yield factoids

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What could be possible, and what most of the "little teeny farm" advocates are really talking about, is producing fresh fruits and vegetables. They aren't really talking about producing grains, beans, meats (usually), dairy or oils, which can amount to 80% or more of the typical diet. Can you produce enough lettuce, tomatoes and zucchini in your 3000sf hobby garden to give/sell some of it to your friends and neighbors during the summer and harvest season? With a bit of basil and thyme? Sure, and why not? If you already have a suburban backyard, you might as well grow zucchini or blueberries instead of grass. This is fun. That's what makes backyard gardening a fun hobby. But, there's a difference between having some fresh zucchini in August, and feeding a family for an entire year.

One reason I call this a "hobby" is that it doesn't make a good business. Let's say you want to grow lettuce in your suburban backyard hobby garden, and sell it to your neighbors. Great! Who wouldn't love local, fresh-grown lettuce instead of something from 3000 miles away? Let's say you sell lettuce for $2 a head. If you sold a thousand heads of lettuce, you would have gross revenue of $2000. Think about the labor and expense involved in growing and harvesting and selling (don't forget the selling) a thousand heads of lettuce, from your suburban backyard garden. You better love lettuce. For this, you get $2000 of revenue, per year, before covering your expenses. It probably works out to less than minimum wage. You would only do it "for fun." That's why I call it a hobby.

Some people are into raising chickens in their suburban backyard. I am familiar with this, because I used to live in a house in central Seattle where the next door neighbor raised about six chickens underneath his backyard deck. Also, my local egg lady raises chickens.

How many chickens? Well, how many chickens do you eat? How about one chicken per week for your family? That is not much meat -- especially if you have a real chicken, not a modern mutant chicken bloated by growth hormones. Obviously, you would have to raise 52 chickens per year to provide that much meat. Are you ready to raise 52 chickens in your suburban backyard? My local egg lady raises about 50 chickens for her personal use. (It's hard to sell meat, because it is highly regulated.) But, she lives on a former 19th century chicken farm. She still has the original commercial-size chicken houses. She would laugh if you called it a "backyard." She likes to live in the country so she can have acreage, not a backyard. She does have some extra eggs to sell. I ride there on my bike (singlespeed, naturally) and buy them for $3 per dozen. You can work out how many dozen you would have to sell to get $3,000 in gross revenue.

If you want to raise a half-dozen chickens in your suburban backyard, while your husband is off working at the telecommunications company or law firm or software developer, go right ahead. Kind of like Marie Antoinette and her peasant cottage. If it was good enough for the Queen of France -- and Michelle Obama -- then what are you waiting for? I am all for eccentric hobbies, as long as they aren't too smelly.

I buy about two dozen eggs a month, for a total of $6, and don't raise chickens in my backyard.

Unfortunately, the "sustainability" types are motivated almost entirely by symbolism. They think that with enough symbolic gestures -- six tomato plants, a Prius, organic cotton underwear and a solar oven -- they can "save the world." Let me tell you what: six tomato plants, a Prius, organic cotton underwear and a solar oven doesn't mean jack shit. Which doesn't mean that you can't enjoy it. But it is really no different -- in terms of resource and energy use -- than having none of that at all. If you live in 3500sf in Suburban Hell and commute 35 miles to work in your Prius, and have six tomato plants and resuable shopping bags ... so what. Living in an urban environment, like New York (but nicer), where you don't own a car, and ride trains, and have a small apartment instead of a 1/4-acre ersatz mini-farm -- now that has a real effect.

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Last note on the Prius: The Prius gets about 51 mpg in the city and 48 mpg on the highway. It costs $22,800 in the base model, and is rumored to be a money-loser at that price due to the expensive batteries and electric motors in the vehicle. It has a max horsepower of 134hp, and weighs 3,042 pounds. It seats four.

Batteries are going to be a much bigger problem than people think. The Tesla Roadster runs on 6,000 cellphone batteries. Do you have a cellphone? I do. How often do you have to replace the battery? I replace mine about once a year. Are you ready to replace an additional six thousand batteries per year? To fulfull your "sustainability" fantasies?

The Tata Nano has a 35 horsepower gasoline engine. It weighs 1,300 lbs, and seats four. It costs about $2,000, and is making a profit for Tata at that price. This is right in line with the original Volkswagen Beetle, which weighed about 1,600 lbs and had 28hp. The Nano gets 52mpg in the city and 61mpg on the highway.

The Prius has hundreds of pounds of expensive rare earth minerals and non-ferrous metals, like lithium, nickel, cobalt and copper. These require huge mining and smelting operations, like the bad guys in the movie Avatar. (I've spent much of the last six years researching mining companies like these, so I have an idea of how that metal is obtained. Although mining company execs genuinely try to make the process as harmless as possible, it is not a pretty thing.) The Nano is made almost completely of iron and aluminum, two of the most common minerals in the earth's crust.

No batteries required.

We would be better off riding trains than using cars. But, if you have to have a car, and you want an eco-friendly one, take a Nano instead of a Prius.

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Now that I've spent the last couple thousand words kicking sand in the face of the "sustainability" types and the "little teeny farm" fantasists, let me say a few words in their favor.

I think that a number of the recent group of let's-grow-tomatoes-in-the-backyard types are genuinely motivated by concerns/visions of economic collapse. They don't necessarily say this, or even think it, but it is inherent in their personal vision.

This is not entirely irrational. Indeed, given that Dmitry Orlov, for example, witnessed firsthand the period during the 1990s when urban Russian people sustained themselves with tiny neighborhood gardens, you might say it could be very relevant.

Let's think about this: What are the characteristics of a collapse period?

1) You have to deal with what you have at the time of collapse. You aren't going to be making any trains, or new buildings, or what have you -- just scavenging among the existing infrastructure.

2) Likewise, people generally aren't going to be moving here and there (unless things get so bad that they become refugees), but sticking with their existing house in their existing city, at least at first.

3) All kinds of transportation could become unavailable or unusable.

"Collapse" is actually quite common. If you look at all the major developed countries in the world during the 20th century -- Italy, Germany, Japan, Russia, the U.S. -- we see that most all of them had some period of economic collapse, in this case mostly due to World War II and also the post-Soviet Union period.

At least 500,000 -- possibly as many as eight million -- Germans died of starvation in the 1945-1949 period after World War II. We don't like to think about that much.

Crimes and Mercies: the Fate of German Civilians under Allied Occupation, 1944-1950

Let's say there was an "economic collapse." The exact details or causes hardly matter. The basic characteristics are that you no longer have a job, and you can no longer easily buy things in the stores that come from thousands of miles away. In this case, for simple survival purposes, you might have to try to grow some food somehow. In practice, you can often obtain grains in some fashion, because grains are easy to transport. We send bags of grain to starving people in Rwanda for example. However, we don't send them ripe tomatoes. So, the survival farmer might get their grain somehow (not too difficult if you are near the water where ships can dock), but they need to provide their own vegetables. (If they were really left to their own devices to produce all caloric intake, most urban residents would simply perish.)

It might be nice if a lot of people had at least a little experience with producing food.

These "collapse" periods don't last forever. About five or ten years, maybe. After that period, either there is some recovery of the previous arrangement, so you can use the old existing stuff, or you start creating a new arrangement, and thus you start building things. For example, if, after five or ten years, you had no expectation that automobiles would ever be available again, except for a couple local warlords driving around in their G-Wagons, then you would go about arranging your activities so that you didn't need an automobile. On a large scale, this could be a no-car Traditional City.

I suppose some people would claim that all such "new arrangements" would be impossible, for some reason like fossil fuels are not available or what have you. This is nonsense. The fact of the matter is, people have time and energy and problems to solve, so they solve them. Why do you think people built trains in the first place? Because they wanted to get from Point A to Point B overland, in a way that was less laborious than a horse-drawn wagon on a dirt road. And they did it with their bare hands, without fossil fuels (the early trains burned wood), because they had time and energy and problems to solve.

Existing structures would be used at first, but over time, you have to go to where you can make a living, as an agriculturalist perhaps or as some sort of urban craft/profession/service provider. So, you will go to that new place, and if existing structures are not appropriate, then you will make some new ones. Detroit, for example, is full of once-beautiful existing structures, but they have been abandoned because nobody can make a living in Detroit, so they have gone somewhere else. Even at a price of near-zero, nobody wants them. In the same way, many suburban houses may eventually be abandoned (especially if automobile transport becomes a rarity) for the simple reason that there is no longer any reason to live in a particular suburb.

What if, for example, you lived in San Francisco's East Bay, and for some reason gasoline became unavilable? At first, you would probably sit and wait with crossed fingers that gasoline becomes available again. Then, after time, maybe it becomes clear that gasoline will never be available again at a price that justifies the daily use of personal automobiles. Then what? Maybe the BART train is still running, because people still need to move, so they figure out a way to keep it running, because it is a heck of a lot easier to maintain one line of rail track than it is to maintain thousands of miles of paved road and hundreds of thousands of personal automobiles. Then, the areas that are within a couple miles of the BART station (and maybe on the water) become very desirable, and those areas that are accessible only by car become less desirable. Eventually, people abandon their houses in the distant suburbs and pile into the existing houses near the BART station, until there are fifteen people per house. This is rather uncomfortable, so they start building some new houses near the BART station. Thus the new arrangement emerges.

I think that many of these "little teeny farm" types are really talking about collapse. I, on the other hand, am talking about the arrangement that follows collapse. Of course, you don't have to have a collapse. You could just have a voluntary transition to a new arrangement.

Dmitry Orlov has some good points about a "voluntary transition to a new arrangement." This is common on a personal level. You don't like your job organizing the marketing of household soap products, so you get into the television business. Or, you don't like living in Chicago, so you move to Miami. Happens all the time.

However, this flexibility doesn't translate to the civilizational level. So many people and entities are enjoying and profiting from the existing arrangement, that often nobody can change the arrangement, even if the arrangement as a whole is disintegrating. We see this with the U.S. healthcare system, for example. Nobody thinks this is a good system. A move to the sort of single-payer system common in other developed countries would be a logical choice. (Not necessarily the best choice, but logical considering that there are many examples of acceptable results with this system.) However, it is very difficult to actually transition to that new arrangement, because of all the interests that profit from the existing arrangement. Instead, with the Obama healthcare bill, we have in some sense a futher intensification and entrenchement of the existing system. The same old thing, just more of it.

Thus, on the large scale, it is quite common that systems simply continue as they are until they collapse. Only after the collapse, when all the entrenched interests have gone extinct, are people free to establish a new arrangement.

On the other hand, it doesn't have to be this way. We replaced kerosene lamps with electric lights, without having a kerosene-lamp collapse.

Within the context of collapse, a lot of what the "little teeny farm" and "self-sufficiency" types say is quite relevant, so maybe they are serving a purpose here whose importance will become apparent later on.

Maybe Michelle Obama knows something?