow slow so they do fine, but if you want to grow food you generally want a plant that needs a lot more light)
We save tons on transportation costs, but lose many orders of magnitude more on redundant labor and economies of scale (one tractor working in a big field is a lot more economical than 1200 humans working in 1200 gardens). Maybe technological advancements will change all of that--perhaps we could have fully robotic farms, but even then I would expect one big factory farm with a handful of big, expensive robots to outperform many gardens each with a small robot.
>(one tractor working in a big field is a lot more economical than 1200 humans working in 1200 gardens).
Sure. But 1200 humans working in 1200 gardens is also a lot more economical than 1200 humans sitting at home playing Fortnite all day because there are no jobs.
The idea of employment guarantees as welfare policy has been getting traction, and programs like this where raw output isn't the main goal would be good candidates.
> is also a lot more economical than 1200 humans sitting at home playing Fortnite all day because there are no jobs
No it is not. I personally care about people being able to do what they want with their free time.
The situation you describe is only "efficient" if you value everyone's free time and happiness at 0. I care about people's happiness, on the other hand.
The main goal of society should be to provide people with things that they want, and that includes leisure time.
On the contrary, I think it would be a great benefit to people if they could be more self reliant / not as dependent on state and corporations to survive. I prefer self reliance to more leisure time.
You might prefer that. But other people don't. If they did care about that, then they wouldnt be using that leisure time, they would be becoming more self reliant.
I personally want people to have a choice of what to do with their time, and not have values forced on them.
>No it is not. I personally care about people being able to do what they want with their free time.
Just tranq them all with a guaranteed supply of opiates then. Problem solved.
People's needs and wants are socially conditioned. It's not like their "wants" just sprang out of thin air. They were created by the culture and social expectations around them. And many of those social expectations make people feel obligated to feel useful.
That means they need to be provided with avenues where they can feel useful instead of doping themselves with addictions to fill the sense of purposeless anomie that they fall into when alienated from public life. Make work programs, like urban forestry or gardening, are good ways to do this as they beautify the spaces where we live and are unlikely to be done adequately without some societal coordination.
Basically efficiency isn't the chief concern. If you really have a bunch of people with nothing better to do with their time (e.g. Fortnite), then we don't really need to care about allocating labor as efficiently as possible to maximize yield.
We can use labor in a very inefficient (where yield is concerned) way if we think it will confer ecological, aesthetic, or sociological side-benefits, as would having lots of private gardens.
Fortnite is just an example of something people fall into doing when they don't have any other productive opportunities available to them.
I'm not sure whether you're taking issue with leisure time generally or the tendency for people to participate in leisure that you believe is inefficient, but both are orthogonal to the question of which type of agricultural system is more efficient.
In particular, if your solution is simply "spend less time on [your current] leisure activities!", it can be applied to either aggricultural system. In the case of specialized agriculture, it simply means spending more time on the individual's specialization or really anything with a greater opportunity value than growing one's own food (if your goal is to maximize earnings, it's tough to do worse than spending an hour per day growing your own food to save ~$5).
Somehow it doesn't seem likely to be less efficient when my food grows a few feet away from my dinner table. How much extra labor is involved in logistics (field to silo to warehouse to grocery to home)?
That said I think it's rather naive to assume that everyone in the world has a garage or other indoor space to spare, the resources to climate control it, etc. The world's hungry don't live in single family homes in California.
If it were cheaper, the market would very likely have sussed that out by now (unless you're proposing some recent game-changing technological advancement). In all likelihood, the cost of all of that extra labor is well under $100/week/family, and the time cost alone of managing a greenhouse (maintenance and repairs, cultivating the crops, preserving the food, managing the whole operation, etc) exceed that amount pretty handily (for most families).
