Much to my surprise, Michael 2 responded almost immediately with a comment:

“Great post! I agree gardens are great, and it’s true high-efficiency industrial ag hasn’t prevented all land-clearing, partly because livestock (especially ruminants) are inherently inefficient. But high yields are really important; if the Green Revolution hadn’t tripled yields, we’d need 3X as much land to produce the same amount of calories. And right now 3/4 of all ag land supports livestock; that’s a problem gardens (which, again, are great!) can’t solve.” Best, Michael 2

That’s on-point, honest, well-informed, and conveying every intention to be fair-minded. Just what I’ve come to expect from reading his book, We are eating the earth – The race to fix our food system and save our climate (2025), and listening to several podcasts in which he was featured. Not that I agree with him on everything. Still, what do we do with his contention that three-fourths of all ag land supports livestock, forcing us to prioritize high yields, which is a problem gardens can’t solve?

At first glance, it sounds unarguably persuasive. Yet it’s based on three shaky assumptions, namely, that: 1) industrial agriculture can avoid or adapt to the accelerating pace of climate change shocks; 2) meat consumption will continue to trend upward no matter what; thus 3): there’s nothing gardens can do about 2), since [by implication] no one is going to raise livestock in their backyard. The related reference to Green Revolution yields needs a separate treatment, but first, let’s take a sober look at those assumptions.

1) We don’t need to take the rapid increase in disasters seriously.

It’s not that industrial ag hasn’t noticed climate change. They’ve been boasting for some time that they’re revving up “climate-smart” tech and new crop strains to more efficiently use fertilizer, withstand drought, fight off new pests and heat, increase yields, etc. What they don’t consider is that climate change disasters are ramping up much faster than industrial fixes can be globally scaled, especially for the outsized demands of livestock production. Those retrofits are geared to fit an assumed gradual climate change, not the actual, rapid pace at which enviro-disasters are marching into our lives. And we don’t have the time to wait around for slow fixes. But wait around is clearly what industrial ag intends to do. What that amounts to is a pernicious second level of climate change denial: not denying outright that it exists, but that it’s so gradual or un-serious it won’t threaten our food supply.

2) Global meat production will continue to rise, rapid climate change be damned.

Yet the increasingly rapid rollout of disasters is serious. Very much so. I’ve shown the following NOAA graphic—which shows the increase in U.S. billion-dollar disasters since 1981—several times. Here it is again, this time compared to the rate of global rise in meat production since 1961.

Precisely because livestock commands three-fourths of ag land, in addition to huge slices of the water and energy we use, it’s much more vulnerable to the heat waves, floods, drought, fires, and aquifer depletions than the non-livestock sector. Notice how fast billion-dollar disasters have increased since 2010, and imagine how that spiral will continue ever upward over the next 25 years. Already, the first six months of 2025 were the costliest on record for U.S. weather disasters.¹ Now look at the rate of meat production². Though rising at a much slower rate than disasters, it’s unsustainably high-volume. In other words, the slopes and contexts of these two trends are on a collision course. Something’s gotta give, and it won’t be climate change. Meat production? Well, consider a sector that burns through resources as ravenously—and on a scale as vast as—livestock. Could it defy ever-intensifying eco-shocks until 2050?

Highly unlikely. It’s thus unrealistic to expect that the production of meat will be able to splurge at its current rate from here on out, regardless of demand. At some point—when multi-billion dollar disasters begin to overlap enough to be intractable—climate change will begin to choke it off. As Günther Thallinger, board member of Allianz SE, one of the world’s largest insurance companies, puts it:

“No governments will realistically be able to cover the damage when multiple high-cost events happen in rapid succession, as climate models predict.” ³

At that point, we’ll be forced to start using less, not more and more, land for livestock. Which means that from then on, boosting yields primarily for livestock will be a moot point. Not convinced? Below is a graphic from the most comprehensive study to date on how agriculture will respond to climate change, published in the prestigious journal Nature in 2025. It reported on observations from over 12,000 regions across 55 countries, analyzing adaptions for costs and yields that supply two-thirds of global calories from six staple crops: wheat, corn, rice, soybeans, barley, and cassava.⁴ It concludes that by 2050, crop yields will decrease by 11%, just when Michael (correctly) says we’ll need to produce 50% more food to feed 10 billion people. The combined accounting adds up to—or rather down to—a shortfall of 61%. Nor was the Nature study a one-off. Slightly earlier (2021) research projected the probability of rice, soy, maize, and wheat yield failures to be as much as 4.5 times higher by 2030 and up to 25 times higher by 2050 across global breadbaskets.⁵ Other accounts, as Michael noted in his book, tell a similar story. No way industrial agriculture, especially livestock’s grab of 3/4ths of its total land, can blithely continue BAU until 2050. And maybe not even until 2030. Even with hoped-for tech fixes and yield increases.

Nor is it just a future worry; it’s already threatening the U.S. cattle industry in the U.S. Southern Plains:

“Large swaths of Oklahoma, Texas, and beyond have been locked in severe drought conditions . . . This cost the agriculture industry in Oklahoma, Texas, and Kansas an estimated $23.6 billion from 2020 to 2024. In 2022 alone, 25% of Texas corn went unharvested, 45% of soybeans were abandoned, and 74% of the cotton crop was lost. Ranchers have been forced to sell off cattle because dried-out rangelands can’t support grazing.”⁶

So it’s not a matter of replacing industrial livestock with a cow or pig in every garden, although a couple hens are often doable and would help. It’s that climate disasters will seriously knock back the rate of livestock production—and soon—thus reducing its voracious appetite for land and other resources, gardens or no. Of course, the non-livestock sector will also be affected, but because livestock occupies three-quarters of the total, it will take the brunt of the setback. Meanwhile, self-sufficiency gardens, because of close proximity to personal care, are much more resilient to climate change. As a result, they are well-positioned to cover the deficit caused by climate change rollback of livestock. See next.

3) Gardens can’t help—at least not in the way that first comes to mind.

Right again—at first glance: no livestock amongst the tomatoes and zucchinis. However, properly managed, gardens drastically decrease the average amount of land required to feed one person: from industrial’s 3 acres to self-sufficiency gardens’ 0.03 ac, a hundred-fold reduction. Highlighting their inherent scalability, in 2008 Russia’s household gardens supplied 50% of its food on just 3% of its agricultural land⁷. In 1996, it was even more impressive: 52% of its agricultural production on 1.5% of its arable land.⁸ Garden food footprints like these in the U.S., even if applied only to the non-livestock sector, would free up enormous amounts of land that could then be re-purposed to natural vegetation. As Michael has correctly noted, established wetlands, forests, and prairies absorb much more carbon—acre for acre—than industrial (and even regenerative) agriculture. Implementing such an ag-for-nature swap would, while making more food on less land, amount to a beneficial “indirect land-use change”*, free and clear of livestock. It would also represent a vast net yield increase, though in a nation-wide network of highly productive self-sufficiency gardens rather than solely in agricultural monocultures. So yes, gardens would feasibly mitigate the need for higher industrial yields and more land—especially for livestock—just not in the way and for reasons you might pre-imagine.

I can’t emphasize it enough: the real economy of scale, when it comes to large-scale food production and consumption, accrues not to the industrial model, with its extreme inefficiencies, but to an extraordinarily efficient self-sufficiency garden food system. When you comprehensively compare the two as whole systems, the pertinent facts and numbers don’t mislead, nor do the full-scope contexts and major metrics of efficiency. Missing out on the garden option amounts to an opportunity cost of using far more agricultural land per capita than is optimal.

The Green Revolution

Michael is also right when he said that if the Green Revolution hadn’t tripled yields, we’d need three times as much land to produce the same amount of calories. But yields and calories alone don’t capture the full scope of the food system challenge. For one thing, increasing industrial yields enough to feed the world in 2050 would only exacerbate the already-unsustainable global obesity epidemic with ever-more ultra-processed foods, currently at 70% of the American diet. As it would a number of other equally unsustainable pitfalls of an industrial food system on sky-high yield steroids.

Green Revolution proponents claim that those higher yields “saved” hundreds of millions of people from starvation. Critics like Michael Pollan, on the other hand, say they simply enabled that many more people to be born. Which, sans solving global food insecurity, is not exactly a commendable plus. Even Norman Borlaug, the great developer and “Father” of the Green Revolution, admitted that higher yields didn’t solve world hunger. Rather, it merely “bought time” to address the “population monster.” Fifty years later, that monster is still haunting us, and it will be even harder to resolve now that we have a second, even scarier monster. That would be—already is—climate change disasters, which will further confound the industrial food system. In short, increasing industrial yields didn’t solve food insecurity in the past, and is even much less likely to do so in the future.

As a wrap, I remember Michael noting in his book that Tim Searchinger, his go-to enviro-lawyer-come-scientist consultant, had said he was looking for any way to greatly push up yields without massively expanding ag land. Evidently, he missed the full extent and significance of the Russian garden performance.^7,8 If it works at scale in Russia, why wouldn’t it here? I think Tim would be pleasantly surprised if he looked into it with his usual care.

* * *

*Indirect land use change typically refers to the increase in carbon emissions due to land-use changes around the world. They’re induced by redirecting croplands formerly intended for food to ethanol and biodiesel production in order to meet fuel demands.

¹Bush, E. 2025. What canceled climate data would have shown: The costliest 6 months of weather disasters on record. NBC News. https://www.nbcnews.com/science/climate-change/climate-change-data-costliest-6-months-weather-disasters-noaa-rcna238752

²UN FAO. Total meat production, Global Meat Production 1961 to 2024. Our World in Data. https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/global-meat-production

³Carrington, D. 2025. Climate crisis on track to destroy capitalism, warns top insurer. The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2025/apr/03/climate-crisis-on-track-to-destroy-capitalism-warns-allianz-insurer?CMP=oth_b-aplnews_d-1

⁴Garthwaite, J. 2025. Climate change cuts global crop yields, even when farmers adapt. Stanford / DOERR School of Sustainability. https://sustainability.stanford.edu/news/climate-change-cuts-global-crop-yields-even-when-farmers-adapt#:~:text=The%20study’s%20authors%20found%20that:%20*%20Every,24%25%20if%20emissions%20continue%20to%20rise%20unchecked.

⁵Caparas, M., et al. 2021. Increasing risks of crop failure and water scarcity in global breadbaskets by 2030. Environmental Research Letters. https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/ac22c1

⁶Hindman, S. 2026. Experts issue warning as historic crisis threatens US cattle industry — here’s what’s happening. TCD. https://www.thecooldown.com/green-business/southern-plains-drought-impact-agriculture/

⁷Sharashkin, L. 2008. The socioeconomic and cultural significance of food gardening in the Vladimir region of Russia. PhD dissertation, University of Missouri. http://naturalhomes.org/img/food-gardening-russia.pdf

⁸Brown, K. 2026. Tiny gardens everywhere - The past, present, and future of the self-provisioning city. W.W. Norton & Company.

OBIE ranks in the top 3% of podcasts globally, with 25,000 listeners a month. A high percentage of them listens all they way through the episodes and then shares them with others. It’s not hard to see why they do so well: it’s because of the host, Dana Diprima. She is exceptionally articulate, informative, well-organized, and compelling. She not only complements her guests, she makes them look good by providing well-researched context. And she doesn’t just chit-chat, she delivers solid quality.

In any case, I think it came out very well. It’s such a treat to have a host set the stage, so you just give your take on what she provides in the way of pertinent background. She really adds heft and insight to your whole message. See what you think: 39 minutes.

R U up for a little friendly yet globally-consequential controversy? Yes? Then read on.

Meet Michael 1

If you’re a foodie, you’re likely aware of . Author of The Botany of Desire (2002), In Defense of Food (2009), and a steady stream of other books about food and the food system, he champions mostly whole, plant-based foods that are produced as genuinely natural as possible. In other words, he favors everything that ultra-processed food, and the way it’s industrially manufactured, isn’t. As a result, he advocates what’s widely perceived as sustainable and healthy—small-scale, local, organic, regenerative-type agriculture—all while avoiding junk food, and being ultra-nice to the environment. Foodies love him; the industry, not at all.

Enter Michael no. 2

is a journalist who covers policy and national politics. His most recent book is We are eating the earth – The race to fix our food system and save our climate (2025). Like Pollan, he’s in favor of truly healthy food, and is no friend of the industrial system and the havoc it wreaks. Yet he notes that yields of organic agriculture average about 20% lower than those of industrial ag, thus requiring more land per person. And since land needs to be as productive as possible to feed 10 billion people by 2050, organic isn’t just less efficient, it’s also technically less environmentally friendly than industrial. In other words, the more land we use to grow crops, the more greenhouse gases we churn out, and the more we boost global warming. Which will destroy us if we don’t limit or reverse it.

So as Michael 2 puts it, the dilemma is how to feed the world without frying it, and industrial is ostensibly better positioned than organic to deliver that outcome. Yet fans of the healthier, more responsibly produced food favored by Michael 1 are horrified at the prospect of caving to what they see as the evil industrial lords plying their UPFs, plunder, and pollution while rendering 40% of the population obese.

And Michael 3 says . . .

Wait, what? Full disclosure, I was raised Catholic, and for those who may not be aware of it, when Catholic children reach a certain age, they are “confirmed”, in a special ceremony, for which they choose a “confirmation name” to add to their legal name. Well, I chose Michael, which made my religious moniker the rather grandiose David George Michael Fisher. So for the purposes of this post I hereby present myself as Michael 3. Just to insert a little camaraderie and lightness to offset the chippy emotional charge people sometimes bring to food and how it’s created.

Now, let’s back up. The goal in resolving the Michaels’ Food Dilemma is to simultaneously use less land, produce healthier food, preserve the environment, and reduce greenhouse gases. All four elements are essential, so they need to be revved up not just a little, but quite a lot if we’re to feed that 10 billion.

Michael 2 is correct when he says that industrial ag uses less land per capita (the food footprint) than organic. However, that doesn’t mean it offers a way to solve the land use problem. Even if we continued to use 20% less land than organic from here on out, it would still be nowhere near efficient enough to meet future food needs. A massive study of six staple crops over 12,683 regions reported that the global ability to adapt food systems is just 23% of what will be needed to feed the world in 2050¹. It further found that modern bread-baskets in wealthy countries will experience the greatest challenge to adapt. Surprised? You needn’t be, because even now the U.S. industrial system loses 50-85% of its harvest between field and fork, depending on whether the food is measured in terms of calories² or biomass³, respectively. My own calculations put the losses at more like 95%.

Unfortunately, the more earth- and health-friendly organic route endorsed by Michael 1 would be even more challenged. Not only because of its lower yields, but even more because it currently turns out only a very small percentage of global food; in the U.S., it represents just 6% of food sales. Plus, if implemented it would add even more carbon to the atmosphere than industrial because of the yield lag. So it would have to make up even far more ground, no pun intended, than industrial would. All those mores add up. Nor is it just organic. None of the theoretically more sustainable means of farm production, including the current rage, regenerative agriculture, could feasiby ride to the rescue. Admirable and “pure” as they may be, they’re just not up to the job—because of climate change—of producing at scale in the limited time we have to apply them.

It will therefore come as a shock to hear that the farm, the centerpiece of the agricultural revolution and the resulting population explosion, is an idea that’s approaching the end of its capacity—all things considered—to adequately produce food at massive scales. Not that it ever really has, what with the food insecure long hovering in the hundreds of millions globally, and even 50 million in America. Of course, some still insist that all we have to do is reduce meat consumption, cut out excess waste, greatly increase yields, insert more tech, etc. My take is that those measures (including the Green Revolution) have either repeatedly fallen well short of resolving hunger at scale over the long term, or are based more on specious speculation than compellingly proven potential. (See the Addendum for a summary.) It is truly time to go back to the drawing board and come up with an alternative idea, which I believe is self-sufficiency gardens. Which, by the way, have been there all along, but whose value has gone mostly unrecognized.

A viable alternative

Globally, food production ranges from gardens to mega-farms along gradients of size, degree of industrialization, proximity, and sustainability. It also varies along continuums of efficiency according to four major measures thereof, as I’ve mentioned before:

The largest gardens overlap somewhat with the smallest farms, at least theoretically, along those parameters. Interestingly, I just came across an article on the concept of an “agrihood”, which is a working farm surrounded by single- or multifamily housing.⁴ Could it provide the neighborhood with most or all of its food? According to the story, it couldn’t possibly meet the community’s calorie needs, even though it could produce plenty of vegetables. So far, the few built-out attempts at this model have turned out to be unexpectedly complicated, which doesn’t surprise me. It’s another version of urban farming: potentially helpful, but yet to be proven at scale over time.

All told, it’s the much-needed increase in efficiency, by orders of magnitude in all four metrics, that enable self-sufficiency gardens to feasibly outperform farms by a wide margin. It’s self-sufficiency gardens, not mega-farms, that render the real economy of scale. Recall that these gardens need only 1% of the land required by the U.S. industrial food system to feed a person, and at scale, that Russia’s gardeners supply half of their country’s food on just 3% of its agricultural land. Providing as little as 50% (or even 25%, for that matter) of U.S. food from gardens would thus greatly reduce the land devoted to agriculture, meeting one of Michael 2’s worries. And because household gardens are far more environmentally-friendly than industrial ag, they would also address Michael 1’s concerns. Energy needs would be far less as well, which would greatly reduce carbon emissions, making it possible to start cooling us off. Voilá for Michael 2: feed the world without frying it. And while we’re at it, replace UPFs with healthy food, a win for both. End of dilemma?

This is not just a pipe dream; it’s backed up by solid evidence from individual to massive scales, as I’ve noted repeatedly. So a food system based on these gardens would honor and hopefully bring together the wonderful work of both Michaels while offering a proven way to simultaneously use much less land, produce healthier food, preserve the environment, and reduce greenhouse gases. All in service of meeting the daunting food and ecological needs of the future. Again, not by completely replacing the industrial and local/regenerative models outright (we’ll have both for quite awhile yet), but by providing a parallel food system that would ensure food security just when we’ll be needing it the most.

¹Hultgren, A. et al. 2025. Impacts of climate change on global agriculture accounting for adaptation. Nature. 642: 644–652. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-025-09085-w

²West, P. 2025. Only half of the calories produced on croplands are available for human consumption. (Preprint) Research Gate. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/394005686_Only_half_of_the_calories_produced_on_croplands_are_available_for_human_consumption

³Center for Sustainable Systems, University of Michigan. 2025. “U.S. Food System Factsheet.” Pub. No. CSS01-06. https://css.umich.edu/publications/factsheets/food/us-food-system-factsheet

⁴Simon, M. 2026. What happens when a neighborhood is built around a farm. Grist. https://grist.org/cities/what-happens-when-a-neighborhood-is-built-around-a-farm/

Addendum

A summary of conventional strategies to reduce food insecurity while mitigating the effects of climate change, and why they don’t or won’t work

Why will the bubble burst?

Simple. It’s because hundreds of billions of dollars have been fed into the gaping AI investment maw, evidently way too fervently to justify its scant revenues so far. And there’s steadily fading reason to think that will change anytime soon. As a result, the tech titans—Microsoft, Nvidia, Meta, Amazon, etc.—have been burning through their coffers at an ever-quickening pace, spooking them into shaky accounting and circular financing. This is a risky money loop where major suppliers invest in AI startups that promise to buy products from them, or some variation thereof. Picture it: I’ll lend you money if you promise to buy my stuff, hoping it will benefit both of us, even though the sales potential is more hype than proven. Meanwhile, the upward swirling money vapors it stokes will help keep investment buzz at a fever pitch.

Even spookier, AI’s uber-expensive data centers gobble up enough power to supply large cities, provoking some communities and states to ban them. Analyst Edward Zitron believes that many of the planned or already built centers will never go on line.¹ And even if some applications of AI survive a crash, many doubt that the next-generation versions will recoup the mountains of cash and ghost-investment being dumped into the maw.^1,5 Yet despite all that, starry-eyed tech proponents still abound, shouting from the rooftops that AI is just too good to fail. Tulips, anyone?

Aftermath of the burst

Next step: Let’s suppose that this bubble does burst, as early as the fourth quarter of this year according to some analysists. In the short term, $trillions in AI investment will go up in smoke. How much will depend on when it happens (the longer the hype metastasizes, the greater the loss) and who gets left holding the bag. If the size of the burst is comparable to the dot-com bubble collapse of 2000, it would wipe out more than $20 trillion in American household wealth.² This would likely prompt the Federal Reserve, in a bid to stabilize the economy, to rush huge amounts of cash into the financial system, just as it did after the 2008 crisis. That cash will disproportionately come from the taxpayer, who will once again bail out corporations (this time the tech bros) that are “too big to fail”. In essence, it will privatize the gains of wealthy risk-takers while transferring much of the loss to everyone else.²

It’s too early to tell whether a bubble pop would trigger a full-blown recession. We do know that Big Tech has been holding up (in more ways than one) the stock market for some time now with its largely fantasy valuations of AI. But stocks aren’t everything; there might be enough other basic strengths in the economy to produce a soft rather than a hard landing.³ Just to give a nod to the AI optimists.

Still, the burst is all but inevitable, and the aftermath will be another wealth transfer from the lower- and middle-income to the wealthy. But the re-direction of wealth doesn’t stop there. A big Fed bailout will increase the national debt, so we will also be transferring payment of bubble bills to the future. In any case, a lot of people will have a lot less money, including less to spend on food. And food, like almost everything else in an economic downturn, will become more expensive and harder to get for many, maybe most, people.

AI in the food chain

Let us now ponder how a bubble burst would impact the food system more directly. Al has been shoehorned into just about every aspect of the 1,500 mile-long food chain, although it’s hard to discern just how much it’s been applied to any one sector. That said, it’s clear that the primary goal of adopting AI is to boost the efficiency with which the industry’s flagship product line—ultra-processed-food—is sourced, produced, and distributed. That focus is pretty much a necessity, given that UPFs make up about 70% of the American diet. But it puts industry in the awkward position of using AI to make UPFs, the principal driver of obesity, more efficient to make and deliver to the consumer. When the bubble pops, AI will become less available, which will render UPFs less able to enhance the obesity epidemic. In as much as the industry would like to see positive outcomes (including reduced obesity), using less AI will be an obversely ironic way to arrive at their goal. By default, not intention. And to their exasperation, I would imagine.

The same conundrum applies all up and down the food chain. Recall that the industrial food system chalks up some $2 trillion in damaging externalities every year. Yet just as with UPFs, the primary reason to use AI is not to mitigate the damage, but to save money, which trickles down to producing the damage more efficiently. Reducing abusive treatment of farm workers and meat-packers, or restoring the declining socio-economic condition of local farm communities, or mitigating water and air pollution generated by livestock confinements, etc. are at most secondary (if at all) goals of AI.

On the other hand, industry will surely argue that making the industrial food chain more efficient can reduce external costs and damage. One example is precision agriculture, in which AI directs drones or satellite-enabled GPS to detect where fertilizer should be applied, then forwards the data to tractors. They, in turn, are programmed by AI to use the data to precisely deposit the chemicals only in needed spots and amounts, thereby reducing their use and helping the environment. In theory. Yet fertilizer application rates (in lb/ac) are about the same as they were 25 years ago, long before AI swooped down to the field.⁷ Meanwhile, the cost of fertilizer has shot up by more than 250% since 1986⁸. Besides, it would take massive interventions, not the incremental nudges enabled by precision ag, to restore pre-industrial health to soil degraded by excessive chemical use. All while climate change is severely curtailing the amount of time we have for those nudges to add up. Would they even make a tiny dent in the annual $2 trillion in damages incurred by the system as a whole? If not, just where, precisely, is the proven consumer advantage of using precision ag? Given the industry mandate to produce harmful UPFs more efficiently, you could ask the same question about any other application of AI in the food chain.

A values shift

Impactful as they are, none of these factors takes into account by far the most consequential outcome of an AI bubble burst: the coming great values shift. This is because the whole AI buildup and probable collapse can arguably be traced back to the suite of basic values that undergirds our entire economic system. Agricultural economist John Ikerd identifies it as individual, short-term, financial self-interest¹⁰. Although there’s nothing inherently amiss with any one of the four elements, over-reliance on the mutually reinforcing mix has led to the plunder and pollution-driven, casino economic system we have today. That, in turn, has led to one boom and bust cycle after another, with ever more wealth being funneled to the already wealthy. To put it simply, an excessively me-first financial focus plays right into the hands of those most able and willing to accumulate wealth. High dividend-paying AI—hoped for by enthusiasts—would further enhance the current buildup and direction of wealth-flow.

People cling to their most life-defining values dearly, yea, fiercely. The only thing that can pry at least some of them away from maybe one of their values is an event so life-shaking that they’re forced to contemplate the unthinkable: What if this event is showing me that there’s something seriously out of whack with my values? What if it’s as much about me as the event?

I believe that mega-events with the power to make us re-evaluate some of our deepest values around food are barreling toward us with ever-increasing speed. It’s just a matter of which one first comes to the fore: climate change disasters hitting fiercely and often enough to wake us up? A nation-shaking mega-flood in California’s Central Valley? A drought-driven blowup of the big water war in the Southwest?⁹ Or maybe, as analyst Brian Merchant put it, “The [AI] bubble to burst them all”⁷? Or will it be some even more powerful combination thereof?

Right now, most people overwhelmingly value the seemingly lower cost and greater convenience of grocery store food over growing much to most of their food. Even when they have the space and wherewithal, they see gardens as taking too much time and energy to be worth it. But that will change. I posit that coming mega-events will spur a society-wide shift wherein we put less of our dearest value-eggs into the short-term, individual, financial self-interest basket, and more of them into the deeper connection to the earth, ourselves, and others basket.

When deciding where to get the best deal, it will become a matter of shifting values: from grocery is best to garden is best. This shift entails a sort of mental wealth transfer, which is also a value transfer: away from the notion that you gain more from shopping convenience, and toward the idea that you gain more from producing directly from a garden. Put another way, it’s seeing that there’s ultimately more wealth value to be sourced directly from the earth than from that which sits in the store or bank, useful as those sources obviously are.

By no means does the wealth transfer to gardens apply only to food. In fact, as I’ve pointed out over and over, garden food, though fabulously healthier than UPFs and most other grocery fare, is not even what confers the greatest benefit. The source of greater wealth value is the self-empowerment and soul-enriching satisfaction that comes from re-energizing the golden-green (sun and plant) flow that cycles through planting, nurturing, harvesting, prepping, and eating—again, and again—only or mostly from a garden. And not just occasionally, but for continuous, extended periods of time. That’s what turns the trick, liberates the magic.

All of this, applied to hundreds of millions of self-sufficiency gardens across the country and around the world, will gradually help shift us, strengthen our human infrastructural integrity in ways that will reverberate throughout our entire society. Ways that we have been craving for, longing for, for a long time. It will be a fundamental transformation to what constitutes real wealth. Make no mistake, money and stuff will still be necessary, just not nearly as all-consuming, separating-from-self must-have as we’ve imagined them to be. So transfer some of your value eggs from the usual basket to that other, currently almost forlorn one. And less of your sustenance from the grocery and more of it from the nearby ground.* Shift. Shift. Shift. The sooner and more widely we do that, the better we’ll be able to forge our way through the coming phalanx of climate, technical, economic, and AI bubble-burst shocks.

*Yes, most grocery store food is also grown directly or indirectly (through meat) from the ground. But it comes from an average of 1,500 miles away, unlike the much closer distance between your garden and fork, and with no ultra-processing.

¹Zitron, E. 2025. The enshittifinancial crisis. Where’s Your Ed At? https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-enshittifinancial-crisis/

²Roberts, M. 2025. The AI bubble and the U.S. economy. MRonline. https://mronline.org/2025/10/17/the-ai-bubble-and-the-u-s-economy/#:~:text=Businesses%20know%20this%2C%20which%20is,further%20into%20the%20labour%20market.

³Donovan,P. 2026. Anatomy of an AI reckoning. World Economic Forum – Chief Economists’ Outlook. https://www.weforum.org/stories/2026/01/how-would-the-bursting-of-an-ai-bubble-actually-play-out/#:~:text=With%20the%20initial%20financial%20market,a%20general%20sense%20of%20caution.

⁴Monaco, H. et al. 2025. Trends in fertilizer use and efficiency in the U.S. Illinois farmdocdaily. https://farmdocdaily.illinois.edu/2025/05/trends-in-fertilizer-use-and-efficiency-in-the-us.html#:~:text=Over%20time%2C%20nitrogen%20application%20rates,corn%2C%20soybeans%2C%20and%20wheat

⁵Doctorow, C. 2026. AI companies will fail. We can salvage something from the wreckage. The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2026/jan/18/tech-ai-bubble-burst-reverse-centaur

⁶Hsu, J. 2025. When it all comes crashing down: The aftermath of the AI boom. Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. https://thebulletin.org/2025/12/when-it-all-comes-crashing-down-the-aftermath-of-the-ai-boom/?gad_source=1&gad_campaignid=22507971299&gbraid=0AAAAAC3qOh_VFu5ijUvHA68smhseS85o1&gclid=CjwKCAiAybfLBhAjEiwAI0mBBldRsXVAT7lkzbnGcZfA41lzBTJBmx3IkJ49S_De2gHNF66FAhbVaRoChHoQAvD_BwE

⁷Merchant, B. 2025. AI is the bubble to burst them all. Wired. https://www.wired.com/story/ai-bubble-will-burst/

⁸McCraken, J. 2024. GRAPHIC: Fertilizer prices reach a record high. Investigate Midwest. https://investigatemidwest.org/2024/01/18/graphic-fertilizer-prices-reach-a-record-high/#:~:text=by%20John%20McCracken%2C%20Investigate%20Midwest%2C%20Investigate%20Midwest,U.S.%20Bureau%20of%20Labor%20Statistics.

⁹Snider, A. 2026. The West’s water war arrives in Washington. Politico. https://www.politico.com/news/2026/01/31/west-water-interior-colorado-00756325

¹⁰Ikerd, J. 2005. Sustainable capitalism – A matter of common sense. Kumarian Press. https://www.amazon.com/Sustainable-Capitalism-Matter-Common-Sense/dp/1565492064/ref=sr_1_1?crid=1I4PG60WAI5CN&dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.cOx5bcYOTkODV1MMPymmL2X_Q7n3kEJkCnSCly0kzq5XRUKAYxzwzSND1d20NdL2A4XMntUHv8TGgDX4ajwSKcNu7deRvxOxPon80PkcBzM.oDCEOmOw3zsBMMfAW5Q0m0hYO2_PLi0oSVi4Hmav6yI&dib_tag=se&keywords=John+Ikerd+Sustainable+Capitalism&qid=1770217662&sprefix=john+ikerd+sustainable+capitalism%2Caps%2C178&sr=8-1

Flood? What flood?

If you follow the news at all, I’m sure you’ve seen the stories about the atmospheric rivers that have picked up water from the Pacific (by evaporation) and dumped it along the west coast, causing “historic” and “catastrophic” flooding. Yet as serious as these downpours have been to those whose homes or businesses were swamped, you have to wonder what language the media will conjure up when a truly huge atmospheric river hits. The last such event inundated California’s Central Valley and surrounding regions with 43 days of rain that produced 15-20 feet of standing water, creating an inland sea 300 miles long and 20 miles wide. That deluge—known as the Great Flood—struck in late December 1861 – early January 1862, just after the Civil War had started back east. Thousands of people died and 200,000 cattle drowned. The capitol, Sacramento, had to move to San Francisco for six months, and the state went bankrupt for a while. Yet today, almost no one has heard about this superstorm, including evidently those you’d think would be most aware of it: Californians.

Turns out this was not some one-off catastrophe, but merely the latest in a series of Valley mega-floods over centuries, according to tell-tale sediments, some of which extend well out onto the Pacific ocean floor. Different accounts at various locations around the Valley—and all up and down the west coast—put the frequency of those floods at about once every 100-200 years.

Yet the 7 million people now living in the area formerly occupied by that inland sea have plenty of reason for concern. Geological evidence in the floodplain of the Sacramento River indicate that mega-floods comparable to that of the Great Flood, or much worse, occurred sometime during the spans of 1235-1360, 1395-1410, 1555-1615, 1750-1770, 1810-1820, and 1820-1862.¹ Based on that data, geologist Michael Dettinger and paleoclimatologist Lynn Ingram, in a article that appeared in Scientific American, said that a Central Valley mega-flood had thus occurred about every one or two centuries, supposedly in line with other evidence.

But that seriously misrepresents the data, because the intervals between consecutive midpoints of those spans were 87, 183, 175, 55, and 47 years, for an average of just 109. Three of the intervals were less than 100 years, and two less than 56. So portraying the floods as occurring every 100 to 200 years is egregiously deceptive. At midpoints of 47 to 183, the floods actually occurred more like every 50 to 200 years, and about 100 on average. And since the last mega-flood was 164 years ago, the Valley is 55 years overdue for the next one, according to their average occurrence. As if that weren’t alarming enough, climate change is now speeding up the potential frequency of California mega-floods by more than threefold.² Other recent reports, while describing the biblical impact of the next Valley megaflood, likewise frame it as possibly 60-100 years away^7,8, making it all too easy for Californians to chill indefinitely.

Take a moment to let all that soak in. (Yes, *soak*.) Would you bet the mortgage that, since the longest interval between mega-flood midpoints was 183 years, and the last flood was 163 years ago, then, whew, we’re safe for another 20 years? Honestly, would you actually think that way? Or would you be eying that average of 109 years between floods and the fact that we’re 55 years past the average due date?

Astonishingly, the response of those living in the Central Valley is California cool: Nah, we’re not concerned. More people are moving here all the time, with another million expected by 2030. In fact, billionaire developers are planning California Forever, a futuristic city of 400,000 in Solano County, about halfway between San Francisco and Sacramento [well within the projected mega-flood zone]. Plus, we’re building a high-speed rail line right down the middle of the Valley. We’re good.

So despite the literally rock-solid geological evidence, over centuries, the reigning attitude of the populace appears to be What, me worry?

It’s too much to think about right now, we’ll worry about it when it happens

Uhh, right. Reminds me of a former governor of Wisconsin. When a reporter asked him a question he didn’t really want to deal with, he replied, “Oh, I’ll burn that bridge when I get to it.” That’s an apt mix of metaphors here, because cavalierly failing to prepare for an impending disaster is a way of burning your bridge to a more desirable future. So let’s take a sober look at what would result from such bridge-burning, so to speak.

• Likely 7-8 million people will have to evacuate and not return for months or possibly years. The 1861-62 flood took 6 months to dry up.

• Also needing evacuation: about 5 million cattle, including over 1 million dairy cows; 5 million turkeys; and half a million sheep, among other animals such as chickens and horses. But if the flood unfolds at the rate it did in 1861, there won’t be enough time or resources to rescue most of them.

• 25% of the nation’s food will have to be sourced from somewhere besides U.S. agriculture, which simply will not be able to replace the flood deficit in a timely manner.

• Numerous industrial supply chains to and from the west coast will be severely disrupted, heavily impacting all areas of society in the U.S.

• The pollution would be staggering: from the massive feedlot manure pools of millions of livestock to the millions of rotting carcasses themselves; from toxic fossil fuels and by-products leaking out of 240,000 oil and gas wells; from the 200 million pounds of annually applied toxic pesticides and hundreds of thousands of tons of chemical fertilizer; and from mercury, asbestos, persistent organic compounds, molds, and soil-borne or sewage-borne pathogens.⁶ All of which, and more, would result in a toxic inland sea-slurry that would leave residues too hazardous to safely return to—except for disaster workers in hazmat suits—long after the water subsides.

• The ensuing mega-disaster area will thus have to be cleaned up and infrastructure rebuilt at enormous effort and cost (on the order of $1 trillion), requiring many months if not years to get it under control.

• There will have to be a huge increase in do-it-yourself recovery efforts at all levels.

• Overall, it will make Katrina and similar catastrophes, including the Covid pandemic, look minor by comparison. Make no mistake, it will roll out as a reverberating national shock wave.

Bear in mind that several mainstream news articles have recently described the Great Flood, and how bad the next one would be^1-5, so it’s not as if it’s all a big secret. The blinkered complacence that nonetheless prevails is thus apparently due to either blissful ignorance or a default mass burial of heads in the sand. Wow, is there any hope at all?

Several studies have been conducted or are underway to determine how to prepare for the coming deluge, regardless of when it arrives^3,5,6. Still, plans to date by state and federal experts have been limited to managing water a little better, which have shown some success in re-directing flows during serious but far from catastrophic flooding events. In all fairness, the state is also trying to get ready for the next major earthquake, large-scale fires, and brutal droughts, so they have their hands full. Besides, there’s only so much you can do to forestall a flood that threatens to fill up the Valley with 20 or more feet of water.

Left unaddressed sits the greatest potential for mega-flood damage control: fixing the corrupted and compromised condition of the land wrought by industrial ag and energy. The full shock of the multi-tentacled pollution described above will be revealed all too starkly as the flood subsides. In essence, the toxicity of that mega-mess has already been deeply pre-baked into the flood aftermath by the business model of the juggernaut industrial food chain, and thus cannot be touched for now. Need proof? Recall that the U.S. industrial food already externalizes some $2 trillion in health, economic, social, and environmental damages every year. So ironically, only a mega-disaster will have the power to disrupt BAU industrial food. Will industry learn and start doing things differently, not only in California but also in the rest of the country? And if they do, will the world follow (or do it first)? We shall see. In any case, do you begin to grasp the scope of the challenge?

Enter the self-sufficiency garden food system

Fortunately, despite all our problems, we’re still a nation of (currently) 342 million creative, can-do, and optimistic people, with a lot of land. We will survive The Big One, even if, as will surely be the case, we wait until it happens before we start taking it seriously.

So how would self-sufficiency gardens help? Well, obviously, those in the Central Valley would get inundated by 15-20 feet of floodwater just like everything else. But if we have a nation-wide, robust, self-sufficiency garden food system set up by then, it would include a widely-distributed stockpile of stored food that we currently lack. Of course, how much would depend on how well established that system is when the mega-flood hits. But even if it’s providing only 25% of our food by then, it would constitute an extremely valuable resource that would help us recover from suddenly losing 25% of our conventional food supply. History has shown over and over that Americans are big-hearted when faced with a catastrophe, and I know that self-sufficiency gardeners would share their bounty, fresh or stored, with not only those fleeing the Valley but also the rest of the country, until we get back on our feet.

Supermarkets, which normally have only a three-day supply of food, would be of very little help, since they would be cleaned out almost immediately due to panic hoarding, with replenishment shaky at best. Again, we need a backup food supply, and a reliable way to continuously replenish it. I don’t see anything but self-sufficiency gardens that, post-disaster, can do that on an adequate scale and in a timely manner. Even ordinary gardens, which grow mostly energy- and protein-deficient food, would help. As well, they can give us hope by example, since by cash value (but much less by calories and protein) they already provide about 10% of our food. We just need to ramp up.

Seen from this angle, a self-sufficiency garden food system becomes a matter of national security, able to build up (can’t emphasize it enough) a much-needed, decentralized strategic food reserve. It could also serve as an example for the rest of the world, which will be watching to see how we handle food replenishment following the next mega-flood. If they see us managing it well under the inevitable extreme duress, with an efficient and resilient alternative food system, it could inspire them to adopt similar systems. That is, assuming that by then they haven’t already figured out how to do so on their own. As indeed Russia has, although so far almost no one, including its own government, has publicly acknowledged its truly great value.

If anyone reading this is currently living in the Central Valley, I’d be interested to hear what you think of this post. And best of luck to you if you plan to stay there.

¹Dettinger and Ingram, 2013. Megastorms could drown massive portions of California. Scientific American. January. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/megastorms-could-down-massive-portions-of-california/

²Huang, X. and Swain, D.L. 2022. Climate change is increasing the risk of a California megaflood. Science Advances. 8:32. https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.abq0995

³Major, P., Jones, J., and Miller, B. 2022. A disastrous megaflood is coming to California, experts say, and it could be the most expensive natural disaster in history. CNN. https://www.cnn.com/2022/08/12/weather/california-megaflood-study

⁴Ingram, L. 2013. California Megaflood: Lessons from a forgotten catastrophe. Scientific American. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/atmospheric-rivers-california-megaflood-lessons-from-forgotten-catastrophe/

⁵Philpott, T. 2020. The biblical flood that will drown California. Mother Jones. https://www.motherjones.com/environment/2020/08/california-flood-arkstorm-farmland-climate-change/

⁶Philpott, T. 2020. Perilous bounty – The looming collapse of American farming and how we can prevent it. Bloomsbury Publishing.

⁷Masters, J. 2023. The other ‘big one’: How a megaflood could swamp California’s Central Valley — A repeat of the state’s Great Flood of 1861-62 could cause over $1 trillion in damage. Yale Climate Connections. https://yaleclimateconnections.org/2023/01/the-other-big-one-how-a-megaflood-could-swamp-californias-central-valley .

⁸Howarth, T. 2026. A biblical megaflood could hit the US at any moment. And that’s only the beginning. BBC Science Focus. https://www.sciencefocus.com/planet-earth/megaflood-arkstorm-california

It was a group of food security podcasts I recently pondered that spurred me to come up with a more effective wake-up call. The first two were staged by the IFPRI (the International Food Policy Research Institute, an arm of the UN) that altogether lasted three hours. They were filled with reverberating rounds of word salad research policy, in which no action emerged that had in any way reduced food insecurity in the past, or potentially could in the future. The goal seemed to be just doing ever more research. The second two podcasts centered around food sovereignty, the right to operate local food-processing enterprises, and the like. They lasted 45 minutes each, and were refreshingly more like ordinary people having a friendly conversation. Admirable enough as far as they went, but they revealed no grasp of what it would take to scale their somewhat romanticized ideals to feed many millions.

The IFPRI talks did bring up climate change disasters, but only in passing, as if they were no more than an ongoing nuisance. That is, continuing at a normalized pace, rather than the sharply increasing reality. The two food sovereignty talks didn’t mention the disasters at all. So if these podcasts are representative of food system specialists ranging from global to local perspectives, it’s clear that environmental disasters are still eh - meh inconsequential for most people. I certainly haven’t seen any evidence to the contrary in the mainstream media.

So will this all-in-one graphic pack enough punch to spur meaningful action? And if so, at the level of gardeners as well as thought leaders? Maybe only with the help of the two Addendums? Or will we have to wait until things get much worse? You be the judge.

Consider first the red line. It indicates the rate at which U.S. billion-dollar disasters will continue to increase over the next 25 years, based on the last 10 years, according to NOAA¹. This is an exponential rate of increase, amplified by the fact that the first half of 2025 was the costliest six months of weather disasters on record.² In other words, the curve is tilting ever more steeply upward.

Now look at the lower, four blue dashed lines, which represent the rates at which various methods of food production are remaining constant or increasing. Unlike the red line, the rates of increase are best-evidence guesses, but they’re nonetheless linear and feature a low rise-to-run slope, so all of them will intersect the red line sometime soon. What does that mean?

Start with the current baseline, the rate at which food is not only produced, but also consumed. Recall that the current production-to-consumption ratio could be as low as 5% in the industrial food system. This baseline represents the least adaptive rate of change, so with it we’d run into trouble sooner than with the others. Second is regenerative agriculture, only slightly more adaptive for meeting food needs. The third is the industrial system, assuming it will become somewhat more efficient in the coming years³, but still nowhere near enough to stay ahead of food demand for 10 billion by 2050. I place current gardens as a somewhat more promising option, based on their Johnny-on-the-spot performance as victory gardens in WWII. However, as I’ve covered previously, even the average American garden will be enough compared to self-sufficiency gardens.

What it all boils down to

As I said earlier, the unsparing message in this graphic is that the lower four blue-line food production strategies will soon clash with the red line of climate change disasters. News stories already document accelerating crop challenges due to increasing heat waves, drought, floods, fires, and scarcity of irrigation water. However, as I’ve indicated previously, the food system will most likely see a steadily cascading failure, not an overnight collapse (but see tipping points, below). I’ve indicated the gradual nature of this cascade by the steadily fading “Decreasing ability to meet demand” lines. The four lower blue lines thus denote varying time frames, depending on how low their slopes are, but all of them indicate breakdown within the next 10 to 15 years or so. By contrast, the steeply sloped solid blue line—that of a self-sufficiency garden food system—does not cross the red line, as will be discussed shortly.

All four of the low-slope lines are based on my conjecture except for the most important one: the industrial system. That one comes from a mega-study by Hultgren et al., published in 2025 in the prestigious journal Nature: “Impacts of climate change on global agriculture accounting for adaptation” ³. It concluded that the global ability to adapt food systems will fulfill just 23% of what will be needed to feed the world by 2050, according to longitudinal (as opposed to scenario) calorie-based data of six staple crops over 12,648 global regions. Surprisingly, the areas that will experience the greatest challenge to adapt will be not impoverished countries in Africa, but modern bread-baskets in wealthy countries, such as the American Midwest. A bevy of other mega-studies published in 2025 also cite challenges or proposals about how to feed the world or mitigate climate change^4-8. However, none of them boast a compelling record of prior long-term success at scale.

Tipping points

In addition to the gradual, linear breakdown scenarios, it’s likely that there will be tipping points along the way, depicted in the graphic by the red stars. When and where they will occur depends on which of the four lower blue lines turns out to be most in play, with increased adaptivity of a given strategy pushing the point further into the future. Key characteristics of such triggers are:

• Threshold Behavior: Gradual change in the food system, such as ever-increasing food prices, decreasing food security, and increasing food recalls may eventually hit a point where the system’s behavior fundamentally changes. This could be due to serious loss of confidence that the industrial system can reliably supply food, causing people to start hoarding. In as much as grocery stores have only a three-day supply of food, this could easily trigger a spree of panic buying.

• Abrupt Change: A tipping point transition isn’t always slow; it can happen suddenly once a threshold is crossed. One way this could happen is with the bird flu. It’s already caused over 166 million birds to be culled (killed) in the U.S. since 2022. What if it suddenly mutates into a form virulent enough incapacitate or kill other farm animals (such as dairy cows, where it’s already widespread, though not yet deadly), or even humans? (Again, some people have already caught it, though the mortality rate is very low.) This also could precipitate a loss of confidence in the food system, which could cascade much quicker than one resulting from increasing food prices.

• Feedback Loops: This where an initial change triggers processes that amplify it, with reinforcing back-loops that make things worse and worse. A classic example in industrial agriculture is the pesticide treadmill: farmers apply chemical poisons to kill pests or keep them from reducing yields, to which the pests (or weeds) adapt, prompting applications of more or stronger pesticides, or GMOs, to which the pests also adapt, causing ever more toxic and stronger applications to control ever-adapting pests. Meanwhile, the air, surface water, and soils get ever more filled with toxic chemicals. Sooner or later, it will reach a tipping point, perhaps in the form of too many people getting cancer from farm chemicals, to where it triggers the public to leave the industrial system en masse.

• Irreversibility: Often, once a tipping point is reached, it’s very difficult or impossible to return to its original state, even if the initial trigger is removed. There are many such points in the industrial food system and its outcomes where this could happen. One example may be toxic “forever” pesticides (PFAS, Per- and Polyfluoroalkyl Substances). Once released into the environment, they continue to build up toxicity indefinitely due to their extremely slow rate of decomposition. Yet they can’t be removed. Another example could be the current global rate of obesity due to widespread consumption of ultra-processed foods. It may be reversible, but only very slowly because of industry attempts to first squeeze every drop of profit out of the obesity gravy-train before the UPF spigot is finally turned off by a wised-up public.

Of course, there is also such a thing as a positive tipping point, with its own potential for beneficial threshold behavior, abrupt change, feedback loops, and irreversibility. This possibility is depicted in the graphic by the gold star on the solid blue line. It’s the point at which self-sufficiency gardens branch off from ordinary gardens, thereby increasing the adaptivity slope of the blue line, which in turn allows them to stay ahead of the ominous red climate-change line. Like the latter, it will have an exponentially increasing slope; it has to be in order to keep ahead of the increasing rate, cost, and intensity of climate change disasters.

Rather than slowly dissolving like the other blue lines, the post-tipping point garden line remains solid blue, depicting an ability to stay strong and produce enough food to keep ahead of population increase and food demand. The reason it is likely to accomplish that is because a self-sufficiency garden food system is orders of magnitude more efficient than the industrial system (and likely the other blue-line methods as well), even if it improves its adaptability by the 23% that Hultgren, et al.³ predict. This outcome is indicated on the right by the four lower blue line strategies being too inefficient to meet food demand. To which the solution is to greatly increase efficiency, as would be manifested by the self-sufficiency garden system.

So there you have it, all I’ve been crowing about since January distilled down into just one graphic. However, it’s so condensed that, even with all the explanation I’ve just provided, there are bound to be those who would like to see—or be reminded of—at least a little supporting evidence. I thus add here a couple Addendums.

Addendum I – Billion-dollar disasters

The first is the one I’ve repeatedly shown: the NOAA-depicted rate at which billion-dollar disaster have increased from 1980 to 2024.¹ The red line is not part of the original graphic; I added it, and extended it into the next 25 years to illustrate and emphasize how extraordinarily serious it will be as it climbs inexorably onward and upward into the future. It is truly scary, yet most people are still oblivious to its threat despite the recent Helene floods, LA Fires, and other disasters that keep piling up.

Addendum II – Food system efficiency, compared.

Again, you’ve seen this table before, a number of times. It’s even more invisible to most people than the billion dollar graphic, just because it so resoundingly flouts the prevailing narrative that the industrial food system is a modern wonder with its supposed economy of scale. In reality, that economic miracle belongs to self-sufficiency gardens, as both my research and the example of Russia’s household gardens have shown.

¹Smith, A.B. 2025. 2024: An active year of U.S. billion-dollar weather and climate disasters. https://www.climate.gov/news-features/blogs/beyond-data/2024-active-year-us-billion-dollar-weather-and-climate-disasters

²Bush, E. 2025. What canceled climate data would have shown: The costliest 6 months of weather disasters on record. NBC News. https://www.nbcnews.com/science/climate-change/climate-change-data-costliest-6-months-weather-disasters-noaa-rcna238752

³Hultgren, A., et al. 2025. Impacts of climate change on global agriculture accounting for adaptation. Nature. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-025-09085-w

⁴West, P. et al. 2025. Only half of the calories produced on croplands are available for human consumption. Research Gate (preprint). https://www.researchgate.net/publication/394005686_Only_half_of_the_calories_produced_on_croplands_are_available_for_human_consumption#:~:text=Abstract%20and%20Figures,every%20calorie%20of%20boneless%20meat.

⁵Carswell, A.M., et al. 2025. Agricultural practices can threaten soil resilience through changing feedback loops. NPJ Sustainable Agriculture. https://www.nature.com/articles/s44264-025-00098-6#Tab1

⁶International Food Policy Institute. 2025. Food Policy: Lessons and Priorities for a Changing World. Global Food Policy Report. https://www.ifpri.org/global-food-policy-report/

⁷Rockström, J. et al. The EAT-Lancet Commission on healthy, sustainable, and just food systems. The Lancet. https://www.thelancet.com/commissions-do/EAT-2025

⁸Vickers, C.E. and Zerbe, P. 2025. Harnessing plant agriculture to mitigate climate change: A framework to evaluate synthetic biology (and other) interventions. Plant Physiology, Volume 199, Issue 3, November.

I’ve often wondered what the material food flow would look like today, and why (to my knowledge) no one had done a thorough update to this study. Well, now someone has, namely Paul West and his colleagues at the University of Minnesota. As of this writing, the study is still a pre-print¹, which means it’s been published online for anyone to review, but has not yet been accepted for official publication by a scientific journal. In any case, it reports that only half of the calories produced on croplands are available for human consumption. So by calorie count, 50% of the field harvest gets to the average fork, quite a bit more than the 15% in 1995, let alone the 5% that I’ve estimated for the present. But the methodologies of these two studies are so different, it’s not just comparing apples and oranges, it’s more like comparing peanuts and watermelons. It’s thus not so much a question of who’s right as what new developments mean and how you count the food. So here goes.

Cropland vs pasture and range land

In its tallies of calories, the Minnesota study counted only those produced on cropland. This is the land devoted to crops grown mainly for food (directly or indirectly), like corn, wheat, rice, potatoes, soybeans, carrots, etc. It differs from pasture and rangeland, where ruminants like cows, sheep, and goats harvest their food either directly from the land as grass, or indirectly in the form of hay and other forage such as alfalfa.

While the Minnesota study considered some 50 crops, it did not include the pasture-sourced grass and hay that make up most of the global feed for cattle. And cattle account for about half of the losses in the U.S. field-to-fork material food flow. True, the great majority of U.S. and European cattle are now fed on corn and soybean meal (instead of the grass they evolved to eat) in CAFOs (concentrated animal feeding operations), which other countries are now adopting. However, most of the world’s cattle still consume either grass in pastureland or hay. Less industrialized countries just do not have—on average—the infrastructure to support CAFOs on a large scale. Nearly all of India’s vast beef output, for example, comes from water buffalo, most if not all of which are pasture-fed. And cattle in Brazil, another mega-beef producer, are still mostly fed on pastureland, as are cattle in nearly all other non-European countries, especially in Africa. If the calories in all the grass and hay consumed by cattle had been counted, it would add quite a bit to the loss of calories in the Minnesota study, resulting in a significantly lower produced-to-consumed ratio.

Biomass versus calories

The Michigan study counted food in terms of biomass at the point of harvest, in harvested form. That would be everything from watermelons to shelled corn and soybeans to whole-grain wheat to potatoes and squash. Thus, biomass basically translates into whole, freshly harvested food weight. By contrast, the Minnesota study counted food in terms of calories, which on average depict only a fraction of whole food, though close to 100% of its energy content. Because biomass includes water, which on average comprises a larger percentage of whole food than calories, and because a lot of water is lost in the food chain, in which much less of total calories drop out, you would expect a much larger percentage of biomass being lost than calories. Hence, a notably lower produced-to-consumed ratio.

Food waste

I was surprised that the authors of the Minnesota study didn’t include pasture-derived calories, and didn’t even cite the Michigan study, but I was even more puzzled that they didn’t count the calories lost in global food waste. After all, it’s not an unknown or insignificant source of calories, as a whopping 30-40% of the food the world produces is wasted every year. In terms of totals, China discards an estimated 109 million tonnes a year, India 78 million, and the U.S. 25 million. France and Germany come in at 4-7, while smaller countries like the Philippines waste around 3 million. Per capita, the figures for the U.S. are 73 and India 55 kg/year. Again at the other end of the spectrum, the Philippines wastes 26 kg of food a year per capita. These figures come from the United Nations Environment Programme’s Food Waste Report 2024². But take a look at this quote:

“The UNEP estimates that in 2022, the world produced 1.05 billion tonnes of food waste across the retail, food service and household sectors. The average amount of food waste per capita that year is estimated to be 132 kg, of which 79 kg was household waste.”

Note that for the UNEP, as with many studies of wasted food, waste is counted only at the retail, food service, and household levels. In other words, only after the food has largely been processed. Yet the Michigan study shows that substantial waste occurs during harvest as well as all the steps of processing, especially as “respiration, animal waste, and live animals” in the sector of “Feed to livestock and poultry”, which alone uses up about 50% of total harvest. But even if you don’t count those considerable animal-related losses and waste, the food chain graphic still indicates 148,470 additional pounds lost due to processing, while only 96,270 pounds were lost to retail and food service. Plus, of the 355,800 pounds of “Edible food supply” in the graphic, 259,610 were “consumed”, meaning that consumers wasted 96,190 pounds, or only 27% of what was available to them.

This has long been the narrative among industrial food system analysts: consumers, not industry, are mostly to blame for food waste. Well, only if you don’t count the waste that happens before consumers get their hands on the food; how could they be held responsible for food that’s wasted before it reaches them? Therefore, the claim that 79 out of 132 kg per capita of food waste (60%) is due to household waste is utterly misleading, especially since global per capita food waste has increased since 1995. In fact, the World Bank reports that the U.S. alone saw a 50% rise in food waste over a 30-year period through 2017³. The fact that the Minnesota study doesn’t consider the calories in food waste at all is thus highly pertinent.

So if all the calorie losses unaccounted for in the Minnesota study were included, it would reveal a considerably greater loss of food than the 50% implied in the report. That is, calorie losses in grass/hay cattle feed not being counted; calories rather than biomass being used as a measure of food loss; and food waste not being considered at all. It would be difficult to assign an objective figure to how much these overlooked factors would add to the 50% of cropland calorie loss. But given how substantial each of them is in its own right (especially the 30-40% of all produced food going to waste), it would not be surprising if it reduced the study’s produced-to-consumed ratio by at least 35 percentage points, down to 15%, and probably to more like 5%.

To put it another way, this would mean that for every twenty pounds of food harvested in the field (in the U.S.), only three—and probably more like one—pound(s) are actually eaten by humans. So much for the industrial food system’s vaunted economy of scale.

¹West, P. 2025. Only half of the calories produced on croplands are available for human consumption. Research Gate. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/394005686_Only_half_of_the_calories_produced_on_croplands_are_available_for_human_consumption#:~:text=Abstract%20and%20Figures,every%20calorie%20of%20boneless%20meat

²Fleck, A. 2025. The Enormous Scale Of Global Food Waste. Statista. (UN Environment Programme Food Waste Index Report 2024. Think Eat Save: Tracking Progress to Halve Global Food Waste.) https://www.statista.com/chart/24350/total-annual-household-waste-produced-in-selectedcountries/#:~:text=China%20wastes%20an%20estimated%20108.7%20million%20tonnes,3.9%20and%206.5%20million%20tonnes%20per%20year.

³Responsible production and consumption. 2017. The World Bank. https://datatopics.worldbank.org/sdgatlas/archive/2017/SDG-12-responsible-consumption-andproduction.html#:~:text=Food%20loss%20can%20occur%20at,Kilocalories%20per%20person%20per%20day

Still, I fully expect those encountering this endeavor for the first time to wonder about this or that aspect of it. After all, the foundational premise is rather shocking: that the real economy of scale in food systems accrues not to vast fields stretching to the horizon, behemoth farm machinery, and 40,000-some grocery items under one roof at your local supermarket. Rather, it belongs to self-sufficiency gardens, which are orders of magnitude more efficient by four major, whole-system metrics. So for the convenience of those who, after seeing the video, want to know more about this or other, equally surprising assertions, I provide herewith an index of the posts. They are in order of appearance, starting with the very first post, Jan 20. Those with an asterisk are not about self-sufficiency gardens per se, but—as a break—interesting garden side-light stories. Clicking on any post title will take you right to it.

1. Setting the Stage for a Self-Sufficiency Garden Food System

2. Gardens and Farms -- So Very Different

3. Self-Sufficiency Gardening - What Exactly Is It?

4. *The Feather and the Corn Leaf *

5. The Surprising Economy of Scale

6. The Industrial Food System: UPFs Are Us

7. ULFs (Ultra-Local Foods), Not Regenerative Ag, Are the Answer to Industrial Food

8. *Butterbean Delight*

9. Yes, But . . . Are Gardens Really Feasible? - I

10. Yes, But . . . Are Gardens Really Feasible? - II

11. The Significance of a Self-Sufficiency Food System

12. Diffusion of Innovations - I

13. Diffusion of Innovations – II

14. The Food System in Slow-Motion Freefall

15. Russian Gardening – Proof of Concept at Scale

16. *The Ghost of a Snake*

17. The Industrial Hidden-Costs Economy of Illusion

Yet I’m not done. There are so many intriguing—or amazing, or alarming—things going on in food systems, both at the national and global scales, that I’ll be adding new posts. I’ve already largely written several of them:

· The production-to-consumption ratio: 50% or 5%?

· The abundance movement and a garden-anchored food system

· If gardens are so great, how did we get the industrial food system?

· Indirect land use change and the garden food system

· Values, paradigm shifts, and food systems: Which comes first?

So stay tuned. I’ll be finishing and getting them out just as soon as I can.

The last few years have seen a veritable flood of books, articles, scientific studies, documentaries, and breathless pronouncements by leading food experts on the global food system and food insecurity. All adopt the unquestioning aim of trying to “fix” the industrial system. Pushed, as I described in the July 14 post, by the hand-wringing “need to” take worn-out “action steps” that can, could, should, ought to, would, or hopefully “promise to” stave off starvation. These hackneyed efforts reflect the proverbial rearranging of the deck chairs on the Titanic: they’ve never really worked at the largest scales over lengthy periods of time, and thus have even less chance of doing so in the future because of climate change.

To illustrate my own push—actually, pushback—I recently wrote a review of one of these books, Foot Fight – Misguided Policies, supply challenges, and the impending struggle to feed a hungry world (2025). The author is Richard Sexton, a Distinguished Professor of Agricultural and Resource Economics at the University of California, Davis. To give him his due, here’s a quote from his book’s promo on Amazon:

“Feeding a growing world population is becoming more difficult in the face of climate change, pest resistance to traditional treatments, and misguided government policies that limit how much food ends up on our plates. Policies to support biofuels, organic agriculture, local foods, and small farms, and to oppose genetically modified foods all reduce food production on existing land. This leads to higher food prices, increased carbon emissions, and less natural habitat as cropland expands. Food Fight documents the challenges to adequately feeding the world in the twenty-first century and illustrates the ways in which contemporary food policies in the United States, Europe, and beyond imperil food security. Richard J. Sexton provides a window into the world of modern agriculture and food supply chains. He separates the wheat from the chaff to distinguish policies that will limit, or expand, the global food supply, and he explains how we can construct a food system that forestalls future hunger and environmental degradation.”

As you might surmise, he’s definitely in favor of fixing the industrial system, not with any form of sustainable agriculture—which he’d like to get rid of because it isn’t “efficient”—but by vaulting as much food “intensification” as possible to mega-farms, the bigger and sooner the better. Here is my take on that approach:

This book rests heavily on the invalid assumption that the industrial food system, of which the supposed gold standard accrues to the U.S., is amazingly efficient. Yet, as Sexton admits, “… farm products are bulky and perishable, and expensive to transport relative to their intrinsic value. This means they can’t practically be shipped long distances.” Correct. So how then could he portray our field-to-fork distance of 1,500 miles as efficient? (Answer: by ignoring full costs; see below) And contrary to what you might expect from his glowing accounts, a massive study by the University of Michigan’s Center for Sustainable Systems found that only 15% of U.S. food production (in terms of biomass) made it over that lengthy trek to the consumer’s fork¹; how is that efficient? Notably, that was in 1995, before biofuels removed another sizable chunk from the food supply chain, and meat production—the least efficient part of the chain—increased by 45%. So that 15% figure is undoubtedly a good bit lower now. Again, how is that efficient?

Moreover, the UN’s FAO (Food and Agriculture Organization) reported in 2022 that agricultural land per capita (the food footprint) for the U.S. was 3.2 acres. In other words, it takes about three acres (independently verifiable) to feed the average American. Is that really an efficient use of land? By way of comparison, the FAO also said that western Europe, itself heavily industrialized, needed only 0.7 acres, or about one fifth as much land, to feed a European. So how is our 3.2 acres—which you’d expect to be the world’s lowest food footprint according to Sexton—so amazingly efficient?

That said, the most telling indicator of industrial food inefficiency is its enormous health, economic, social, and environmental external costs, which it foists off onto other cost-payers throughout our society. This amounts to some $2-3 trillion a year for the U.S., according to food system true-cost accounting mega-studies by the Rockefeller Foundation, KPMG International, the Milken Institute, the World Bank, and others. If you had a company half or more of whose operating costs, which were inflicting considerable external damage, were paid by a rich uncle so you could turn a profit, would you call that efficient? Of course not. Yet that’s the way our industrial food system works. In fact, it’s only able to function at all by throwing off much to most of its damaging operating costs

All of that is why Sexton’s claims—that our food system challenges are mainly due to bad information, practices, and policies that supposedly threaten our ability to free up enough land, to increase yields indefinitely, to feed ever more people—are altogether a moot point. He comes down especially hard on organics, which, even though it occupies only 1% of industrial ag land, he portrays as a threat to “intensification” of food production. True, organics, along with non-GMOs, regenerative ag, animal-friendly, and small and local farms, cannot compete price-wise with large industrial farms. But that’s because they don’t offload anywhere near as much of their operating costs as do the largest farms, and the industrial food system in general. Contrary to his repeated assertions, the cost premiums of small-scale ag are not due to inefficiency because of insufficient economy of scale—i.e., because the farms aren’t big enough. Rather, they’re because large scale has a corresponding large and effectively hidden advantage by not paying for the $trillions it racks up in external costs. In short, the vaunted industrial economy of scale is a hidden-costs economy of illusion.

Even if it weren’t, from 2010-2020, the global population rose by one billion (14%), while crop calorie production rose by 24%.² Yet during that time the total number of food insecure people also rose—by 103 million (from 598 to 701—a 17% increase).³ So even substantially increasing food availability in the usual ways—whether through yield intensification or other oft-prescribed but ineffectual means—is highly unlikely to reduce food insecurity over the longer term.

Fixing industrial food system strategies and policies is thus not the answer, in part because, as Sexton notes, once they get “baked in”, as all of the most consequential ag and food system policies are, they’re politically impossible to dislodge. His primary example is corn and soy re-directed to biofuels, but entrenchment applies to the rest of the food system as well. That won’t change as long as corporate profits are valued over the general welfare.

Fortunately—and unfortunately—there is an element that will soon force the industrial system to radically reconsider how best to produce and distribute food. (Which I agree won’t be slick new technologies, “climate smart” ag, regenerative ag, organics, small farms, or the like.) That element is climate change. When the Helene hurricane flooded the mountains of western N.C., many grocery stores—with their meager three-day, just-in-time supply of food—closed for weeks, thanks to the “efficient” food system. That, in turn, prompted FEMA to (belatedly) drop in pallets of MREs (meals ready to eat) by helicopter, and to employ pack mules to get food to people in places made otherwise impassible by washed-out roads and bridges. When ever-accelerating climate disasters get so intense and close together that the government—and the food system, and probably insurance coverage well before that—can no longer cope, then, and maybe only then, will we come up with a better plan.

Then again, does it make sense to wait until the proverbial s--- hits the fan? What Sexton, as well as the rest of the agricultural economists and other food system planners, and all of us really “need to” do is go back to the drawing board. Avoiding relatively minor perceived threats to yield intensification—while remaining beholden to a fossilized food system deeply dependent on externalized costs—just won’t cut it. Especially now, with climate change bearing down on us.

¹Center for Sustainable Systems, University of Michigan. 2025. “U.S. Food System Factsheet.” Pub. No. CSS01-06. https://css.umich.edu/publications/factsheets/food/us-food-system-factsheet

²Le Page, M. 2025. Fewer than half the calories grown on farms now reach our plates. New Scientist. https://www.newscientist.com/article/2493576-fewer-than-half-the-calories-grown-on-farms-now-reach-our-plates/

³World Hunger Statistics. 2025. Macrotrends. https://www.macrotrends.net/global-metrics/countries/wld/world/hunger-statistics

One cool, sunny day last fall—it was October 18—I was strolling down a row of my beloved colored butterbeans, which even at that late date had not yet been hit by a frost. (See Butterbean Delight, May 18, to learn more about these amazing family heirloom beans, in case you missed it.)

Then I spotted something I’d never expected to see amongst bean vines: a shed snake skin. It was a good three feet off the ground, which meant that its ex-owner must have slithered its way up there. First, who knew that any of the species of snakes in southeast Iowa would be capable of climbing up skinny bean vines, much less that they would still be active in mid-October? Of course, the skin could have been sitting there since earlier in the fall, or even the summer, for all I knew. That is, if the wind hadn’t blown it away. So maybe the snake had visited quite recently after all.

I’ve seen green snakes, brown snakes, and garter snakes in and around the garden, but I’m not sure which, if any, of those had been wearing this particular skin. It looks brownish, but brown snakes tend to be on the small side, and this skin definitely looked too large to have been of that tribe. So it’s a bit of a mystery, as I am not a herpetologist.

In any case, I’m sure it wasn’t just a sightseeing tourist; it must have been hunting. I looked around a little, and sure enough, I found several big, fat grasshoppers and immature stink bugs (at least I think that’s what the one in the photo was) in the bean vines. Dinnertime. Made me try to visualize how a snake would sneak up on and strike before the insect could sense the danger and scurry or jump out harm’s way. They certainly weren’t alarmed by my cell phone suddenly appearing just a few inches away to snap a pic.

So maybe this snake had still been fattening up for the winter even this late in the fall. And maybe shedding one last skin before it snuck down into a den to hibernate.

The ghost of a snake up in the bean vines, just in time for Halloween. Who woulda thought?

First, Sharashkin’s credentials. A Russian, he earned a Bachelor of Commerce and a Specialist in International Relations from the Moscow State Institute of International Relations, followed by an MS in Environmental Policy and Natural Resources Management from Indiana University. He then headed the Conservation Finance and Economic Programme of the World Wildlife Fund, Russia while serving as editor of The Panda Times, Russia’s leading environmental magazine. Following an affiliation with the University of Missouri Center for Agriforestry, he received a PhD in Forestry there in 2008. He translated the eight-volume set of The Ringing Cedars by Vladimir Megré into English, and is the author of Re-creating a Garden Planet: Psychology of Humanity-Earth Megré Co-evolution (2009).

His dissertation The Socioeconomic and Cultural Significance of Food Gardening in the Vladimir Region of Russia, is equivalent to a 260-page book.¹ It is extremely well-researched and engagingly written, but a bit much for the average reader to digest in toto. So I’ll just discuss his main themes and compare some of his most pertinent findings to the gardening and agricultural scene in the U.S., as well as my own research.

It's important to note that much of the statistical information he cites comes from Rostat, the official government source of detailed records on many aspects of Russian life and industry, including gardening and commercial agriculture.

He has divided his work into three chapters: the first on the ancient and modern history of Russia’s family agriculture; the second on household agriculture in the Vladimir region of Russia; and the third on what he calls the invisible gardens.

Chapter 1 – Ancient roots, modern shoots: Russia’s family agriculture

The everlasting resolve

What impressed me most in this chapter is how fiercely, through all manner of upheaval and often brutal abuse, the Russian people have maintained their deep connection to the earth through their beloved gardens. Surprisingly, their battles with various autocratic figures and regimes—for over a thousand years—have been duplicated just since 1900:

Says Sharashkin, “The twentieth-century Russia saw wars, revolutions, repression, and famine; it was ruled by tsars, commissars, and presidents; it was orthodox and atheist, totalitarian, and “democratic”; it was feudal, capitalist, socialist, and capitalist again.”

Every one of those autocrats schemed to subvert garden bounty into a free source of food to compensate for non-existent or grossly inefficient state food production. Or (as is the case today) they either denied the gardeners any government assistance whatsoever, or refused to acknowledge their existence despite the extraordinary benefits they delivered to Mother Russia. (Hence the “invisible” gardens.)

Food footprint

Remember the food footprint? If not, it’s the agricultural land needed to feed one person for a year. Here’s a comparison from Sharashkin, public sources, and my own research.

In other words, Russia’s industrial system needs (4.1/0.14) = 29 times as much land to feed one person as their gardens require. By contrast, the U.S. industrial system requires (3.0/0.03) = 100 times as much land as self-sufficiency gardens need to feed one. So although the footprints are different, both Sarashkin and I found that garden food systems are far more efficient than their industrial counterparts. Most important is that the Russian industrial data was compiled by their government for 72 million people (half of the country’s population in 2004).

It also happens that the U.S. and Russian industrial systems are about equally inefficient (with food footprints of 3.0 and 4.1, respectively), whereas my gardens are 4.7 times as efficient (0.14/0.03) as the Russian gardens. However, my data represents just three self-sufficiency gardens (even though their individual vegetable yields match garden yields of those averaged from five USDA field stations), compared to many millions of Russian gardens. Plus, there are other differences between what I, other American gardeners, and Russian gardeners do. As you will see.

What we each plant

It’s so amazing to me that I put all this emphasis on planting for a balanced diet with equal parts vegetables that are: starchy (for calories), “beany” (for protein), and watery (everything else—for additional vitamins, minerals, and fiber). By contrast, Russian gardeners focus on potatoes (53.1% of planting area) with the balance going to other vegetables, perennial crops, forages, grains, and beans — roughly in equal measure (between 10% and 15% each).

What?! How in the world do they get enough protein when beans are essentially an afterthought? Yet here’s where knowing a little history of Ireland might help. Prior to the late blight disaster of the 1840s, millions of their poor (but surprisingly healthy) people got almost all of their nutrition from potatoes. As I’ve mentioned before, per unit of dried weight, potatoes have as much protein as mother’s milk. Plus, they’re rich in vitamins, minerals, fiber, and resistant starch, and are naturally gluten-free, low-fat, and satiating. Eat enough potatoes and you can get by pretty well. Of course, Russian gardeners also produce some meat, milk, and eggs, though the amounts are still quite minimal compared to potatoes.

How many people garden, and what’s the dietary significance?

In 2019, 33% of all U.S. households had a food garden, compared to 66% of all Russian households in 2006. American gardens produce about 10% of the American diet by cash value, though only about 1% by calories. Meanwhile, Russian gardens produce about 50% of their country’s food by value (no data on calories).

What this means is that Russia is in a much better position than the U.S. to deal with an industrial food system collapse induced by climate change. Especially given that gardeners supply about 95% of the country’s potatoes. Besides, most of Russia’s gardeners already have a kind of permanent climate challenge, with, as mentioned previously, only a 4-month growing season compared to 8-9 months for Iowa.

Comparing the two types of agriculture in Russia

Addressing the full significance of Sharashkin’s comparison of conventional agriculture and households would require a lengthy discussion, but I don’t think that’s necessary. You can get the collective import of it just by spending a couple seconds on each line of this table.

What is the primary purpose of gardening?

Here, Sharashkin references the legendary economist and statistician E.F. Schumacher, who held that land management should be primarily oriented towards health, beauty, and permanence. What a concept! The fourth goal—the only one accepted by the experts—producing food, will then be attained almost as a by-product.² “On all these accounts,” says Sharashkin, “food gardening stands out as a holistic practice offering all of these economic, personal, social, and cultural benefits.”

This mirrors what I’ve said in my own way, namely, that even though self-sufficiency gardens are extraordinarily efficient and effective, their main benefit is not producing food but enhancing gardeners’ circles of connection to the earth, themselves, and others.[]

Sharashkin goes even further, observing that “. . . originally, agriculture was viewed as a spiritual path, and the most direct interaction with God was seen not in any formal religious ritual familiar to us today, but through cultivation of the soil.”

So, go to the soil instead of church to get to God? Maybe for some people that could work. Perhaps others would say why not both?

The conclusion

“The fact that self-provisioning is so universal, involves both rural people and urbanites, and plays a leading role in Russia’s agriculture, shows that the social institution of subsistence growing with its economic, social, and cultural characteristics has persisted from the time of the peasant economy to the present day.”

Chapter 2 – Household Gardening in the Vladimir Region

The purpose of this chapter was to go beyond the Russian government’s dry data to find out more about more about the family dimensions of gardening in Russia. To accomplish this, Sharansky zeroed in on the Vladimir region (“oblast”). Not only did he grow up there, he considered it to be representative of much of Russia, even though its area (11,200 sq mi.) and population (1.5 million) are less than 1% that of the country. Again, there is far too much data to even summarize what he found (dozens of tables and graphs), so I’ll just continue to describe a few representative nuggets, along with their context.

How does your garden grow?

Gardening is the hot thing in Vladimir oblast. A full 95% of all families either have a garden plot or contribute to or benefit in some way from the gardens of others, compared to about, as mentioned, 42% of U.S. households. Their plots average 3,726 square feet per person, over twice my 1,400. However, theirs often include—in addition to a wide variety of vegetables—fruit and nut trees as well as some grains and animals that need more room than my strictly vegetable plot. Interestingly, corn, which I love to grow, is not mentioned, neither for Vladimir nor the country as a whole, which is a major exporter of commercial corn.

About half of gardeners’ plots are next to their homes or within what’s considered to be walking distance for Russians (1.5 mi!), with the rest an average 12 miles away. Amazing. Anything over maybe 50 yards would be a deal-breaker for most Americans.

Sans commuting time, Vladimir gardeners average two and a half hours a day of tending, compared to my one. However, their growing season—like Russia’s as a whole—is only four months long, vs my nine months. Over their meager season, they average 290 hours per person, whereas I average 231, not all that different. They just have a lot less time to get in the work, as they are waaay up north, like Canada. But they do get it done, and obviously love doing it. Just like me. On average, Vladimir gardeners spend about $270 a year on gardening expenses per household, compared to $83 for American gardening households.

So the Russians have: 1) twice as many households gardening; 2) half as many months to get the job done; 3) garden plots more than twice the size of mine and on average a good bit further away from their house; and 4) expenses more than three times as much as Americans. All this while spending about 25% more time tending their gardens as I do. Despite, or maybe because of, these differences, they produce a far higher percentage of their country’s food by value (50%) than Americans do (10%).

Full disclosure, both the (U.S.) National Gardening Association and Sharanski report a fair number of other food gardening statistics, but I think I’ve covered the main areas for which there is data from both. That is, without going into excruciating detail.

Once again, what are gardens for?

Why, to produce food, of course! Yet for Russian gardeners, that’s not even the primary reason they take up a hoe. Just look at all the other reasons they have gardens (Table 48). Now, Americans also value their gardens for several reasons other than providing food, but to nowhere near the extent that Russians do. As Sharashkin emphasizes again and again, food gardens are a major social and cultural feature of their lives. You don’t have to go very far down this list to find activities that you’ll rarely, if ever, see in American gardens.

Do you begin to see how and why gardens are a much bigger deal to the Russians than they are to us?

Chapter 3 – The Invisible Gardens

This relatively brief chapter laments the fact that despite doing so much for Russia, household gardens are all but invisible. That is, official Russian agricultural policy cannot even imagine a food system that doesn’t rely on large-scale industrial production that at best would try to commercialize whatever “surplus” household gardens produce. Even though they exemplify and convincingly document the benefits of gardens themselves.

I would add that the American industrial food system, along with the international system, are equally oblivious. A few months ago I had the chance, through an intermediary, to inform the FAO (Food and Agriculture Organization) of the UN about my approach. They said, Oh, we’re already doing that, and cited a page on their website describing essentially small-scale, somewhat sustainable but still farm-based agriculture. When I wrote back and described in some detail how distinctly different and demonstrably far more efficient a garden system is than even small-scale farms, I received no answer. It was invisible to them, too.

Nevertheless, the effort to inform persists. To further illustrate the value of gardeners’ connection to the earth, Sharashkin describes the work of Russian entrepreneur Vladimir Megré, who published the now nine-volume Ringing Cedars series. I think of these books as a form of folk documentary that “. . . advocate a return to the land and rural living as consistent with Russia’s traditional millennia-old lifestyle and the economic, social, cultural, and spiritual needs of human nature.”

As well, “Megré suggests that maintaining contact with one’s own piece of land and establishing a circular flow of matter, energy, and information between each family and their family domain’s ecosystem is important for both physical and psychological well-being.” This is a more concrete take on the benefits that Megré refers to.

What does it all mean?

The overarching question is whether, compared to garden-based food systems, the gross inefficiency of the U.S. and Russian industrial systems is compelling enough to warrant adoption of garden-anchored food on a massive scale. Of course, that scale has already been achieved in Russia, but not for most of the rest of the world, as far as we know.

The irony is that we regularly see glowing news reports of—potentially, at most—15-20% yield increases that the media tout as “breakthroughs” that “promise” to “feed a hungry world” or save us from climate change disasters. Yet household gardening doesn’t just promise, it delivers. I emphasize how, via four measures of efficiency that self-sufficiency gardens are orders of magnitude more efficient than the U.S. industrial system. Similarly, Sharashkin focuses not only on garden production of 50% of Russia’s food on 3% of its agricultural land, but also on the extensive social, economic, and cultural benefits it confers. And that it’s been providing these kinds of advantages since antiquity.

For the near as well as longer-term future of food systems, proven orders of magnitude versus a few potential percentage points pretty much sums up the difference of this road not taken. Yet.

¹Sharashkin, L. 2008. The socioeconomic and cultural significance of food gardening in the Vladimir region of Russia. PhD dissertation, University of Missouri. chrome-extension://efaidnbmnnnibpcajpcglclefindmkaj/http://naturalhomes.org/img/food-gardening-russia.pdf

²Schumacher, E.F. 1973. Small is beautiful: A study of economics as if people mattered. Harper Collins.

The answer is yes, but it’s not about to completely collapse overnight—it’s more like a slow cascade. Yet it’s not too early to think about growing your own food, either, just for peace of mind in case groceries start to get scarce or expensive. Many lower-income people, especially those who depend on government assistance or food banks, have already reached that point. If you’re an influencer—that is, an information gate-keeper such as an editor, or a thought leader like Michael Pollan, or a government policy-maker—you may be more worried about the security of the country as a whole. Or perhaps you’re just a concerned observer who would like to do something to help.

Like what, for instance? Well, on the individual level, plant a starter self-sufficiency garden (more on how to do that in a later post). At the mass level, help galvanize a garden food system that would supply up to 50% of the nation’s food in the form of a healthy, balanced diet. This, of course, is what I’ve been pushing all along. I’m thinking primarily about the U.S., secondarily Canada and Europe, and then the rest of the world. I start with the U.S. because we run the world’s least efficient and most damaging version of industrial food, and for better or worse we lead by example. However, I don’t discount the possibility that some other country or region could get inspired enough—possibly out of sheer necessity—to leapfrog ahead of us. In fact, Russia has already reached the 50% mark, as I’ve noted many times. But no one is following their example. Yet.

The Global Food System in Turmoil

It’s not that major food watchers are oblivious to global food insecurity. The UN and other relief agencies like Oxfam beat the drums about it all the time, to no avail that goes much beyond emergency infusions of financial or food aid, or short-term, stop-gap business-as-usual fixes. But amping up the drums, 100 Nobel Prize Winners recently signed an open letter warning that BAU will not meet the food needs of an expected ten billion people by 2050. Not even close.

Some prominent thinkers believe that the global food system is all but certain to crash unless we do something truly drastic to prevent it (such as replacing real food with bacterial goo). Here are a couple examples of their reasoning^1,2.

Others tiresomely advocate worn-out “action steps” we “need to” take, which they insist can, could, should, ought to, would, or hopefully “promise to” stave off starvation while now weaving in the challenge of climate change. Most of their proposed fixes—none of which marshal compelling evidence of effectiveness at massive scale under increasing climate change duress—will be familiar to any global food system expert.

How the experts say we can feed the world

Increase the total output of crops and livestock.

This is the obsessive strategy of virtually all mainstream media pundits, and even—still (!)— many agronomists. Its go-to justification used to be the claimed success of the Green Revolution, which we now know causes more food, social, and environmental problems than it solves. Still, two billion more people by 2050—about 25% more than now—means we need to produce 50% more food by then. And that means—according to the prevailing narrative—greatly increasing yields with more chemicals and water, better financing, “smart” technology, and improved crop genetics. But since increasing yields over the last 70 years has not solved food problems, the only alternative is to clear 25% more land to further ramp up agriculture-as-usual. That, of course, would spike greenhouse gas emissions, resulting in ever-hotter weather—making it much harder for all the other prescriptions to work in most parts of the world. This is the “feeding the world without frying it” conundrum^2,3.

Shift from meat to plant-based foods and meat substitutes.

Oh, my, for how many decades now have the experts lectured that solving food insecurity means eating less meat and more plants? Yet look what’s happened: a prodigious net increase in global meat demand and production. In general, the world just isn’t prepared to give up meat; in fact, it wants more of it. Meanwhile, ventures into plant- and/or fungi-based substitutes and lab-cultured meat have been mostly duds. I’ve even seen one idea, mentioned previously, to free us from farms by turning non-agricultural feedstock such as fossil fuels into edible—if not very tempting—synthetic food.⁴ Besides leading investors into financial dead-ends, the purveyors of such next-generation foods have missed emerging evidence that it’s the ultra-processing, more than harmful ingredients, that make them unhealthy. Food from lab dishes or petroleum? Not just ultra-, but hyper-processed foods (HPFs?). And as we’ve seen, ordinary UPFs are already on the ropes health-wise.

Reduce food loss and waste.

Again, the food authorities have harangued for many years that if we could just eat instead of wasting 30-40% of the food the world produces, no one would go hungry (at least for the time being). But in spite of repeated waste-reduction initiatives here and there—imploring restaurants and grocery stores to give their still good but unusable food to the needy, being careful to buy only what we eat, salvaging food otherwise lost at various points along food chains up to thousands of miles long—the waste dilemma has not significantly improved. Habits all along the chain are evidently just too deeply entrenched, and no amount of urging can dislodge them.

Shift to healthier agricultural production.

That is, healthier for both farmland and people. Principal among these is the now ever-hyped regenerative agriculture. In an earlier post I discussed eight reasons why, despite its superficially admirable features, it has no hope of succeeding at scale over the longer run. Then there’s “vertical” agriculture, in which vast greenhouses substitute tightly-packed walls of LED light bulbs for sunlight, safely out of the weather and not limited to the warmer growing seasons. But this approach only works for watery vegetables like lettuce, greens, tomatoes, and cucumbers—not calorie- and protein-rich items like corn, sweet potatoes, and dry shell beans. Those staples require the full sunlight that LEDs can’t match. You can’t live on water, fiber, vitamins, and minerals alone.

Offer more carrots, wield more sticks

Subsidies to OECD (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development) countries, including the U.S., total more than $700 billion per year, mostly to unsustainable meat and dairy production. So, why not divert some of that gravy train to sustainable practices, or even implement new subsidies that would mitigate the health, economic, social, and environmental damages of conventional production? Other common prescriptions are to levy taxes on unhealthy food and practices, and to increase regulatory pressure, such as banning CAFOs (concentrated animal feeding operations) or limiting the use of agricultural antibiotics. Yes, they’ve registered a few small-scale successes, but these kinds of strategies provoke vehement opposition from the industrial juggernaut. As a result, they’re going nowhere. Don’t poke the bear.

Stop diverting food to biofuels.

In the U.S., about 40% of corn and 40-46% of soybean oil goes to biofuels. Most cars in Brazil run on ethanol derived from sugarcane. And globally, food crops produce 810 calories a day per person that end up feeding cars and trucks instead of people. Nevertheless, again because of excessive waste and loss in the industrial food chain, diverting those fuel stocks back to food would make no more than a small dent in global food insecurity. Besides, the food-to-fuel industry has no intention of loosening its grip on its heavily subsidized source of bounty.

Adapt to climate change.

Actually, all of these proposals could be played as attempts to adapt to climate change. Yet a recent, massively comprehensive study—spanning 12,658 regions, and two-thirds of global crop calories—reported that six key staple crops will likely see a substantial production drop over the coming decades.⁵ Surprisingly, it also found that the areas least able to adapt to global warming will be not the poorest regions of the world but the bread baskets of the richest countries, such as the Midwest of the U.S. So perhaps our own food supply is in greater danger than we thought.

In addition, given the dependence of many countries on U.S. and a few other major ag exporters, this study not only tightens the amount of time we have to adapt, it also strongly suggests that we need to step outside of our deeply dug-in (read: industrial) mindset to see how best to adapt.

And others

Some prescriptions don’t fit neatly into these categories, such as ramping up relatively minor sources of global food like fish, and convincing African and some Asian women to have fewer babies. Others include addressing the rapidly accelerating demise of honeybees, upon which billions of dollars worth of crops depend for pollination, and fortifying nutritionally-depleted crops with vitamins or minerals.

Regardless of the fix, it all needs to be accomplished before increasing carbon emissions (due to no small degree to agriculture) render the industrial system so over-stressed it’s non-functional. Again, feed the world without frying it.

So what to do?

Overall, the elephant-in-the-room reason none of these proposals will work is that they all depend on fixing the industrial food system, as it’s widely held to be the only way to mass-produce food. Yet its gross inefficiency and outsized collateral damage, which the University of Oxford says destroys more value than it creates⁶, is itself the source of the problem. And even if the prescribed fixes could somehow be forced to work, they would need lengthy and massive campaigns to change entrenched habits and/or decades of research, development, and infrastructure to scale up.

The conclusion reached by the Nobel Prize winners, as well as Bendell, Monbiot, a growing number of food system experts, and the study mentioned above, is that without some drastic new (not tired old) approach, we simply cannot come even close to feeding two billion more people by 2050. And even if we did, we’d then be faced with far more mouths to feed over the subsequent 25 years.

Tellingly, the blinkered belief—still held by many—that tired old strategies could work rests on the following widely-held but invalid assumptions:

1. Only farms can produce significant amounts of food for the world.

This, as the production of half of Russia’s food by gardens has demonstrated, is the mother of all misapprehensions about food systems. Not surprisingly, it drives the next four assumptions, each building on the mistaken premise about farms:

a. The global food supply comes almost entirely from industrial production.

No, it doesn’t. The FAO held for years that only 30% of the global food supply was due to large-scale industrial efforts. Then two studies claimed it was more like 70%.^6,7 However, not only did they ignore evidence of large amounts of alternative food sources, they also based their estimates on the assumption that 100% of industrial production is consumed. As we’ve seen, only about 5-15% of the U.S. material harvest makes it to the consumer’s fork, and the global average isn’t much better.

b. Agricultural production is largely equal to consumption.

No, it isn’t, as just noted. Yet you see the production-equals-consumption myth inferred just about everywhere in the popular press. It’s even still used in some food system analyses.

c. All adaptations in food production will consist of industrial tweaks.

Where else could they come from if all we had was the industrial model to feed the world? Yet, as the household garden model in Russia has shown, industrial is not all that we have.

d. Increasing yields is essential to reducing food insecurity.

No it isn’t, in large part because of the inability of increased yields to do the trick, as discussed above. Even more convincing: the global population rose by one billion (14%) from 2010 to 2020, while crop calorie production rose by 24% during that period. Yet the total number of undernourished people also rose—by 103 million, or 17%. So even substantially increasing food availability in the usual ways—whether through increasing yields or other oft-prescribed but ineffectual means—doesn’t reduce food insecurity. By contrast, when a much greater proportion of food production results in consumption, as with household gardens, it’s not necessary to increase farm yields.

The folly of basing food security on these invalid assumptions founders even further on the next two, equally flawed suppositions:

2. The pace of climate change won’t continue to accelerate substantially.

Even though the perils of climate change are now widely acknowledged, an unstated assumption persists that the pace and intensity of disasters won’t continue to get much worse. But NOAA’s record of billion-dollar disaster events from 1980 to2024, however, indicates otherwise.⁸

3. We still have decades to develop and implement needed adaptations.

Many of the proposed fixes assume that we have 25 years or even much longer to step up massive attitude changes or infrastructure buildout needed to implement them. Given the sharply accelerating pace of climate change, we simply don’t have that time. Doubtful? Then do a thought experiment: logically extrapolate the end of the curve in the NOAA graphic from 2024 to an imaginary 2050 and you’ll see what I mean. At some point well before 2050, multi-billion-dollar disasters will overwhelm the government’s rescue capacity, likely preceded by disappearing insurance coverage, which is already beginning to happen in hurricane-prone Forida.

Overall, it’s a truly fatuous tower of cards, with the mother of all assumptions propping up its equally dubious children. The upshot is it just doesn’t make sense to try and beat a dying horse (i.e., fix the industrial food system), especially when climate change and other disruptors are so rapidly encroaching upon us. Any one of them, or maybe two or more acting together, is/are more than capable of tipping over the food system grocery cart long before the hoped-for fixes could take effect.

The only solution that does makes sense is to build up a proven self-sufficiency garden food system based on solid premises. Because it’s far more efficient than the industrial system, it can easily feed two billion more people without pumping a monstrous new pulse of carbon into the atmosphere. In fact, because its food footprint is a small fraction of industrial’s, it will free up a lot of land for natural vegetation, which is more efficient at sequestering carbon than agricultural fields of any kind. At the same time, it will give the industrial system time to salvage what it can of itself, as it has no choice but to do, anyway. As I’ve pointed out again and again, we’ll still need it to feed densely populated areas, at least for a while. Just don’t expect it to revamp itself enough to feed the world without frying it; it simply can’t. So stay tuned to see in more detail why gardens offer by far the best hope for food.

¹Bendell, J. 2023. Breaking together – A freedom-loving response to collapse. Good Works.

²Monbiot, G. 2022. Biogenesis – Feeding the world without devouring the planet. Penguin Books.

³Grundwald, M. 2025. We are eating the Earth – The race to fix our food system and save our climate. Simon and Schuster.

⁴Davis, S.J., et al. 2024. Food without agriculture. Nature Sustainability. 7: 90-95.

⁵Hultgren, A. 2025. Impacts of climate change on global agriculture accounting for adaptation. 642, 644–652. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-025-09085-w

⁶University of Oxford. Fixing the broken food system would unlock trillions of dollars in benefits, study finds. News and Events. https://www.ox.ac.uk/news/2024-01-29-fixing-broken-food-system-would-unlock-trillions-dollars-benefits-study-finds#:~:text=Currently%2C%20our%20food%20systems%20destroy,to%20diet%2Drelated%20chronic%20disease.

⁶Riccariadi, et al., 2018. How much of the world's food do smallholders produce? ResearchGate. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/325405959_How_much_of_the_world's_food_do_smallholders_produce

⁷Lowder, et al., 2021. Which farms feed the world and has farmland become more concentrated? World Development. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0305750X2100067X

⁸Smith, A.B. 2025. 2024: An active year of U.S. billion-dollar weather and climate disasters. NOAA Climate.Gov. https://www.climate.gov/news-features/blogs/beyond-data/2024-active-year-us-billion-dollar-weather-and-climate-disasters

All successful innovations go through an adoption curve, in which the new technology, practice, or idea reaches a critical mass. After that, it becomes self-sustaining, at least according to theory. But not all innovations are successful. For instance, many predicted that sustainable/regenerative agriculture, which is invariably framed as innovative, would be wildly successful. Yet even after decades of trying, it’s never accounted for more than about 1% of wholesale U.S. food sales. Or 6% if you count USDA organic, which is more a compromised list of don’ts than a farming system. Self-sufficiency gardens have much greater potential to reach a critical mass. Why? To briefly reiterate from previous posts, they have:

• Demonstrated impressive efficiency and scalability, as in Russia’s household gardens providing 50% of the country’s food on just 3% of its agricultural land. Another example: Nigeria’s production of 50% of its vegetables on 2% of it’s agricultural land.¹

• The capacity for quick implementation, as indicated in general by U.S. WWII victory gardens ramping up to 40% of the nation’s vegetable production on 20 million gardens—all within just a couple years.

• A low-cost ease of adoption with minimal technology and training, again evidenced by victory gardens, not only in the U.S. but also in other countries.

However, the diffusion of innovations model holds that adoption will eventually reach 100%; anything significantly lower than that is considered a failure. By contrast, I’ve said all along that if just 50% of the population adopted a self-sufficiency garden—or if together all types of household gardens produced 50% of our food—it would be an enormous success that would drastically improve the health and well-being of the nation.

Besides, most people in high-density populations like New York City literally can’t have a garden. As well, others are physically unable to or don’t care to have one, so 100% adoption is simply not feasible. That’s why a successful curve for self-sufficiency gardens, despite following an S-pattern, is much better suited to a goal of 50%, with local food streams and industrial comprising the rest. Nevertheless, the categories of adopters within that goal, from innovators to laggards, would likely fall into the same bell-shaped curve as the standard model:

Adoption strategies

Change agents

Go-getters at the leading edge of adoption may come from inside or outside of a pertinent community. Innovation is typically initiated by gatekeepers, followed by opinion leaders, and from there adoption spreads through the society. Gatekeepers include editors, managers, or community leaders who control initial access to information about a new initiative. Opinion leaders are those who, once the gatekeepers have spilled the beans, so to speak, help inspire the larger community to follow.

The question is, who or what is most likely to be the gatekeepers crucial to self-sufficiency gardens, as well as a food production system made up of such gardens? Will it necessarily be influential people, as assumed by standard diffusion of innovation theory? Or will the influencers be eclipsed by catalytic events, including those outside of short-term human control?

In the case at hand, the single most likely gatekeeper will be the editor who choses to publish this Substack thread as a book. Opinion leaders who then pick up on the concept and inspire others to follow may include:

• Highly-respected “foodie” experts like Michael Pollan and Marion Nestle, or renowned chefs like Gordon Ramsay or Ella Mills.

• Environmentalists such as Al Gore or Bill McKibben.

• Mega-social personalities like Oprah.

• The National Gardening Association (which conducts large, influential surveys on gardening every few years) and other garden organizations.

• The mainstream and alternative press (including Substack).

• Government policy-makers. Ordinarily, this block of potential influencers will be among the last, not the first, to hop on the bandwagon, as they are largely in the pocket of the industrial food system. However, the USDA does have The People’s Garden, [ ] although it’s oriented more toward ordinary gardening than food self-sufficiency. But if the government reaches a point where it can no longer rely on industrial agriculture to fully meet the nation’s food needs, as happened in WWII with victory gardens, it could become a powerful opinion leader. (See Event or Situation Incentives, below.)

Once the novelty of starting up a self-sufficiency garden starts to grab some traction, it could be enhanced by any number of interest-provoking schemes. One option: a gardening challenge enabled through a website or social media. It might be framed as an enticing self-competition: “How long, really, could you live on food you’ve grown yourself? A day? An entire week? A month? How about a whole year? Try and meet a level of food self-sufficiency that’s right for you and tell us about it.”

Other people-oriented strategies could include:

• An incubation period fired up by enduring communication networks. Social media could be helpful, but only if they steadily build awareness. Viral flash-in-the-pan episodes that attract initial widespread attention but then quickly vaporize are not that helpful.

• Emphasizing direct word of mouth and example whenever possible. Inter-personal networks are far more durable, especially among those who are already connectivity-schmoozers—as the gardening-friendly tend to be—than less personal forms of communication.

Event or situation incentives

As you may have noticed, these are not ordinary times. It’s increasingly likely that diffusion of innovation for self-sufficiency gardens will be energized not by a socially-mediated strategy but an ominous event or situation that alarms people into taking action. As I’ve mentioned previously, the instigator could be ultra-processed foods. Or rising food prices, or—most likely—environmental disasters. Any of which could be Trumped by the trade war and gratuitous removal of vital support for farms, especially the small to medium-sized operations that account for about 30% of U.S. food output. Which of these ticking time bombs might trigger a gardening boom is anybody’s guess, but at some point necessity may be the mother of adoption.

Benefits

Individual

Food gardening in general bestows a broad spectrum of personal, practical, economic, social, spiritual, and environmental benefits, as most gardeners will readily attest. However, a self-sufficiency garden—as defined throughout this thread—confers additional returns, namely:

· A balanced diet. Again, the average American garden, though adequate in vitamins, minerals, and fiber, is low in protein and energy.

· That it’s structured so an individual can raise a year’s worth of food on a 35’x40’ plot in an average hour a day, using hand tools only.

· An enhanced level of self-empowerment derived from eating only from your garden for an extended period of time, which goes beyond supplementing grocery store fare with garden vegetables.

· The additional degree to which you feel connected to the earth, yourself, and others as a result of sustaining yourself solely from your own efforts. It’s an effect that only really begins to sink in once you’ve experienced it for at least a month straight.

Collective (local to global)

• When fully developed, a quite substantially greater level of self-sufficiency and food security in the face of climate change and regional conflicts. More on this in the next post.

• As mentioned before, mitigation or removal of massive health, economic, social, and environmental damage and externalities wrought by the industrial food system. In fact, trillions of dollars worth, every year.

Costs

Individual

• Expenses of seeds and gardening supplies and equipment, though some items are one-time purchases that can be amortized over years.

• The challenge of appearance when located on lawns in communities that prohibit gardens due to their claimed lowering of aesthetics or property values. Sometimes—amazingly—gardeners have had to mount enduring campaigns to procure the right to grow their own food. Ironically, studies have shown that community gardens, at least, enhance a range of positive social indicators in the neighborhood, including property values. Attractively-designed individual gardens could thus make it easier for doubters to come around. I predict that if, as I expect, a gardening boom happens, neighbor barriers will start coming down.

• Health issues resulting from chemical pesticides and fertilizers. Some gardeners use them in even greater relative concentrations, with fewer safety measures, than conventional farmers. Easy to avoid by prodigious use of compost and natural pest controls.

• Not that likely, but worth mentioning: health issues due to vehicle fumes if the garden is located next to a busy street.

• Labor? Again, not an issue. Contrary to the industrial mindset, the physical activity of gardening is not “labor” that has to be financially assessed as if the gardener were a farm worker. If engaged enjoyably, knowledgeably, and in a way that’s consistent with one’s physical abilities, the exercise and exposure to nature is not a gardening cost. On the contrary, it’s a benefit, as it directly enhances physical, mental, spiritual, and social health. That’s not to say that farm labor isn’t a legitimate expense for farms. Just that its value has to be assessed differently than the nurturing of a garden.

  

  Collective

• Public awareness campaigns about the benefits of gardening (as described above) to counter the billions industry spends to maintain 75% or more of our diet as UPFs.

• Subsidies, grants, and the like may help both individual gardeners and community gardens get started. However, we’ve seen all too many examples of people coming to depend on them indefinitely. That’s how, for instance, “farmer welfare” became entrenched, so care should be taken to ensure that doesn’t happen with any form of gardening. Especially since one of the most valuable benefits is self-empowerment, which would be undermined by continued dependence on freebie financing. Ideal would be for newcomers to start up their gardens with their own resources, with the plot size commensurate with what they can reasonably afford, even if it’s initially quite small. Besides, starting small will help ensure greater initial and then continued confidence of success with increasing size.

The wrap-up

Diffusion of Innovations is thus a useful theoretical concept for imagining how self-security gardens could be adopted over time. Even if they end up producing “only” 50% of the food supply and are motivated not by human-centered persuasion strategies but by events that more or less scare people into action. Either way, greatly increased self-empowerment and security would result, which would add up to a considerable net benefit for the country.

Stay tuned for what will likely be the next three posts: The global food system in turmoil; How gardens supply 50% of Russia’s food; and The self-sufficiency beginner’s garden.

¹Cunningham, W.P. and Cunningham, M.A. 2018. Environmental Science – A Global Concern. McGraw Hill.

It’s one thing to say you want to galvanize a self-sufficiency garden food system (GFS), but it’s quite another to imagine just how that would unfold over time. Fortunately, there’s a well-developed theory, “Diffusion of Innovations,” developed by Everett Rodgers, that explains how, why, and at what rate new ideas or technologies spread through a social system.

The initial innovation that led to this concept was the introduction of hybrid corn in the 1940s as an alternative to the open-pollinated standard. Now, a network of self-sufficiency gardens is being offered as an alternative to the average vegetable garden and the industrial food system (IFS). Both innovations represent a significantly different way of producing food, with both starting in Iowa. The following summary illustrates how the main features of this process would be applied to gardens and ultimately an entire food system.

The innovation itself

So to begin with, what’s so innovative about what I’m offering? After all, there are already numerous ways to garden, including how to achieve self-sufficiency therefrom, most notably in homesteading. However, homesteading aims to be off-grid not only in food but also in energy, water, and sewage treatment, so it’s too demanding for most people.

What makes my approach innovative is a unique combination of features I’ve yet to see fully matched by any other gardening system, although a few versions have some elements of it. I’ve described it previously, but for those seeing this thread for the first time, I’ll summarize it here. There are not just one, but two levels of novelty, beginning with the full scope of self-sufficiency gardening itself:

• Being able to enjoyably grow a year’s supply of food per person—on a 35’x40’ plot—in an hour a day, using hand tools only.

• Growing enough variety to provide the vitamins, minerals, fiber, protein, and carbs needed for a fully balanced diet, not just the usual watery veggies.

• Completing the “full circle” of the gardening experience—planting, nurturing, harvesting, prepping, and eating—on a continued basis.

• Eating only from one’s garden for an extended period of time, starting—for beginners—with a day, then up to a month, and eventually up to a year.

The second level of innovation extends self-sufficiency gardening to a whole food system that is far more efficient than the industrial system. Again, I’ve yet to see another fully developed concept of how any other version of gardening could lead to an entire system of food production and consumption at a massive scale. At most you’ll see grossly incomplete references to organic or regenerative/sustainable agriculture. The GFS is thus an innovative whole system technology distinctly different from the IFS, farm-based agriculture, and typical American gardens.

Elements of diffusion

Characteristics of innovations

In general, the GFS meets Rodgers’ criteria of innovation, as it features:

• A considerable gain of efficiency – As just mentioned, the GFS is enormously more efficient than the IFS in field-to-fork distance, produced-to-consumed ratio, food footprint, and external costs.

• Compatibility with the previously existing system – 42% of U.S. households already have food gardens that could easily be ramped up to greater levels of self-sufficiency while inspiring beginners to start up new gardens.

• Ease of adoption – 20 million WWII victory gardens were scaled up to produce 40% of the nation’s vegetables within a couple years, on short notice, and with little and inexpensive gardener training.

• Ease of testability – Victory gardens’ contribution to the U.S. food supply was closely tracked by the USDA; today, its 2,900 Extension Offices and 100 university affiliations are ideally set up to document the efficacy of self-sufficiency gardens.

• Potential for continued development and improvement – Hundreds of gardening books, videos, articles, and webinars provide limitless potential for adapting the basic concept of self-sufficiency gardens to individual preferences.

• Easily observed results – The positive effects of home gardening on health, food budget, self-empowerment, and social well-being are already well documented.

• A small core and large periphery - The core is existing gardeners, who are well positioned to ramp up to a large periphery of self-sufficiency garden adopters.

• No disruption to routine tasks – This is especially true for the surprisingly reasonable time requirement, which turns out to be one of the most innovative elements of self-sufficiency gardening (see next).

Lack of significant barriers

Potential barriers, and why they’re not deal-breakers, were addressed at length in the April 1 and 13 posts. Summarized, they are:

• No excessive time requirement – As I’ve previously documented—with a season-long, daily activity/time log—it took me, at age 72, only about an hour a day to grow a year’s supply of food—over 1,000 pounds of vegetables.

• Producing enough protein and calories in a garden –With 70% of our population overweight and 43% obese, current baseline standards for these nutrients are likely skewed to excessively high levels. I suggest eating from a self-sufficiency garden planted to about one-third each of protein-rich, calorie-rich, and watery but otherwise nutrient-rich crops, then closely monitoring your health to achieve optimal results.

• Ramping up a 35’x40’ garden to serve a family of four – Specific data for that scenario is not yet available. However, the fact that household gardens in Russia provide half of its food on just 3% of its agricultural land indicates that meeting family needs on a very large scale is not a problem.

• Sufficient storage space – With 2,400 sq ft of floor area, the average American house should not be too challenged to allocate perhaps 5% of that space for stocking canned, frozen, pickled, dehydrated, and whole dry home-grown food. Especially since it will typically be stored in floor space-efficient shelves, whether in pantries or cold storage.

• Competition from convenient, cheap, and tasty ultra-processed foods – Rapidly increasing concern about UPF links to bad health effects, rising food prices, and increasingly frequent and intense environmental catastrophes are already driving more people to grow more of their own food. More on this point below.

• No space for a garden – True, people in downtown NY City and the like have no yards and must continue to depend on the IFS. Yet 23% of all U.S. urban area is occupied by lawns with enough space, combined with rural areas, for up to 90% of the population to grow self-sufficiency gardens. Even 50%—which is the goal, after all—would be an extraordinary achievement.

• Climate change disasters destroy gardens, too – Also true, but because of close-proximity control and in-house food storage, a national grid of self-sufficiency gardens would provide far greater resilience than the 1,500 mile-long industrial food chain with its meager three-day supply of groceries.

• Even self-sufficiency gardens require external inputs – Yes, they do, and businesses that supply compost, mulch, gardening supplies, greenhouses, education, and even done-for-you services will add many new jobs as the GFS ramps up.

In addition, as the WWII victory gardens demonstrated, training gardeners faces far fewer barriers than training farmers en masse to switch from industrial to regenerative agriculture [ ]. Which is why, when the government needed a quick, effective influx of large amounts of food, it turned to engaging new gardeners, not additional farmers. It also helps that prior adopters (current gardeners) are typically eager to help train and encourage their kindred spirits (new adopters).

Characteristics of self-sufficiency garden adopters

“Google search interest in ‘raising chickens’ has jumped markedly from a year ago. The shift is part of a broader phenomenon: A small but rapidly growing slice of the American population has become interested in growing and raising food at home, a trend that was nascent before the pandemic and that has been invigorated by the shortages it spurred.” — NY Times Feb. 2, 2023.

Research has shown that when a new idea is introduced to a community, the first people to adopt it exhibit a predictable set of character traits. This was certainly true for the introduction of hybrid corn seed to the farming community. Some farmers, because of their innate tendencies—more readily motivated, metropolitan, and empowered—picked it up more quickly than others. For self-sufficiency gardeners, the first adopters will tend to be those who:

• Are most open to change and new ideas, especially those that center around increasing connectivity to themselves, others, and their surroundings.

• Are more likely to live in urban and suburban areas, which is where most self-sufficiency gardens will necessarily be located. Surprisingly, rural people are on average among the later adopters.

• Have the power or agency to create change, not incidentally true of almost anyone who has a lawn, which 80% of U.S. homeowners have. This means that if they have the wherewithal—land, a garden hose, access to gardening supplies, etc.—they’re more likely to start up a garden than those who don’t.

The process of diffusion

As with all new adopters, gardening beginners or upgraders will go through the process of:

• Learning about the advantages of a self-sufficiency garden.

• Becoming intrigued by the prospect of enjoyably supplying themselves with up to a year’s worth of a balanced diet.

• Deciding to try it out.

• Following through with a trial self-sufficiency garden.

• Adopting [self-sufficiency gardening] as an ongoing habit.

A number of increasingly compelling factors will accelerate this process, though it’s hard at this point to tell which will bring things to a head first. If I were a champion of the IFS desperately trying to preserve business as usual, I think I’d be most worried about the unending parade of bad health effects linked to ultra-processed foods. Given that the industry puts about 75% of its business in that basket, with the goal of increasing it to 90% by 2028, I just cannot see any way out for them. They’ve really painted themselves into an existentially-threatening corner. About the most they can do now is remove or hide some of the more toxic ingredients while trying to retain ultra-convenience, irresistible taste, and artificially low cost—a daunting challenge for most UPFs.

However, UPFs could well turn out to be a moot point if the now much-weaker FEMA first reaches a point where it can no longer deal with the steadily increasing frequency and intensity of environmental disasters. Or if ill-prepared states, to which FEMA is already trying to punt responsibility, have to take over crisis management. Or if insurance companies reach their limits for damage coverage. All of which is being hastened by a mindless trade war that’s hitting small- to medium-sized farms¹ harder than any other sector.

These are only the most alarming signs of distress for the reigning food system. Together, they make it all the more urgent to adopt a system that offers a better future.

Decisions, decisions

Most important about deciding to start a garden is that it be chosen freely, implemented voluntarily, and enjoyed. The decision cannot be imposed by those in positions of power or influence (from parents to governments), or by some collective entity, even if democratically voted for. For gardening to work at all, the decision to do it must be freely made by the individual; disgruntled gardening, especially by kids, is a non-starter. That said, friendly, respectful enticement, as well as leading by example, is very much in order.

Stay tuned for further parameters of diffusion of innovations.

¹Irby, M, and Cleveland, J. 2025. In its war against small farmers, Congress says the quiet part out loud. The Hill.

Setting a compelling example

Given America’s status as the leading exponent of industrial food, moving to 50% garden fare would set a startling example for the rest of the world. That is, assuming that the rest of the world doesn’t get there before we do. Russia has already done it, but shh, that’s a glorious secret.¹ Already, the percent of the world’s food produced by the industrial model is estimated to be as low as 30 percent, depending on which studies you believe^2,3. That would mean the other 70% is fed by small-holders, home gardens, and non-commercial hunting, gathering, and fishing. If, as some reports claim (based on production, not consumption)^4,5, global industrial is a good bit higher than 30%, having the U.S. lead with gardens would be even more significant and inspiring for other countries.

Balanced diets, not UPFs

Huge positive here. As I’ve noted repeatedly, UPFs constitute 75% of the American diet and 60% of its consumed calories. Industrial manipulation and nutrition reduction render them pretty much the extreme opposite of a balanced diet. A meal from a self-sufficiency garden couldn’t be more different. Not only does it lack UPFs, it’s also nutritionally balanced, outdoing even most ordinary gardens that emphasize watery vegetables low in protein and energy. As little as half of the country switching from UPFs to ULFs (ultra-local foods) would be enormously significant for the nation’s health.

Jobs: losses offset by gains

No doubt about it, a substantial switch to garden food would result in a loss of many jobs, and not only at the farm. It takes thousands of people to support the industrial food infrastructure, from mining and refining ag-related fossil fuels and hardware; to designing, building, and maintaining the required factories and machinery; to transporting structural components and food by ground, sea, and air; to educating workers at all levels. Contrary to media claims, the average farmer does not feed a hundred people. Rather, most of the work is done off the farm by the sprawling infrastructure support team. Besides, AI will be removing many of those jobs well before gardens could get around to it. The industrial food system has no problem with that, as it’s already cranking up blockchains and robotics, from “smart” ag tech at one end to self-checkout stations at the other.

Altogether, increasing the proportion of the nation’s food coming from gardens will shake up all parts of the industrial system. But because of the industry’s deeply-entrenched problems, that will have to happen sooner or later even without gardens, and probably sooner now that climate change is swiftly moving up the goal posts. In any case, a major shift in production methodology typically generates a shift in jobs from the older to the newer way of doing things. Here, think of a garden support system creating new companies and jobs to provide compost, mulch, greenhouses, gardening supplies and equipment, coaching and education, and done-for-you gardening services.

Grocery stores losing business

In view of the meager 1-3% profit margin of U.S. supermarkets, a switch to garden-supplied food would bankrupt grocers long before a 50% mark is reached. For every 1% increase in garden fare, people would buy 1% less at grocery stores, which would then have to compensate with increased prices. Shoppers who could afford to would grudgingly pay—up to a point—but those who couldn’t, wouldn’t. So would those priced out of the supermarket be the first to take up gardening? Not necessarily; surveys show that wealthier people are consistently among the first, not the last, to take up vegetable gardening. But no matter who starts first, grocers will face a day of reckoning once the gardening train really takes off.

This harks back to the previous post, where we considered what it would take to convince people that gardens could be more convenient than supermarkets. There, I said only environmental disasters would change most minds. But depending on how fast gardening ticks up, and how soon and seriously it bites into grocery store profits, it could well be the higher cost of food that does it instead. Already, food prices are rising ominously even without pressure from gardens.

Farmers also losing out?

At the other end of the industrial profit stream (with Big Ag and Big Food hoovering up the lion’s share in between) is the farmers. The largest farms realize the greatest margins and the smallest ones the least, but the average is around 11%, of which subsidies account for about 20% of the profit. You’d think that would make farmers better prepared for an increased supply of garden food, but because of looming tariffs and the loss of many federal ag supports, farm interests are already angling for another big Trump-delivered subsidy bailout. Trouble is, this one would have to be much larger than his last one—making it a harder sell for deficit hawks. What’s more, other governments are already looking to diversify their food imports away from the U.S. because of its diminishing trade credibility. The future is not exactly rosy for farmers, gardens or no.

Significant pushback?

Of course, we can expect that the multi-national ag and food corporations, wealthy land-owners, and global food speculators would be none too pleased to lose even a small percentage of market share to gardeners. But not to worry. They’re deeply convinced that backyard gardens are way too wimpy to compete with the well-entrenched juggernaut. So they won’t respond to any significant degree—whether to garden buildup or climate change breakdown—until it’s too late to have much effect.

UPFs: scarier than gardens?

Which, by the way, calls for a re-visit to ultra-processed foods, this time from Marion Nestle, the renowned nutritionist critic of the food industry. She says it’s facing four big threats to the market dominance of UPFs: public interest in the negative health effects; GLP-1 drugs (e.g., Wegovy) that make people not want to eat them; inflation; and HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr’s efforts to get them out of the food supply⁶. According to her, the industry sees a perilous handwriting on the wall with the perfect storm of these four elements coming together. So if—contrary to my read—the juggernaut is already spooked, the decline of UPFs could eclipse gardens and climate as the leading cause of industry shakeup and job loss.

Natural resource windfalls

If job losses sound like a downside, a transition to 50% garden food will have enormous upsides that will more than counter them. In addition to new jobs, it would free up boatloads of natural resources that are currently either stressed or in short supply. Estimates vary, but about 40% of the land, 70% of the water, and 20% of the energy we use is gobbled up by agriculture. In addition, the industrial food system is responsible for at least 25% of on-site greenhouse emissions. The total is more like 40% if you count emissions generated from infrastructure buildout, maintenance, and on-the-ground effects of exploitative financing that keep it all running.

Now, remember the table summarizing the increased efficiency—by orders of magnitude—of a garden-based food system compared to the industrial system? If you don’t, here it is again:

If just half of these quantum leaps in efficiency were realized, it would leverage a huge lift to an economy and food system beset by many challenges. More specifically, if the decrease in food footprint from industrial’s 3.0 acres to garden’s 0.03 is any indication, it would generate similar reductions in water and energy use, even if applied to only half of food production. It would also substantially reduce greenhouse emissions. The most significant impact by far, however, would be decreasing external costs from $trillions to virtually zero.

The significance of industry cluelessness

So far, champions of industrial food have shown very little awareness of just how significant improved efficiency could be. I often see exaggerated reports of the way regenerative agriculture will revolutionize industrial food⁷. Or how this or that scientific breakthrough could generate a 15% increase in crop yields or game-changing resistance to ever-hotter weather. Or how various lab-generated food-goos will transform our food supply, and how wonderful those goos would be. Never mind that it would take massive research, development, and infrastructure investment over many years to commercialize such increases and structural buildouts at scale. Which (for higher yields) we don’t need anyway since global hunger is due to inadequate food distribution, not lack of quantity.

But suppose the goal was to use less land rather than to feed more people. And suppose that we somehow did achieve a 15% increase in yield across all of the nation’s vast crop and pasture lands, enabling us to produce the same amount of food on 15% less area. The U.S. has a billion acres in agricultural land, 15% of which would be 150 million. Sounds impressive, but by contrast, switching from the industrial system to self-sufficiency gardens would reduce ag land use from 3.0 to 0.03 acres per person. That would thus free up 99% of the total amount of ag land—990 million acres. That’s 6.6 times as much as 150 million.

Yet it’s certainly not as though the whole country is going to transition to garden-based food; I’d settle for just half of that, as I indicated all along. That would leave “only” 495 million acres of freed-up land, still over three times as much as a 15% yield increase would deliver. If it could. But it can’t, because scaling up commercial yields by 15% over a billion acres of crop and pasture lands would be an unbelievably herculean task that simply has no chance of happening any time soon, if ever. Yes, I’m aware that yields of corn, wheat, and soy increased by a good bit more than that from 2000 to 2019. However, those crops account for less than a quarter of all ag land, and have seen virtually no growth in yield over the past five years.

Overall, the significance of this thought experiment is the revelation that it’s much more effective to move to a garden system than to hope that theoretical yield increases will pan out. Especially given how little time we have to prepare for increasingly frequent environmental disasters.

Is the scope of all this still a little hard to grasp? Here is an overview of the main physical consequences of the described transitions, summarized in two graphics.

These graphs frame just some of the significance that would result from ramping up to half of our food from gardens. They don’t even get into the specifics of the economic and social benefits. Nor do they broach in more detail the implications of preparing us for climate disasters much more effectively than the industrial system can. That will come in in the next two posts.

A rising tide of relief

And finally, there’s the not-to-be-underestimated significance of relief. Recall that over time, for every self-sufficiency garden established and used as the primary source of food for one person, three acres of industrial ag land will be freed up. This would gradually swell to thousands, then millions, then hundreds of millions of acres. What would become of all that land? Would it all be “re-wilded”, as some call for? Made into parks? Re-populated by people fleeing overcrowded cities? Recall (again, can’t emphasize it enough) that the industrial food system incurs trillions of dollars worth of externalized damage every year, a toll that will diminish in proportion to the number of gardens adopted. How will all that money be re-distributed as it becomes available?

It's easy to lose sight of, but industrial agriculture is basically a chemical and physical assault on the land, especially against soil and pests. During the nine years I engaged in potato breeding research, I often noticed industry language that invoked “the battle of the beetle” or farmers getting “hammered” by aphids, or “total war” against this or that disease. For many years, commercial ag has used ever-heavier tools to demolish natural “invaders”, and just as regularly, nature has fought back, developing resistance or work-arounds to whatever artillery was thrown against it. Back and forth it’s gone, decade after decade. And that’s just one consequence of the industry’s machine-like, domination-of-nature attitude. What will be the response once the siege is lifted, even partially? For starters, I see the land and the people collectively breathing a huge sigh of relief. The practical details of how it all plays out in nature and our national life remain to be seen. Stay tuned.

¹Sharashkin, L. 2008. The socioeconomic and cultural significance of food gardening in the Vladimir region of Russia. PhD dissertation, University of Missouri. chrome-extension://efaidnbmnnnibpcajpcglclefindmkaj/http://naturalhomes.org/img/food-gardening-russia.pdf

²Who will feed us? 2017. The industrial food chain vs. the peasant food web. Etc. Group, 3^rd ed.

³Small-scale farmers still feed the world. (PDF). chrome-extension://efaidnbmnnnibpcajpcglclefindmkaj/https://www.etcgroup.org/files/files/31-01-2022_small-scale_farmers_and_peasants_still_feed_the_world.pdf

⁴Riciarrdi, V., et al. 2018. How much of our world’s food do smallholders produce? Global Food Security. 17: 64-72. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/325405959_How_much_of_the_world's_food_do_smallholders_produce?

⁵Louder, S.K., et al. 2021. Which farms feed the world and has farmland become more concentrated? World Development. 142.

⁶Maldarelli, C. 2025. “To me, it’s junk food.” Inverse. https://www.inverse.com/health/marion-nestle-interview-ultraprocessed-food-health

⁷Torella, K. 2025. The false climate solution that just won’t die. Vox. https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/409940/regenerative-agriculture-kiss-the-ground-common-ground

Most people won’t be won over to ULFs (ultra-local foods) because they’re nowhere near as cheap, tasty, and convenient as UPFs (ultra-processed foods).

On all three counts, this is a story about what we’ve long been conditioned to experience and thus believe is reasonable.

So here’s an intriguing question: could a ULF version of cheap, tasty, and convenient rival the UPF version, given the latter’s head start in billions of advertising dollars over the last 70 years? Also intriguing is the way ads for UPFs portray them as “natural” despite excessive processing that takes them far away from their natural state. And therein lies hope. Still, morphing hope into the reality of genuinely natural would mean changing the reigning idea of tasty from, say, a crisp, sour cream-flavored potato chip straight out of a new bag to a crisp, sweet, juicy carrot plucked straight out of the ground and rinsed off with cool water.

In an equally advertised and culturally conditioned contest, which would prevail, based on taste alone? Many would say the potato chip. Yet I’ve seen young children, provided with only fresh apple wedges as a snack, ask for them. Even then, I suspect the reason they like them is that those particular children are home schooled, so that their apple wedges don’t get defeated by seeing friends at an ordinary school binge on junk snacks. Conditioning is powerful.

The same kinds of conversions would need to happen with current concepts of cheap and convenient. At the moment, it would be a hard sell to convince the average person that tending a garden would be cheaper and more convenient—all things considered—than simply driving to the nearest grocery to pick up what they want in 15 minutes. I’ve found that even the average home gardener finds it more convenient to get most of their food from a supermarket rather than their garden.

So some say we need a massive campaign to educate people about the benefits of healthier/garden food concepts. Really? Funded by whom? may I ask. To the tune of how many $billions, and over how many decades to even catch up to, let alone compete with, the overwhelming UPF head start? Advertising is powerful.

We don’t have the time or the resources to re-educate at the nationwide scale needed to be effective. The only thing that will turn the tide is the onslaught of environmental disasters, and even then only once they have compromised the industrial system enough to convince people that our taken-for-granted food supply is no longer reliable. As perhaps eggs are already illustrating, what with bird flu rapidly driving down their supply and up their cost. Yet a genuine solution will have to go beyond organic, which is largely distributed through the industrial food chain anyway. No, I think the big switcheroo will happen only when most people are disaster-nudged enough to go the ULF route.

In the meantime, for those who are open to education, it would be wise to start or ramp up a garden, knowing that the real cost of grocery store food is two to three times the check-out price. Especially when you add in the more upfront costs of bad health outcomes: overweight, obesity, diabetes, etc. And how convenient is it to pay for that, either out of pocket or in the form of accumulated suffering when paying out of pocket becomes out of the question? How worth it is the tastiness of potato chips and other UPFs? One rationale is that you can just get the fresh veggies at the grocery store and still have convenience. Right. And for how long will they be easily available, and at what cost? Already we import up to half of our fresh vegetables and fruits, whose prices will only go up substantially with trade problems and climate change. So over not that much time, transforming the experience of cheap, tasty, and convenient will likely be disaster-defaulted from UPFs to ULFs.

What about people who have no space for a garden?

No question, those living in downtowns with no lawns will likely have to continue to depend on the industrial food system. However, turfgrass lawns—often sitting idle—are the largest irrigated crop in the U.S., occupying some 40.5 million acres¹. That works out to 3.7 self-sufficiency gardens like mine (a 35’x40’ plot) for every man, woman, and child. Some 80% of us live in urban areas, but 23% of that space is occupied by lawns, a substantial portion of which could surely become gardens. Plus, there’s the 20% who live in rural areas, with more room to raise ULFs. It would be difficult to parse out how much of all that space is available for self-sufficiency gardens, but if even just a third of it was, it would be more than enough to feed everyone. That’s in the sheer number of all of us, although deep city-dwellers wouldn’t have access to it. Even then, it would be far more than enough to reach the goal of “only” half of the population.

Climate change disasters destroy gardens, too.

So just how resilient can gardens be? After all, they’re not immune to climate shocks. In the Helene disaster that slammed Asheville, N.C., households that were flooded would most likely have seen their gardens go underwater too. Likewise, gardens would not have been spared in the recent burned-out neighborhoods that ravaged Los Angeles. However, most—likely 95% or more—of the area of those two cities were not destroyed by their respective disasters. Hence, most gardens would have survived (though possibly battered), as would any food put up from them. Such home garden-generated backup would have provided sustenance for weeks to months, in sharp contrast to the three-day supply in grocery stores. For slower-moving shocks like drought, it’s much easier to water self-sufficiency gardens, which require only one percent as much land per capita as the industrial system. A garden food system would thus be much more nimble and better prepared to address these kinds of shocks than mega-farms.

As I’ve pointed out before, the U.S. military has only so many helicopters and MREs (Meals Ready-to-Eat) they can deploy to stricken areas. How frequent will two or more $50 billion disasters have to be to render those kinds of rescue efforts impossible? Two in three months? Nope: Helene and the LA fires were just over three months apart. And how geographically close together? Well, closer than LA is to N.C. I have friends who weren’t even remotely aware of the devastation wrought by Helene. Stunning. So how much worse will it have to get? Hard to say, but I’m betting we will find out within five years, and possibly three. I would love for us to be seriously ramping up a national self-sufficiency garden food system by then.

Self-sufficiency gardens aren’t input self-sufficient.

Right. Especially in the larger context. But that’s not a problem.

A recent article in The New Yorker featured the famed backyard gardener Ruth Stout, an appealing character, for sure.² Contrary to what I espouse, she championed the easy “no work” method that scoffs at compost and requires no digging or much of any kind of physical activity. Just throw together some moldy hay from a farmer along with other sources of organic material to a depth of eight inches, throw some seeds into it, and voilá, you have a garden.

But it’s not that easy to substantially feed yourself from a mulch-only garden. For one thing, moldy hay will likely have scads of pill bugs that (as I discovered myself) will gladly devour tender young vegetable seedlings. Plus—surprise, surprise—heavy mulch is useful as a growing medium only when enough of it has decomposed into compost, so dismissing compost out of hand is a bit disingenuous. The quick, “lazy” way may get you a garden, but an hour a day will get you a much more productive one, with the added benefits of more exercise and exposure to nature.

Like mulch and compost, greenhouses, gardening education and supplies, and (for some) done-for-you garden plots are all parts of an infrastructure build-up needed to sustain an effective garden food system. It’s just not practical for the average gardener to generate all those services on their own. Plus, the resulting businesses that will spring up to help will provide many new jobs. That’s already happening with companies offering to set you up with your own egg-laying hens. This, of course, is (again) due to the bird flu crisis, which has been hitting commercial farms with much greater devastation than backyards.

Then there’s perhaps the most valuable service of all: gardening neighborliness. An active exchange of not only vegetable favorites but also tips on best practices will greatly enrich menus as well as garden success. You could conceivably be the only one in your neighborhood to grow a self-sufficiency garden, but it’s much more satisfying and beneficial to enjoy the social sharing that can go along with it.

So at the largest scale, it’s true that gardeners will need and benefit from local support services. However, they will operate outside of—and at a tiny fraction of the cost of—the industrial food system. You won’t have to wait for long to see it happen. Stay tuned.

¹Norrington, B. The Lawn Is the Largest Irrigated Crop in the USA. UCSB Geography.

²Lepore, J. 2025. The book of Ruth. The New Yorker. March 24, p 24-29.

The Inside Story

Are you kidding? Gardens take too much time.

This is by far the most common reaction I get when I suggest starting up a garden. The overwhelming impression “out there” is that a vegetable garden calls for way more time than most anyone has, in no small part because it entails a lot of hard, costly work. As The New Yorker cartoon below so cleverly claims. To test that impression, in 2023 I kept a log of the number of minutes I spent in the garden every day and what I was doing, starting March 14 and ending October 21. As you can see from sample entries, it averaged out to 62 minutes a day, about an hour. Full disclosure, that varied from around two hours a day for some days in the Spring to as little as 15-20 minutes/day in the Fall. However, that year happened to be when I was starting up a new garden on a site that had been in brome grass pasture for years, which meant getting tough root masses broken up, re-installing fences, spading new beds, etc. Those are initial chores that don’t have to be repeated each year. Also of note: I was 74 at the time, used only hand tools, and prepped ten 1.5’x40’x1’deep beds. If I could do it in that amount of time per day, on average, under those conditions, how hard and excessively time-sucking could it be? Especially considering that the average American spends four hours a day watching TV.

Eating only from your garden for 30 days doesn’t prove that you can do it for a whole year.

Technically, that is correct; unexpected things can go wrong when you multiply any initially successful endeavor by a factor of twelve. However, my (2020) 30-day experiment does provide enough baseline data to indicate that properly managed, the soil of a 35’x40’ plot has the intrinsic capacity to produce 365 days worth of food for one. Based on that trial run, my 2021 garden of that area produced over 1,000 pounds of vegetables, or 107% of a year’s needs. Nor are my results unusual: yields of the primary vegetables I’ve grown matched the average of home garden yields predicted by five USDA field experiment stations around the country. Exceeding those outcomes, a study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences reported home garden yields at 170% of what I achieved¹, and a permaculture garden produced 230% as much.²

Besides, even if a self-sufficiency garden system met only half of U.S. food needs for a year, it would be a huge nutritional improvement over the standard American diet (SAD) of 75% UPFs (ultra-processed foods). In addition, as I’ve mentioned before, it would be a powerful hedge against the onslaught of climate change disasters now arriving ever more frequently and intensely.

You can’t get enough calories from a garden.

My best garden yields can produce a total of about 1,650 calories worth of food per day (on an annual basis, 35’x40’), although I could increase that to at least 1,800 or more if I planted (in the same area) more staples like beans, corn, and sweet potatoes and less of “juicy” options such as tomatoes, squash, kale, and okra. The recommended U.S. intake of calories—regardless of the source—varies from 1,600 to 3,200 a day per person, depending on five metrics: age, sex, body mass, activity, and health issues. However, it’s absurd to portray (as the food media does) calories delivered by UPFs as equivalent to those in whole, healthy foods. Especially given that 75% of us are overweight, 40% are obese, and well over a third are diabetic or pre-diabetic. How could universal benchmark calorie recommendations have any realistic value when they’re derived from—and thus set goals for—a bloated population consuming a high proportion of low-nutrition, high-calorie junk food?

A more sensible context would include a sixth carb-related measure of diet: healthy quality calories (e.g., favoring garden-fresh vegetables) rather than UPF-dominant quantity.³ This is why, incidentally, I portray ULFs (ultra-local foods) as the extreme opposite of UPFs. Even then, rather than trying to weight all six metrics into some pre-conceived formula (more numbers games), you could more feasibly and beneficially pursue a diet according to how it makes you feel—and feel about—yourself through intelligent trial and error.

To do that, it would be helpful to follow some simple guidelines. First, have a firm and enduring intention of getting the amounts of vitamins, minerals, fiber, protein, and calories that you find are right for you, even if you don’t know at first just what they would be. A starting point for a balanced diet from a garden could be about one-third dry shell beans (for protein); one-third dry corn, sweet potatoes, and regular potatoes (mainly for carbs); and one-third dark leafy greens, squash, tomatoes, etc. (for a variety of additional nutrients). Rest assured that this mix could provide a surprisingly wide variety of menu options. Second, don’t make any drastic changes suddenly. If you’re just beginning a self-sufficiency garden, don’t think you have to produce a year’s supply of a balanced diet right off the bat. Rather, start small and enjoyably build up, step by step, according to what your body tells you is working. Third, gradually reduce UPFs to at most an occasional item.

In my 30-day experiment of eating only from my “Super Size Me” garden, my beginning compared to my ending physical exams revealed that my weight had remained normal and my moderately high cholesterol had dropped by 15 points—nice results. But then, my weight and cholesterol were not that much of an issue. This experiment is just one outcome, but it could serve as an example of how to take a cautious, try-it-out-and-see-what-you-get approach. Then adjust accordingly, rather than being ruled by a set caloric “need” according to the UPF-dependent metrics of the food media.

You can’t get enough protein from a garden.

Protein is even more contentious than calories when it comes to figuring out what constitutes a healthy level of intake. The most often recommended figure is 0.36 g per pound of body weight per day, but I’ve yet to see how objectively—or not, as I suspect—that figure was determined. I’ve seen reports of thriving, healthy cultures that consume a third as much while some dieticians in this country advise multiplying it by a factor of three or even much more. In fact, high-protein diets have become somewhat of an obsession over the last few years.⁴ Meanwhile, we Americans consume twice as much meat per capita as Europeans (who tend to be healthier), and three times as much as the world average.

Should we thus add yet another measure—protein—to our list of diet metrics? To be sure, it’s an essential nutrient, but just as with calories, it would be nonsense to cast the protein in UPFs as physiologically equivalent to that in whole foods. Yet that’s precisely what the universal benchmark does. As with calories, it would be more rational to think in terms of consuming healthy foods—preferably from your garden—and adjusting according to what you hear from your body. In other words, it’s high time to shift the context: make diet decisions based not on UPF-framed standard numbers but rather, on self-empowered bodily results. For a balanced diet self-sufficiency garden, planting guidelines for protein would be roughly the same as above: a third for carbs, another third for protein, and the final third for anything else that delights your palate.

A 35’x40’ garden for one would mean a 70’x80’ garden for two, and 140’x160’ for four.

Not necessarily. First, consider that a family of two to four would likely achieve some economy of scale, although I haven’t yet tested that out. There are intriguing unknowns here. For instance, how would teenagers versus young children play out? Teenagers would certainly eat a good bit more, but they could also produce much more in that one hour a day than young children. Second, would an average healthy family accustomed to mostly garden fare crave the excessive volume of food that the average 75% UPF-dominant diet dishes up? And third, to be realistic, no one, not even homesteaders, suggests that as a country we should switch to 100% garden food overnight. Which is why I consistently push a goal of “only” 50%—by perhaps 2050. That’s in part because it’s already been achieved by Russia⁵, with far fewer advantages—especially now—than we have.

The average family of four doesn’t have enough storage space for a year’s supply of home-grown groceries.

That may be true in some cases. However, if two-thirds of that supply consisted of staples like dry shell beans and dry corn, which need relatively little space, the rest could likely be accommodated without adding an extra room to the average house. Of course, it would depend on what non-staples are grown and how they’re stored: frozen, canned, pickled, whole dry, or dehydrated. To be best prepared for a disaster like the Helene-generated event that flooded western North Carolina, it would be wise for every household to use the storage space they have to maintain at least a month’s supply of garden-produced food at all times.

Without planning to, I had that amount of home-grown garden food on hand when I decided to conduct my 30-day experiment prompted by the Covid pandemic. Then again, the Helene disaster was more extreme than most in that it wiped out all services in the Asheville area for weeks: power, internet, cell phone, city water, and grocery-store food. Absent (as that event thankfully was) the coldest part of winter or the hottest period of the summer, a well-stocked garden-supplied pantry—not too dependent on freezer space, plus perhaps a rooftop-collected tank of filtered rainwater—would have gotten most people through the worst of it.

This is another reason why it would serve us well to shift the context of how we think about food. Don’t just assume that the “just-in-time” three-day supply in grocery stores will always be there. Rather, create your own stash with a self-sufficiency garden. Prior to Helene, western N.C. had been thought of as a “climate haven,” immune to just about any kind of geology- or weather-related disaster. But look what happened: $60 billion in damages at last count, of which only about $10 billion in help from the government is on the way. When and if it arrives.

This is our new, alarming world: “natural” disasters that will drastically shake up our food system. But don’t get discouraged. Instead, be part of the new answer: start a garden or upgrade your current one to balanced-diet self-sufficiency. And stay tuned.

¹McDougall, R., Kristiansen, P., and Rader, R. 2018. Small-scale urban agriculture results in high yields but requires judicious management of inputs to achieve sustainability. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. 116: 129-134. https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1809707115

²2019. Permaculture garden grows 7,000 pounds of healthy organic food per year using only a tenth of an acre. PreparednessMama. https://preparednessmama.com/permaculture-garden-grows-7000-pounds-of-healthy-organic-food-per-year-using-only-a-tenth-of-an-acre/#:~:text=There%20is%20a%20family%20that,per%20year%20selling%20excess%20produce!

³Maldarelli, C. 2025. “To Me, It’s Junk Food”. Inverse. https://www.inverse.com/health/marion-nestle-interview-ultraprocessed-food-health

⁴Spivak, E. 2024. The inside scoop on how America became obsessed with protein. Inverse. https://www.inverse.com/health/how-america-became-obsessed-with-protein

⁵Sharashkin, L. 2008. The socioeconomic and cultural significance of food gardening in the Vladimir region of Russia. PhD dissertation, University of Missouri. chrome-extension://efaidnbmnnnibpcajpcglclefindmkaj/http://naturalhomes.org/img/food-gardening-russia.pdf

For over a hundred years, my family has handed down and grown what we’ve always called colored butterbeans. My great-grandma brought them with her when her family moved from Belhaven, N.C. to Roanoke Rapids in about 1915; where they came from before that I haven’t a clue. They’re unique, as they have about eight different color patterns. I’ve never seen them in any of the seed catalogs, wherein beans of a given variety all look exactly alike.

By contrast, our butterbeans feature four different colors: off-white, tan, violet, and deep purple; and four basic patterns: solid color, pocket patch, mottled, and tri-colored. With some mixing, as you’ll see.

So maybe 10 years ago I decided to plant in separate spots a hill of each of the seven patterns I had at that time. The idea was to see how they were inherited when grown out. In the pics below, the color pattern that was planted is indicated by the inset at the upper right, and the adjacent beans illustrate the spread of the colors and patterns that manifested.

They reveal some crossover, verifying what we’ve always assumed: that despite the different color patterns, they’re all just one variety of heirloom bean. Nevertheless, violet never mixes with deep purple in any pattern, and at least in this test, the violet and deep purple pocket-patch patterns (tongue-twister there) bred true. Surprisingly, in 2024 a pattern showed up that I’d never seen before: the tri-color of tan, off-white, and a sprinkle of deep purple, variously arranged according to the pocket-patch mosaic.

Whether fresh, canned, frozen, or dried, they certainly all turn out the same within a given type of preservation and cooking, and their size and shape are uniform. The taste is savory-buttery and the texture is sooo tongue-friendly smooth—absolutely delicious. Plus, the color splashes are stunning. Can’t beat it with a stick, as the old folks in Roanoke Rapids used to say.

Make no mistake, if farms were to adopt this practice, it would indeed be a boon all around. Yet in the context of the food system it serves and ultimately depends on, a closer look reveals that it just hasn’t been thought through very well. Want to know why? Read on.

Why regenerative agriculture isn’t the answer

Too limited

Regenerative agriculture is nothing new. It and similar sustainable ag concepts have been around since the early days of the organic movement decades ago. But admirable as these eco-efforts truly are, they have never produced more than about 1 percent of wholesale food sales in the U.S. Yes, organic is now at 6 percent of wholesale, but 35 years have passed since the USDA launched the organic label, and much of the targeted market has been subsumed by the industry, so we now have industrial organic. Regenerative ag, like organic, “…fails to tackle systemic social and political issues. As a result, the movement may perpetuate business-as-usual in the food system, rather than transform it.”¹ That’s not to say that reduction of harmful synthetic chemicals hasn’t been good. It has—but only in a small percentage of our food.

Too pricey

Organic food costs an average of 47% more than non-organic², and although I haven’t seen any estimates for regenerative, one ardent proponent told me to expect a 20-30% premium. Regenerative ag includes many of the same protocols as organic, so it, too will incur additional costs. While some (including me) are willing to pay the difference, it prevents regenerative from giving conventional a run for its money. Industry externalizes about two-thirds of its costs, which regenerative ag can’t replicate, so it has no choice but to slide the added cost of revitalizing soil down the food chain to the mom pushing the grocery cart. But it’s evidently too much to ask of most people. Especially now, when food prices are increasing faster than the overall rate of inflation. (Don’t even ask about eggs.)

I’ve seen regenerative advocates argue that it can match or surpass conventional yields or revenues per unit of yield and is therefore scalable. However, making the same kinds of claims, organic has shown that those metrics don’t usually translate to the shopping cart. Hence the 47% premium. This is just one result of not looking at the system as a whole when assessing regenerative.

Too dependent on subsidies to massively scale

Strategies, reports, predictions, and schemes abound as to how regenerative ag can, could, would, promises, or hopes to scale to major relevance—but only with the help of subsidies. Yet ag subsidies almost always morph into dependency. Thus one idea is to simply move industrial entitlements over to regenerative. Says regenerative farmer Patrick Holden of Wales, “. . . industrialized, intensive systems pay better—what’s needed are redirected subsidies to ensure farming and nature can coexist in a field . . .”³ Ironically, this would allow regenerative to externalize a portion of its true costs, just as the industry does. Not only would that throw up another barrier to regenerative becoming a major player in the food market, it would also increase an existing economic burden on the taxpayer if it did somehow manage to go big-time. There are only so many subsidy dollars to go around, and the industry will surely fight to keep the lion’s share of ag freebies for itself. Especially now, with federal aids to agriculture in a state of chaos.

Too unable to address downstream problems, especially UPFs

Most proponents of regenerative ag seem to be unaware that it addresses only the initial, production stage of the 1,500 mile-long industrial food stream. They assume that if they just fix that front edge, it will magically solve all food system problems, as the documentary “Kiss the Ground” would so misleadingly like you to believe⁴. That is, they ignore the downstream problems, especially UPFs, by far the most damaging consequence of the industrial system. Regenerative ag does nothing to address them. Feeding responsibly farmed foodstuffs into UPFs will render them just as unhealthy as sources from industrial ag. Big corporations like WalMart, Nestle, McCain, PepsiCo, and others know this, which is why they’ve committed—at least on paper—to adopting regenerative ag while continuing to churn out all the UPFs they want. That way, they get the green creds, though it remains to be seen whether they can avoid price increases if they live up to their promises. In other words, their green is washed, although I think in some cases they actually believe that regenerative will improve their UPFs. As we saw at length in the last post, it won’t.

Too scary

The average age of U.S. farmers is 58. With a few laudable exceptions, most of them are too conservative and/or too old and set in their ways to venture more than a modest step toward regenerative ag. But as Holden says, you have to consider what they’re up against: a system that in many ways holds them hostage “. . . with most farmers operating on wafer-thin margins, embattled by climate change and demands for cheap food, and the victims of price shocks passed down the supply chain, [so that] the transition remains unpalatable, or simply unfeasible, for many.”³ The result: just not anywhere near enough “boots on the ground” to leverage a major shift to sustainable food production.

Too slow

Even if younger, more open-minded farmers started to massively adopt regenerative ag tomorrow, it would be too late to have a decisive impact on food production any time soon. Consider just one example of why: the pace of soil erosion. About half of U.S. farm topsoil has been washed or blown away, and the remaining half has lost 50% of its organic matter. Despite recently decreasing rates of erosion, soil is still being lost 10-17 times as fast as it’s being replaced. Regenerating it back to its former depth and organic matter content is a truly enormous, time-consuming task. It will take at least a couple generations to reverse deeply unsustainable ways of thinking and farming at the current rate of food system wakeup. As you will see in the next angle of the challenge.

Too late

Industry rep Barry Parkin, chief procurement and sustainability officer at pet food and candy-maker Mars, holds that regen ag methods “. . . have been adopted across about 12% of farmland . . .” He’s undoubtably referring to quick initial steps like cover crops and no-plow, for sure not the full restoration of soil depth and organic matter. According to Dr Kristine Nichols, a soil microbiologist and regenerative agriculture expert, only about 1.5% of U.S. farmland is being farmed regeneratively.⁵ This figure is more in line with a practice still struggling to gain a toehold in the farming scene. But Parkin is right when he says that it’s being adopted “. . . at less than 1% a year. Clearly, we don’t have 50 years or more for this to roll out.”⁶

Lurking behind that dire prognosis are the climate change disasters that loom over not just farming but everything else as well. And they’re arriving more and more intensely and frequently. The floods in western N.C. following Helene and the fires in LA the are the most recent examples as of this writing, but they’re by no means isolated. Between 1980 and 2019 there were an average of 10 billion-dollar-plus disasters a year, whereas the average from 2020-2024 was 23 per year.⁷ These events are accelerating far too quickly for regenerative ag—at 1% of food sales and 1.5% of current farmland, increasing at 1% a year—to effectively address climate change before it’s too late. That is, if the 35 years it took to reach 6% certified organic is any indication.

Too weak

Even if all seven of the other “Toos” could be successfully resolved, regenerative ag, with its one percents, is just too effete to repair the mighty industrial food system. Big Ag—and its extension, Big Food—are just too colossal, too corrupt, and too deeply dug in. Attempting to improve it to any significant degree—e.g., by installing the mostly ignored stopgaps in Mark Hyman’s Food Fix⁸—would be like trying to rearrange a cemetery. Tomorrow.

Much more worthwhile would be to adopt the approach of Buckminster Fuller: "You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete."

Regenerative ag, which itself is often portrayed as that new model, is not only not new, it’s not up to the job, as we’ve just seen. We need a much more effective and nimble model, with compellingly greater leverage on all fronts. That’s what a self-sufficiency garden system would be. And as a result, it would accomplish so much more, so much faster.

ULFs – the Key to a Self-Sufficiency Garden Food System

Compared to farms, self-sufficiency gardens are just a distinctly different proposition, which is why I’ve devoted five previous posts to helping people get accustomed to the idea. In fact, they’re so different that even regenerative ag farms don’t match up with them very well. The following observations add a critical step to illustrating why. So here we go.

Able to scale massively

Like regenerative ag, home gardens currently account for only about 1% the U.S. food supply. However, that’s measured in calories, and as we saw in a previous post, American gardens typically focus almost entirely on watery vegetables low in protein and calories, so the low figure is probably accurate. Measured as a percent of cash value, home-grown vegetables account for more like 10% of our diet (see below). That’s with the 41 percent of U.S. households that already have a food garden of some kind. Transformed into self-sufficiency gardens, the percent of calories in the home-grown diet would rise accordingly. Plus, they would provide a balanced diet, which the average current garden falls well short of.

A robust contribution of household gardens to the food supply, as I keep repeating from Sharashkin’s study, has already been accomplished in Russia⁹. Fifty percent of its food comes from its “secret” household gardens, which do include plenty of foods high in protein and calories, especially from potatoes. Moreover, Sharashkin has shown that the economic, social, and cultural benefits of household gardens are much more extensive than anything regenerative ag, with its 1% delivery metrics, has thus far been able to demonstrate. If Russia can achieve all that, with fewer resources and a less conducive climate than we have, there’s no reason why we shouldn’t be able to do even better.

Yet as also noted previously, we, too have shown the potential to ramp up home-grown productivity with victory gardens, and quickly. As have other countries. That speed-to-scale metric will come in handy once the frequency and intensity of climate change disasters start overwhelming the industrial system’s ability to restock grocery stores promptly. And that perilous time may come sooner than you think. Following Helene, it took weeks to get many of the supermarkets in Asheville, N.C. and vicinity back into full operation. In the meantime, everything from military helicopters dropping pallets of MREs (meals ready to eat) to pack mules were used to get food to people who couldn’t afford to just leave the area for a while. Through how many catastrophes could that continue, once they start to happen closer together?

Cost-efficient

Saving money is not the number one reason gardeners grow their own food (taste is). However, even the typically small (20’x30’) American garden generates an average $677 worth of fruits and vegetables beyond the $238 spent on materials and supplies¹⁰. My (35’x40’) 2021 self-sufficiency garden yielded a gross value of $3,727 from over 1,000 pounds of vegetables—a year’s worth of a balanced diet. And neither of those measures assigns a cash value to the exercise, connection to nature, and other benefits of gardening. The cost of some gardening supplies, such as seeds and compost, could continue to rise, but once you have the tools, wheelbarrow, maybe fences, etc., their cost is amortized over years of gardening. You thus escape most of the industrial elements contributing to food inflation. Meanwhile, the healthy effects of home-grown food will continue to appreciate in your body, mind, and soul. It’s a relatively low-cost, high-benefit investment in yourself when done properly, which is not difficult.

Independent of subsidies

Unlike farmers, who usually expect to be paid to adopt sustainable agriculture practices, ultra-local gardeners don’t require support from the government. True, community gardens can depend on subsidies or grants, at least to get started, but the home gardener doesn’t. The 50% of Russian food coming from household gardens on just 3% of the country’s agricultural land received zero help from the Russian government; no subsidies. In fact, historically the government often made things difficult for its gardeners, going as far as some despots who outright stole their bounty. No matter, the gardens have continued anyway, through all challenges, since before the czars.

I don’t know of any farm-based food system using sustainable ag practices that has shown the ability to provide food for scores of millions on a continuing basis, subsidies or not. But that’s what Russia’s system has done for a long time, although you’d never know it from reading accounts of sustainable ag programs around the world. Here in the U.S., we did show the ability to get started in that direction, when that 40% of the country’s vegetables were produced from 20 million gardens during WWII. Unfortunately, that initiative ended once the war was over and the government started pushing heavy industrial use of chemical fertilizers and pesticides.

Well positioned to address the main industry problem

As mentioned in the previous post, ULFs—in their most useful version produced in self-sufficiency gardens—are the extreme opposites of the industrial food system’s biggest problem: UPFs. Most importantly, ultra-local foods provide ultra-healthy fare, as opposed to ultra-processed food (again, now 75% of our diet), which is linked to a wide range of unhealthy outcomes. In addition, ULFs also offer a benefit that even CSAs or farmer’s markets sourcing their goods from small, local, or regenerative ag farms can’t match: full-circle connections. Because even if you pick up that wonderful zucchini or tomato from a table at a farmers market, you didn’t plant, nurture, and harvest it yourself, thereby missing out on the first three steps of the full circle of gardening.

Further, you miss out on the enhanced second circle of connections to the earth, yourself, and others that result from completing the first circle on a continual basis. Those benefits don’t occur to most people, not even most gardeners, because they haven’t experienced the full sense of self-empowerment and deep satisfaction that comes from providing 1) a balanced diet 2) comprising entire meals that 3) they’ve grown themselves 4) over an extended period of time, whether it’s a day, a week, month, or even up to a year. You can’t be expected to miss what you haven’t yet tried out for yourself. Although you might be able to imagine it. Try it.

Friendly, easier to implement

Yes, the prospect of putting in a garden can be intimidating or off-putting to many people. But because it requires so much less of an investment of time, money, and effort than transitioning a farm from conventional to regenerative agriculture, it’s a much easier to imagine doing it. Going regenerative entails a far greater learning curve and financial risk to the average farmer, who already has the industrial deck stacked against him, than converting a few square feet of lawn into a luscious garden. And since most of the fruits of regenerative ag would presumably be fed into the industrial food chain, with many ending up in UPFs, there would be a much greater ROI at the collective health level for ULFs coming from self-sufficiency gardens.

Fast and feasible to ramp up

Ramping up those 20 million gardens during WWII was accomplished within a year of two, on short notice, with little training or prior experience. Today, with 41% of households already having a food garden of some kind, the basic infrastructure needed to transition to a self-sufficiency food system is already widely in place. All that’s needed, really, is to up the concept of a typical garden from where it is now to balanced-diet self-sufficiency—not a huge undertaking. Regenerative ag would require a far greater investment of time, money, energy, land procurement, and farmer training to ramp up enough regenerative ag farms to massively transition the country to a healthier food supply. To reiterate once again, conventional is converting to regenerative at the rate of only 1% of farmland per year. That’s commendable as far as it goes, but at that rate it would take generations to significantly magnify it.

Not too late to effectively address climate change

It’s precisely because self-sufficiency gardens can be relatively quickly scaled up that makes them so timely. In the face of accelerating climate change disasters, bird flu, Trump’s tariffs and removal of federal services to industrial agriculture—as well as other food system challenges like increasing costs of farm chemicals—we are ill-prepared for the near-term future of food. As you’ve seen above, it’s simply too late for regenerative ag to even try to meet the challenge; it just doesn’t have the needed inherent capacity to move quickly. By contrast, ULFs and a self-sufficiency garden food system are proven to be much more nimble, quick, and easy to leverage into significant volume on a massive scale. It’s the right tool to prepare for the daunting future of food security.

Strong, smart, capable

Perhaps the greatest advantage of this proposal is that it doesn’t require entering into or changing the industrial juggernaut in any way. That system will continue doing what it’s doing for as long as it can. So the solution is to go around it instead of depending on, joining, or fighting it. An ultra-local, full-circle, self-sufficiency system of food production would stand on its own. Yes, it will require businesses that help provide compost, mulch, gardening supplies, greenhouses, education, and—for the infirm—done-for-you gardening services. But those can be sourced outside of the industrial food system. They’re part of the gardening infrastructure that is already in place, although it would have to be expanded to service a garden system that could—like that other country does for its people—supply at least half of our food. Which by the way will provide many new jobs. The conclusion is clear: don’t try to change the existing system with a well-intended but not-nearly-enough tweak. Rather, build up a new one that makes the existing system no longer the only game in town.

This has been a lot to take in and digest, so I’ve summarized it in the following two tables. Review them, be informed, and stay tuned.

¹Bless, A. 2023. “Regenerative agriculture” is all the rage—but it’s not going to fix our food system. The Conversation. https://theconversation.com/regenerative-agriculture-is-all-the-rage-but-its-not-going-to-fix-our-food-system-203922

²2015. The cost of organic food. A new Consumer Reports study reveals how much more you'll pay. Consumer Reports. https://www.consumerreports.org/cro/news/2015/03/cost-of-organic-food/index.htm#:~:text=We%20compared%20more%20than%20100,change%20based%20on%20weekly%20promotions

³Rawnsley, J. 2024. The rise of the carbon farmer. https://www.wired.com/story/carbon-farming-regenerative-agriculture/

⁴Kiss the Ground. 2020.

https://kissthegroundmovie.com

⁵How many farms are regenerative. 2025. Regenerative farmers of America. https://www.regenerativefarmersofamerica.com/regenerative-farm-near-me#:~:text=How%20many%20farms%20are%20regenerative,1.5%25%20is%20being%20farmed%20regeneratively.

⁶Toplensky, R. 2024. Sustainable Agriculture Gets a Push From Big Corporations. The Wall Street Journal. https://www.wsj.com/articles/sustainable-agriculture-gets-a-push-from-big-corporations-55541180

⁷NOAA National Centers for Environmental Information (NCEI) 2025. U.S. Billion-Dollar Weather and Climate Disasters. https://www.ncei.noaa.gov/access/billions/, DOI: 10.25921/stkw-7w73

⁸Hyman, M. 2020. Food fix. Yellow Kite.

⁹Sharashkin, L. 2008. The socioeconomic and cultural significance of food gardening in the Vladimir region of Russia. PhD dissertation, University of Missouri. chrome-extension://efaidnbmnnnibpcajpcglclefindmkaj/http://naturalhomes.org/img/food-gardening-russia.pdf

¹⁰Langelatto, G. 2014. What Are the Economic Costs and Benefits of Home Vegetable Gardens? Journal of Extension, Oregon State University. Vol.52, No.2. https://archives.joe.org/joe/2014april/rb5.php#:~:text=On%20average%2C%20home%20vegetable%20gardens,value%20realized%20by%20individual%20gardeners.

For a few years now the news media have been reporting that UPFs account for some 60% of the calories we consume and 75% of our overall diet, projected by the industry to reach 90% by 2028. As of August, 2025, the CDC (Centers for Disease Control) says they account for over half of the calories Americans consume. However, the 75% figure is a more honest picture of our national addiction, because counting by calories underrepresents diet soft drinks, low-cal salad dressings, and a host of other UPFs racing to mislead consumers by reducing calories.

In any case, they’ve become the poster-child, the beating heart of the industrial food system. Yet ultimately, they may turn out be a dead-end due to bad health outcomes. To see why, we’ll explore whether they’ve become locked into a chain of ultra co-dependencies, held together by externalizing their true costs. And if that’s the case, what to do about those outcomes.

But first, a brief definition. It was Carlos Monteiro, a professor of nutrition at the University of São Paulo, Brazil, who classified food into four groups based on the degree to which they’ve been processed:

1. Whole or slightly processed (e.g., whole fruits, vegetables, whole grains, meats, eggs, tea)

2. Processed culinary ingredients (e.g., cooking oil, salt, sugar, maple syrup)

3. Processed (made from some combination of groups 1 and 2 (e.g., canned beans or fish, salted nuts, sauerkraut, fresh artisanal cheeses and breads)

4. Ultra-processed (foods industrially formulated by extracting and manipulating components mostly from groups 2 and 3, and adding chemical ingredients, with few or no direct inputs from group 1 (e.g., hot dogs, soft drinks, cold breakfast cereals, ice cream, frozen TV dinners, fish and chicken “nuggets”, distilled alcoholic beverages)

This scheme doesn’t rate how healthy foods are. Nonetheless, UPFs have come under increasing attack of late as hundreds of studies have linked them to a wide range of the bad health outcomes now driving much of the UPF narrative.

Feeding into this story are the touchstones of UPFs: cheap, tasty, and convenient. That is, the ultra-processed versions of those illustrious three. Which are not by any means the only way food can be economical, delicious, and easy to produce and consume, as you will see in an upcoming post on ULFs (ultra-local foods).

Is UPF-style cheap possible without ultra-processing?

Consider the challenging landscape of food prices. To begin with, cheap food is deeply baked into US psyche. The cost of U.S. food is pretty much the lowest in world as a percent of income, which makes it a no-go—psychologically—for the industry to risk raising prices unless it’s forced to. The market would tolerate a little of that, but not much. Second, the complex cogs of the mechanical food chain are too deeply mired in co-dependency to reduce prices by tinkering with the system. Though that’s not for lack of trying. One attractive but futile idea is to adopt regenerative agriculture – a whole separate topic that will be explored in a later post).

Third, food inflation is already rising a good bit faster than the general rate of inflation. Fourth, climate change will hit industrial agriculture—and thus food prices—especially hard. In fact, it’s already starting to do that. Potato chips, that icon of UPFs, are 50% more expensive than they were a couple years ago because of warming weather in Idaho and Washington state—where most “chipper” potatoes are grown. Fifth, on average, UPFs cost about half as much as their minimally processed counterparts.¹As if all that’s not enough, we have accelerating food recalls, bird flu rapidly spreading and becoming more contagious, and other market upheavals such as Trump’s tariffs and removals of many federal aids to agriculture. Farmers are alarmed.

All this means that the only way industry can hold food prices down, at least for now, is to keep churning out the UPF style of cheap. And that requires as much ultra-processing as possible.

Appearing Good

Can UPF-style tasty be produced without ultra-processing?

It’s hard to see how, in as much as the UPF version of tasty is the direct result of industrial manipulation. Excessive salt, sugar, fat and calories (found in some level 2 processed foods) are factors, but not the key components that make UPFs so tasty. UPFs feature a unique and effective blend of adulterations that can be achieved only through physical treatments that complement gums, flavor and texture enhancers, stabilizers, preservatives, and other additives. Doubtful? Do a thought experiment: ask your tongue to imagine the tastiness of, say canned beans or any other Level 2 processed food compared to that of your favorite ice cream, French fries, fast-food pizza, bacon, ketchup, or most other such. If your tongue is anything like that of the average person, I’d bet it will report that the former is good but latter raises tasty to the level approaching irresistible. That result depends entirely on level 4 ultra-processing.

Is UPF-style convenient feasible without ultra-processing?

How could it be? The industry has prioritized little-to-pay, quick-to-buy, and ready-to-eat, widely and easily accessible in a smorgasbord of venues. Fast food outlets are almost everywhere, usually with drive-thru pickup. You can get hot dog takeouts at the local bodega while your gas tank is filling up. Handy, because 20% of all meals in the U.S. are now eaten in a car, driving to or from work. You can do all your grocery shopping under one roof at the supermarket. Shrink-wrapped, microwaveable frozen Pizza and TV dinners, entire aisles full of soft drinks or chips, puffs, pretzels, and flavored popcorns. And much more. It’s what we’ve been conditioned to believe we’re entitled to, any time we want it. Could it be achieved without ultra-processing? No way. Only UPFs can deliver that degree and style of convenience, because that’s precisely what they were designed to deliver. Foods produced at only the 1-3 levels of processing are not configured to match it, and thus cannot.

Can foods be ultra-processed without externalizing costs?

No, mainly because UPFs are so cheap, but also because they’re ultra-tasty and ultra-convenient. The only way the industry can afford to produce those features is to externalize two thirds of the cost of making and delivering them. But given the now weekly bad press, how long can that hold? Thus far, the industry seems to realize that it has no choice but to continue to externalize costs. So what to do? One potential solution is to shift to the next generation of UPFs—lab-produced food goo such as synthetic fat derivatives, fermented bacteria, cultured meats, and Chlorella algae. The hope is cast them as healthier than the present version while maintaining the cheap, tasty, and convenient appeal.

Good luck with that. All of the goos face daunting hurdles of public acceptance as well as massive development and infrastructure build-up from scratch—adding even more costs to externalize. For sure, you won’t see them on grocery store shelves anytime soon. Yes, “Impossible” meats are sometimes cited as quick next-generation success stories. However, they, too are ultra-processed and thus face the same challenges as their brethren.

Is it possible to re-formulate UPFs to be genuinely healthy?

Not when the bad health outcomes are due to dismantling whole food integrity. As mentioned earlier, bad health outcomes of UPFs are not due mainly to salt, sugar, fat, and calories, even though those factors in excess are indeed unhealthy. Rather, the source of such outcomes is the industrial practice of tearing whole foods apart, manipulating them with heat, pressure, extrusion, or atomization, adding new and/or “fortified” ingredients, and then putting the re-jiggered pieces back together. Nor would next-generation food goos ride to the rescue; they would be even more deeply processed.

But PepsiCo is betting I’m wrong. It has announced that in addition to reducing salt, sugar, and unhealthy fats in some of its snack foods, it will start replacing toxic dyes and flavors with natural substitutes to make the snacks healthier². In other words, the unhealthiness is due to toxic ingredients. Getting rid of artificial additives is a good idea, but the latest evidence tells us that the problem is mainly due to the extreme processing. PepsiCo is also betting they can reduce or replace ingredients without sacrificing at least some of the tastiness, visual appeal, and low cost that define UPFs. I’m betting they can’t, and more importantly, that UPFs can’t be rendered healthy with such superficial manipulation.

So the chain of ultras can’t be avoided or fixed, UPFs generate unhealthy outcomes at the current rate of national consumption, and they can’t be re-formulated to be healthy. That leaves the industry only one option to save them: convincing the public that those bad health outcomes are not really all that bad.

Disappearing Bad

Processed is processed, period.

From the descriptions and examples described in the NOVA categories, it can seem like there’s no clear distinction between processed and ultra-processed. Industrial interests pounce on this perception with claims that since (according to them) there’s no unequivocal difference between the two, there’s little or none at all. Hence, no problem with UPFs. And some journalists and dieticians are only too happy to agree. Never mind that Michael Pollan has made the distinction clear and simple: “Processed food you could make at home. An ultra-processed food is one that contains ingredients no normal person has at home and requires equipment you could only find in a factory.”¹

Yet that depiction may not be all that easy to apply in the grocery store just by reading labels. So in an effort to improve on the NOVA model, a new scoring system, FPro³, features a table classifying hundreds of foods according to the degree to which they’ve been processed. Unfortunately, it’s based on nutrient content rather than degree of industrial manipulation. As we’ve seen, mechanical and chemical adulteration, rather than content alone, is the principal source of bad health outcomes. Nevertheless, FPro could be a helpful next step in the ongoing debate about what’s relatively safe to eat and what isn’t.

Appropriating natural

Another approach is to imply that okay, it’s a UPF but it can still be natural; all we have to do is convince the customer. Think UPF ads featuring bucolic cows grazing in a lush green meadow under blue skies. Cascades of freshly-diced veggies or fruits gaily tossed into the air. Inspiring claims of nourishing nature’s this or that, brimming with naturally-crafted wholesomeness. It’s another time-tested strategy. But highly misleading.

The clearly healthy UPF meal

A third approach is to create examples of a supposedly healthy meal by throwing together a few debatably typical UPF items into what’s portrayed as a normal breakfast, lunch, or supper: “See, UPFs aren’t so bad after all. In fact, they’re perfectly fine.” The problem with this claim is that the great majority of UPFs cannot fit into such a fantasy meal.

UPFs can be part of a healthy diet

Except that they’re designed to be far more than just “part” of a “healthy” diet. The reality (can’t emphasize it enough) is that 75% of our diet is already UPFs and is expected to rise to 90% by 2028. Yet I’ve seen the modest-consumption-of-UPFs-is-healthy claim more than once. This tack appeals to the seemingly logical argument that an occasional few potato chips, dip, and a Pepsi is harmless. Right, until you slide down that slippery slope of tasty, cheap, and convenient. All of which, all too often, and all too successfully, entices you to far more than occasional consumption.

Full disclosure, I enjoy an occasional UPF myself. However, the many years I spent teaching environmental science and sustainability—and extensively studying food systems and their effects—keep me from over-indulging. Even then, I would never claim that a small dish of ice cream (though not the kind that holds together when it starts melting due to gooey, sticky emulsifiers) is an integral part of a healthy diet.

UPFs can be nutritious.

This claim was addressed in the discussion above about potentially healthy UPFs. In short, no they can’t be, for the reasons given.

Goodbye, level 4 UPFs. Hello, level 5 (?)

Another option is to double down on UPFs by replacing them with what we might call level 5 processed foods; these are the food goos, also described above.

One of them, lab-cultured meat, has generated intense opposition from the meat industry. So much so that it has muscled some state legislatures into introducing bills that prohibit even research on it. Basically, meat interests are terrified because of how quickly the Impossible Burger got a solid foothold in the fast-food market (with more such impossibles on they way).

Equally alarming to Big Ag is that some of these second-generation UPFs are being marketed as a “farm-free” way to feed a still-ballooning global population. They would also gain environmental plaudits by vanquishing ag-related greenhouse gas emissions, water and energy use, and pollution. Even though that won’t happen overnight, lab-grown meats could turn out to be more of a headache than a boon for the industrial food system.

By the way, I once, at a Burger King, tried an Impossible Burger myself. I knew that it consisted of black bean and potato protein, GMO soy and yeast, vegetable oils and other additives, including vitamins, and was high in saturated fats and sodium. So I was curious to see how it compared to a real hamburger (which I hadn’t had in a good while). I omitted everything but the bun and a little mustard and ketchup—no French fries or drinks—to get the most objective experience possible. It did taste a lot like beef, but the odd thing was that after I’d finished it, I felt like I hadn’t really had anything to eat; there was this strange sensation of hollowness, even though I could detect that there was something in my stomach. The only real source of satisfaction was the lonely, lingering aftertaste of mustard and ketchup—full-fledged UPF nostalgia. A friend of mine said he’d had more or less the same experience.

How could you be so heartless?

I’ve even seen an appeal to guilt: claiming that those who disparage UPFs are being cruel to low-income people, who (accurately enough) depend on UPFs because they’re so cheap. As if it wasn’t the big chain supermarkets who drove out neighborhood access to small local grocery stores—with affordable whole foods—in the first place. Those little stores, of course, were replaced by convenience stores with junk food. Still not satisfied, the industry encourages UPF sales in every way it can. For instance, by inducing vendors to prominently feature specials on “Big Gulp” soft drinks and the like to coincide with the release dates of food stamps.

Big Food, Big Problem

To get back to the original point, because the industrial system has put most of its eggs into the bulging UPF basket, how much of rejection can it weather if the public doesn’t fall for the deny, delay, and mislead strategies to disappear the doubts? What if, instead of the projected year-on-year increase of 7%, we see a 3% annual drop? Can the industry absorb that and still be profitable? If not (and I don’t see how it could), at what point does it not only stop digging itself deeper into its self-inflicted hole, but start pulling out of it? And given the degree to which it’s locked into its chain of ultras, as described above, how would it even do that? And what will that cost it? These are the big questions in my mind, because even a relatively small disenchantment with UPFs would rock Big Food to its core. At the same time, it would help pave the way for ULFs. Stay tuned.

November 19, 2025: Here is a comprehensive update on the encouraging progress made against UPFs since I wrote this article.

¹Williams, Z. 2024. The man who warned us about UPFs: Michael Pollan on his 25-year fight with the food industry. The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/film/article/2024/jun/06/the-man-who-warned-us-about-upfs-michael-pollan-on-his-25-year-fight-with-the-food-industry#:~:text=%E2%80%9CHe%20labelled%20and%20defined%20ultra,only%20find%20in%20a%20factory.%E2%80%9D

²Whitelocks, S. 2025. America's largest food company makes major recipe change to appease RFK Jr that'll change taste of snacks. Daily Mail. https://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-14659771/food-giant-recipe-change-rfk-jr-dyes-additives.html

³Youmshahekian, L. 2025. Which foods are the most ultraprocessed? New system ranks them. SCI AM. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/which-foods-are-the-most-ultraprocessed-new-system-ranks-them/