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we’ve got plenty of rich to eat
grains and pulses
What are pulses?
lentils and their friends
Good thing I have a couple of acquaintances that have small farms and produce, so if shit goes downhill, I know where to offer my labor
They’ll have plenty of friends and family that suddenly feel an urge to come over and lend them a hand once the real shit goes down
Most chemical fertilizer is synthesised from LNG.
The two biggest exporters are Russia (sanctioned) and Qatar (all plants shut down)
A lot of dreamers here who never actually tried to grow something. A lot of YouTube video knowledge but no practical experience.
Its damn difficult to grow your own food. I think buying canned goods and storing them is the best option for almost everyone instead of trying to grow your own.
I agree that people should definitely keep a good store of non-perishable foods in case of hard times, but you also should try to grow food as well. I don’t think anyone is trying to say it’ll be easy, like anything at first it is difficult. It’s definitely worth trying though, if you can and have the space. Like I said, don’t go all in as your only option, keep non-perishable foods on hand, like canned goods, or dried goods. If you’re able to grow your own food you get fresh fruits and veggies, and you won’t use up as many canned goods.
Haha, are you speaking from your own practical experience, in which you failed and decided to buy canned food instead?
It’s not easy, but it’s not impossible either. It depends on your circumstances.
And there’s an in between as well: grow some of your own food and buy canned foods as well. Or share a garden with people who know what they’re doing.
I planted horseradish into the ground, neglected it, and it grew anyway.
I grow a lot of stuff in a relatively small space. Sometimes I cave to give stuff away because it’s too much for me. Maybe living in a tropical region helps? or maybe because I grow mostly native stuff that needs near to zero care.
LOL yeah. Stuff actually grows in tropical regions! :p
I’m happy for you there. (Although I imagine pest control gets interesting haha)
Southwestern U.S desert? Yeah, another story. Hydroponics are basically the best bet for your typical suburbia-dweller, I think.
Indeed, I have some trouble with pests, especially with the guava tree, but I’ve been using the technique of covering the young fruits in clothing bags so that pests can’t access them, and it’ has been effective so far. Needs a bit of work, but it’s cheap and doesn’t need using any chemicals. Sometimes, a naughty possum comes and takes something away, but it’s not so frequent, so I let them take their share lol. I once planted a broccoli that was growing so big and nice-looking, but had it suddenly disappear, eaten by a group of caterpillars.
But I simply avoid the things that attracted pests and favor the ones that grow without much need of maintenance, like acerola, cassava, some pumpkins, passion fruits, some wild grape-like fruits, and so on. My backyard looks like an abandoned house with the wilds taking over, i admit, but well, I like it that way…
Living in a tropical region definitely helps. Up north, the selection is difficult. Where and when you plant different items is really important, since you can very easily kill the plant if you plant it too early or late
That’s interesting to know. I never paid attention to timing when planting. We can plant most things in any season without much difference around here. Sometimes, things grow “spontaneously”, like the papaya tree that appeared last year and is already mature and giving fruits. Looks like I’m playing real-life stardew valley in easy mode >.<
As someone who has been trying to grow tomatoes in containers for about 10 years, I can confirm that it really is difficult. It took me about 5 years to achieve fairly consistent results and get the hang of properly amending the soil, planting correctly, watering, pruning etc. And I still have years where the production is really low, largely due to fungal diseases.
Yeah. I have the largest respect for people who manage to get that far. It really is not easy.
see what you should have done is just toss some rotten ones onto your driveway or behind the shed and ignored them and next year you’d have had the biggest baddest bitchingest tomato plants you’d ever seen
We planted tomatoes on the backyard last year and we drowned in them, kilos and kilos of the stuff
It also would’ve been a lot cheaper to get the same amount from the grocery store 😅
Not wanting to add complexity or anything but have you considered trying a deep water culture (DWC) hydroponic system? That’s all a fancy way to say a dark colored large 5-ish gallon bucket of water with specific hydroponic nutrients dissolved in the water (I use a generic balanced powder and it works nicely) and an air pump to keep the water from going stagnant. As long as you keep the air pump dry, you can do the whole thing outside without issue. I hang mine under a plastic camera guard and it works nicely.
I’m terrible at growing things in dirt because dirt remembers what you did to it (holds salts and nutrient excess unless you flush the soil), but hydroponics is a totally different thing. You can just toss the water and give it new when it starts showing signs of nutrient deficiency/toxicity. The roots end up massive and healthy and everything grows faster since there’s zero resistance in the growth medium. Just sucking up everything they can. Tho since the typical advice is to just completely toss the water at least weekly once it’s grown up (great for outside gardens or houseplants after the tomato buckets), you usually don’t end up with imbalances like that at all.
Proper care of a hydro system makes for a bountiful harvest most years, and if you want, you can very easily keep a tomato clone over winter to keep some smaller amount of production going. Hydro works very well inside because you don’t bring most of the bugs you would with a dirt pot.
Throw like 4 standard screw-in daylight bulbs of 60+watt-equivalent leds and you’ve got a grow space. No fancy expensive nonsense required.
Yeah, my peppers got too much calcium and had black ends. Cucumbers got too yellow. Cabbage worked fine, but I fucking hate cabbage. Beans were seriously lacking. Shit certainly isn’t easy, and it’s way to easy to think, hey, I can do this no problem!
Man your soil is farked . Start composting
Growing food isn’t hard but takes knowledge and time, and even then there is no way in fuck you can be self sufficient.
The best is community roles in a collective. If you try to do everything yourself you’ll fail but in specializing you’ll succeed. For produce, one neighbor specializes in tomatoes, the other cucumber, the other onions, etc etc… that’s how human society survived in tough times and that’s actually as a species how we’re supposed to operate. As a community. Another reason why everyone is so dang lonely and depressed. Anyways, I digress…
Yep, find your local CSA (Community Supported Agriculture) and get a membership
Buying dry food is probably better than canned. It’s lighter, stores for longer, and is much more compact.
Are we talking like, bags of rice and beans?
Rice, lentils, peas, beans, wheat berries, barley, oats, etc. But if you buy in large bulk (which you should do for the cost savings), you should repack the goods into smaller individually sealed containers. Because a 25kg bag of rice, once opened, will take a small family all year to get through, and having an open bag of rice attracts rodents, weevils, moisture, mould and dust. Pack it down into half kilo or 1kg containers, ideally vacuum sealed or with some other preventative treatment. Then only open 1 container at a time.
This is good advice not just for building resilience against food cost shocks, but just generally good practice for saving money by buying in bulk and repacking yourself. Around here,a 25kg bag of rice costs me about $40, but buying 25kgs of rice in individual kilo bags at the supermarket costs $3.50 per kilogram for the cheap stuff, or $7.50 for the premium stuff ($88 or $188 respectively for 25kg worth)
Yeah unfortunately I can buy rice in either 4x125g individual bags in one package, or just a 500g package.
Somehow we just don’t get bulk packages of most goods. At least not in consumer facing stores.
Have you tried Asian and indian grocery stores? I get Thai jasmine rice from a Vietnamese shop near me, but they also sell it at the Indian supermarkets. They have lots of spices in bulk too.
Bro my cacti died. Both of them.
Cacti are more difficult than other plants to grow.
ok you can stay away from the garden and take a more motivational role
This is how capitalism starts
Good. Captialism is based
I don’t even agree with this but I’m upvoting because I hope Lemmy becomes more open to hearing nuanced takes on this. Capitalism is complicated. It’s not God, it’s not Satan
I dont support everything in capitalism and I dislike the way Americans engage in it. But i do like it as an economic engine and a way for people to build things and shape their communities. The idea of someone being unable to own a store and sell goods and services is very sad to me.
I can do that. I’ll keep track of everyone’s food, you know, in exchange for food.
You should even get a little extra! You know, because of all the responsibility
What are pulses?
Ohhh…
Legumes are plants in the pea family Fabaceae (or Leguminosae), or the fruit or seeds of such plants. When used as a dry grain for human consumption, the seeds are also called pulses.
What is a pulse?
Beans
Lentils too
I’d rather make someone else do it by offering things in trade. Almost like some kind of barter system. I’ll fix your garden tools and equipment just feed me plz.
I’m glad I started growing wolffia globosa. Gonna help supplement a lot of meals. Kinda sucks that I got sick and neglected it and got set back a few weeks, but I have enough to sees other colonies
When agricultural processes are invented that allow the population to grow by billions, what’s the first thing people do? Rush to fill the extra capacity. Sure would be nice if we had the prudence to maintain a buffer.
Sure would be nice if we had the prudence to maintain a buffer.
we do. half the food is thrown away. that’s literally what a buffer is.
Good thing my country exports 90% of its agricultural produce, so if we start getting hungry then we’ll just export a bit less.
(We learned the hard way a long time ago when we ran out of potatoes.)
I mean, you exported 90% of your agricultural produce back then, too.
Ireland was exporting food during the potato famine.
Don’t assume your food won’t continue to be sold overseas if the growers/wholesalers can make more money that way.
Ireland was exporting food during the potato famine.
*Britian was exporting food from Ireland during the famine.
Regardless of nationality, don’t expect your billionaire overlord to have ethics if it comes at the cost of a 0.7% income loss
What billionaire overlord? Irish agriculture is made up of over 100,000 independant family farms, and each farmers income is on average about €40-50k.
We produce enough beef to support almost 3x the population and enough dairy for 10x the population.
Ireland is the 2nd most food secure country in the world.
That sounds impressive, I never heard about it. Do you have some resource about it? I don’t know how to search for it and Google is, like, you know
Sure:
Sustainable Food Systems Ireland
- However, Ireland continues to be the largest net exporter of Beef in the Northern Hemisphere
- There are approximately 137,500 family farms in Ireland with an average size of 32.4 hectares per holding according to the Farm Structure Survey of 2016.
The report, highlights that average farm income is forecast to reach €48,500 in 2025
The scale of our farming output relative to our domestic population of 4.9m people mean that Ireland exports some 90% of its net beef output, making Ireland the largest beef exporter in Europe and one of the largest in the world (Department of Agriculture, Food and Marine, 2019). Similarly, 85% of dairy output is exported.
This isn’t exactly what I was searching for, I was more interested in the “independant farms” part
In France, most “family ran” farms work on rented land and under an exclusivity contract that forces them to sell all their production to a single company. This leads to a situation where the few billionaires that buy food from everyone get to set the prices at which they buy different crops (and therefore what the farmers produce), and whether to export it. In other news, France is exporting wine while malnutrition rises and the major food charity is running out of fund as the demand increases. The government has stepped in to fund the charity, but still, we end up prioritizing exporting alcohol over feeding locals.
I would be more interested in how the system decides what is exported and produced, rather than in what is currently exported and produced
No, you have to expect your government to do that, which is why almost the entire world is not hyper capitalist choochoo trains
A vegetable garden? LOL so you can get one tomato after 6 weeks? What are you going to eat in the meantime?
People are completely clueless and disconnected from reality.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DPfmYNNo-4U
This is what one couple needs to actually grow stuff. And that’s just fruits and vegetables.
And what freaking inputs in the form of plastic, fertilizers, pesticides are they using?
You do not need to replace your entire diet with home grown produce. Supplement the food you buy from the store with whatever you can grow in the small area you have. You can get a surprisingly good haul from 25ft².
aka hobby
There’s a difference between supplemental gardening and full on self sufficient farming.
I had a garden for years that I started in the spring every year, and reduced my grocery bills by about half.
tomatoes, onions, carrots, garlic, potatoes and cucumbers are all staple crops that can be gardened in abundance on basically any 1/4 acre plot in the US. Most of these are either shelf stable for extended periods on their own or can be canned at home for winter use.
Who has a 1/4 acre plot, and the knowledge, tools, and chemicals to grow the food? You have the seeds ready to go? You’re confident in the face of a global food shortage you’ll just snap your fingers and Disneyfy your way to “staple foods”?
How about buying canned produce, learning to preserve the food you can still buy now, dry beans, rice, etc? And then try to see if the knowledge we’ve lost as a culture wrt subsistence can be re-learned quickly and painlessly?
I don’t think so.
Plant a vegetable garden?WHERE?
DO YOU THINK I CAN AFFORD A YARD?
I have a copy of this little pamphlet called Fugitive Gardens, which is all about gardening in small spaces, such as a fire escape.
It’s all fun and games until there’s a fire.
Container garden. I even had one on my North facing balcony in Baltimore.
Hydroponic indoor gardening is the way. (I assume - I don’t grow any food hahahahaha)
i would, but power prices are making it impossible to be a alternative
Do you think power draw would be that much for hydroponic/aquaponic? Always just watched that and auto gardening from afar
it kinda dosent matter if its hydroponic or soil they still need the same amount of light, and that depends on the crop, but basically there isnt a crop that could feed you if u only have a normal sized flat, even if u stack micro greens to the top and sleep in the bathtub
If they cannot afford a yard what makes you think they have space to spare inside to grow stuff??
Was thinking of those small footprint plant towers that were circulating online a decade or so ago. Look like big upright pipes with holes in the sides for plants. Continually circulating water inside. I’m sure they’re expensive now but I bet we could throw one together without too much effort if we had the knowledge.
Dude, I’ve been filling my pantry with grains since the pandemic.
Natural gas is used to produce hydrogen, which is then used in the Haber-Bosch process to produce ammonia from nitrogen in the atmosphere. Only about 6% of natural gas is used to produce hydrogen, so even if the price were to rise substantially, we could divert natural gas from other uses and have plenty for making ammonia. We also have other ways of producing hydrogen, it’s just that natural gas is more established.
PEM electrolyzers paired with cheap solar in countries with high insolation can now produce hydrogen for less than the cost of natural gas, but we’re only recently starting to see the construction of the large-scale green ammonia plants needed to accomplish this. Egypt is currently constructing a 100-MW green ammonia plant powered by solar energy. Even if you didn’t have enough PEM eletrolyzers you could still just pass current through some salt water and produce hydrogen, albeit much less efficiently.
It’s not going to be a catastrophic issue.
Also, while it’s still new, plasma nitrogen has the potential to rapidly scale if the economics stop making sense for Haber-Bosch nitrogen.
Fun fact: Fritz Haber, the German guy that invented the Haber-Bosch process is the same Fritz Haber that developed a way to use the chlorine gas in chemical warfare. He was personally overseeing its effect in the battle of Ypres.
Clara Immerwahr, who was married to Fritz Haber and was a successful chemist in her own right, spoke out against his research as a “perversion of the ideals of science” and “a sign of barbarity, corrupting the very discipline which ought to bring new insights into life.” She ended her own life the day before he traveled to the eastern front to oversee the use of chlorine gas against Russian troops.
And the Bosch in this instance is not Robert Bosch, founder of the company Bosch, but his nephew Carl Bosch, founder of IG Farben. Famous for, among other things, zyklon b.
Dude knew his chemicals
Habe
rn wir einen an der Waffel? Ja
Adding to that, logistics are such that direct impact will be felt strongest in places like India that rely heavily on Qatari LNG to make fertilizer, but many places have other sources of both gas and fertilizer. Americas, EU, Russia and China will get by because they have their own supply and will be only affected by price increase
Farmers almost uniformly over-apply N fertilizer. Having it be more expensive and forcing them to look into more efficient ways of applying fertilizer and managing nutrients is not a bad thing.
Unless it just causes the crop to cost more without any change in behavior.
Farmers are price-takers not price-makers. The prices they receive are driven by speculation on the commodities markets (even for crops not traded on the market).
Since they can’t control the price they receive for their crop, they are very sensitive to any change in the cost of inputs. Determining how much to spent on inputs is the part of their profitablity they can control. So widespread behavioral change is usually pretty close to immediate.
we could divert natural gas from other uses and have plenty for making ammonia. We also have other ways of producing hydrogen
We can’t do any of those in a scale large enough to replace the destruction and have it online for the next planting season on the North Hemisphere. Or the next one on the South Hemisphere either, btw. Or the following ones for each.
Thank you for explaining the process, because the pro-fuel-cell pact doesn’t understand that hydrogen isn’t free and production is still heavily reliant on fossil fuels.
“Oh it comes from ammonia”. Alright, where does the ammonia come from???
You’re just moving the problem around, not fixing anything.
You’ll make hydrogen from renewable energy. That is the point.
But why not just make electricity from renewable energy?
Like, I get the benefit of fuel cells, but people need to realize that hydrogen closer to a battery than a fuel source itself. You’re expending energy now to make storage of energy that can be tapped later.
It’s good for places where vehicles can’t tap into the grid and need dense energy storage (i.e. transoceanic freighters), or where long charging times are infeasible (like long-range trucking).
And probably good for grid-level storage, too.
But for a typical family car/commuter? There’s really no point. You’re adding more steps in energy conversion, and losing efficiency at every additional step (thanks to basic physics), and to gain what? A faster refueling time on a long road trip? An experience closer to what we were used to with ICE-cars? An experience that really isn’t that great anywhere that has a winter. Or an excessively hot summer.
Maybe for people who can’t have a charger at home, even an L1, but there are better solutions for that (like…adding an outlet? Making landlords responsible for providing power whenever there is parking? More municipal charging locations?)
You can’t store electricity by itself. The problem we are facing is massive curtailment, i.e. massive overproduction of green energy that can’t be utilized. There needs to be way of storing it at a massive scale. There is no feasible way of storing that much energy in conventional batteries.
If you can acknowledge that hydrogen is needed for dense energy storage and grid-level storage, then you should realize that we will eventually have a huge hydrogen infrastructure, and production capacity to match. That will create very cheap green hydrogen, and will mirror what happened with solar and wind.
Cheap hydrogen alone will drive large-scale adoption of hydrogen cars, regardless of the popularity of BEVs. A lot of people will choose hydrogen cars (possible e-fuel cars too, since e-fuels can be made from hydrogen) simply because it is akin to an ICE-car in usage.
The other point is that battery production is not green and is very resource intensive. Hydrogen cars let’s you avoid that almost entirely. In the long-run, it will be pointless to care about efficiency when green energy becomes nearly free. That suggests hydrogen, not batteries, is the better idea.
You can’t fertilize crops with electricity, not can you eat it
Making food from pure electricity would be a cool sci-fi thing
Some startups are trying to synthesize edible fats from non-biological feedstocks, using just energy, water, carbon monoxide, and hydrogen, through the Fischer Tropsch process.
Personally I’m more interested in seeing whether that can expand into just manufacturing hydrocarbons with excess solar energy, rather than synthetic food, but it’s still cool to see that people can do it.
