Fencing

Even with just a four-foot high fence, it’s extremely unlikely that deer will jump into a starter garden enclosure measuring just 5.5’x18’, especially if you have some kind of vertical supports for tomatoes and pole beans. It’s just too confined and crowded for them to feel safe. However, with increasing size they become less easily spooked about jumping over a fence, which means you might need to extend the top to five feet. It really depends on how hungry they are. I went for years with only a four foot-high fence and had no deer problem; then suddenly one year, late in the season, they jumped it. Still, the more you fill up the interior with vertical objects like lines of pole beans, trellises for beans, some kinds of winter squash, and even sweet potatoes, the less likely they are to feel safe in there. And I’m talking about the white-tailed deer that are common in the eastern half of the country. I have no experience at all with mule deer in western states. It’s a good idea to talk to gardeners in your area about what it takes to keep them out.

As for rabbits (the eastern cottontail), the most important deterrent is a four foot-high, one inch-cell chicken wire. Even then it’s best to extend the lower edge out to form a three-inch wide flange down flat against the ground, around the outside, to discourage them from digging under the bottom edge of the fence. And it’s best to do all this before you plant anything. I’ve suffered deer and rabbit raids more than once when I didn’t get a fence up early enough.

Bed spacing

In my 35’x40’ gardens, which supply a year’s worth of food for one, I have ten rows of 1.5’x40’ beds, with two foot-wide aisles between them. I also plant some extra, vining crops along some of the perimeter fence if the leaves poking through the fence are not tasty enough to serve as a snack buffet for deer or rabbits. So no sweet potatoes there, the leaves of which are like candy for them. Then, when increasing planting space, it’s better to go blockier than longer. For instance, if you go from one to two 1.5’x14’ beds, it’s better to put them side by side rather than end to end. The reason is that there is less fencing increase to deal with. A year or two later, you may want to have the equivalent of six starter gardens, in which case two adjacent rows of three starter-sized beds end-to-end might be the best arrangement. Or you might decide you want 2’-wide beds, and 3’wide aisles. Fine, as long as you’re prepared to deal with more fencing, mulch, compost, watering, and soil prep. I’m just describing how to get the most out of a 35’x40’ garden area with the least amount of effort.

Arrangement of plants

In contrast to a starter plot, the larger the garden, the more plants of a particular kind you’ll place together; it wouldn’t make much sense to have four starter gardens side by side, each with seven different plants. However, there are many strategies and preferences for plant arrangements, as well as variations in crop rotations from one season to the next. As just one example, see below for the way I interplant greens and tomatoes. This is more a matter of convenience than companion planting, wherein two adjacent different crop plants have an advantageous effect on one another. In general, I prefer plants in a given row to be of just one type.

Nutrition proportions

Although it’s not that easy to do with a starter garden, growing a garden that delivers a balanced diet becomes easier with increasing size. In general, I aim for a layout in which about one third of the growing space is devoted to protein production, one third to carbohydrates, and one third to all the other components of balanced nutrition. Again, this is so very different from the usual home garden, which focuses almost entirely on juicy veggies low in protein and carbs. Protein comes mainly from dry shell beans, but there is also a fair amount of it in dry corn and even, surprisingly, potatoes if you eat them regularly. (Did you know? Dried potatoes and dried human milk have the same amount of protein per unit weight.) Carbohydrate-dense crops are mainly corn and sweet potatoes, with potatoes and some of the drier winter squashes not far behind. Of course, beans and corn also provide a number of other nutrients in addition to protean and carbs.

Water

Vegetable gardens require an inch of water a week, according to just about every authority on gardens. But sandier soils will need more than heavier clay soils, so it varies. When you have only one or two 1.5’x14’ beds, it’s not too arduous to water with a watering can. Maybe even three or four such beds, depending on how far away your water source is, and how often you need to water. As you get a larger and larger garden, however, at some point it will be wise to use drip irrigation. Or if you don’t mind lugging a garden hose around, that can work too, but again, only up to a point. Also, if you pack a good six inch-thick layer of dense mulch around your crops, and in the aisles as well, you won’t need to water nearly as often as you would if you left the soil bare, which unfortunately many people do. Plus, the mulch keeps the weeds down, and it also gradually becomes compost, enriching the soil. Can’t say enough good about mulch, as long as it doesn’t consist of wood chips.

Hauling stuff around

The larger your garden gets, the more handy it is to have a small wheelbarrow to transport compost, mulch, and if you need to, topsoil for a raised bed. Note that I said small (4 cubic feet), not one of those awkward big ones, and certainly not a square-sided cart. That is, unless you don’t mind increasing the width of your aisles enough to accommodate all that goes with it, as noted above. A small, single-wheel barrow allows you to turn sharp corners, allowing you to keep your aisles to 2’ wide while easily getting to all parts of the garden with not-too-heavy loads.

Corn

You will remember that I said a single or two corn plants need to be hand-pollinated. However, that won’t be necessary once you’ve graduated to at least four rows 10’ long, which you’d plant side by side (with the usual 2’-wide aisles). At that point, you can let the wind do the pollinating. This is one case where I recommend jumping fairly substantially from a small number of corn plants to the 10’-long rows, as hand pollinating can get to be a real chore if you have to tend to more than a very few of them.

Beans

To make the best use of space, I strongly suggest dry shell pole beans. This means you have to provide some way for them to climb up a trellis, strings, or slender poles, and there are a number of ways to do that. I grow an heirloom variety that climbs up eight feet or more, forming a thick curtain of vines. In order to keep them from shading one another, I now don’t grow them in adjacent rows, though with just a few plants shading is not an issue. You can, of course, grow dry shell bush beans only a foot or so high, but pole beans usually yield better, and the vertical orientation they require also helps to spook deer into staying out of the garden, as well.

Winter squash and sweet potatoes

These are both characterized as vines that like to sprawl along the ground, and they will certainly do that if you let them. However, you can put up 4’-high, 2”x4” welded wire fencing along the row, and train the vines up into as lattice, thus making better use of space. That’s easier to do with some winter squashes than others.

Tomatoes and greens

I space tomato plants 3’ apart and put a Swiss chard or kale plant between each two tomatoes. The greens, which like cool weather, grow and yield well while the tomato plants are still gradually gearing up, but at some point the tomatoes start to more or less shade out the greens, so I then harvest most of the chard or kale leaves. However, toward the end of the summer the tomato plants start to max out, so I eventually remove them, giving the greens enough light to have a second spurt of growth and yield that extends well into the fall, even early winter.

Other high-yielding veggies

Think green beans (which also have significant amounts of protein, though not nearly as much per unit fresh weight as dry shell beans), okra, carrots, onions, and rutabagas. Also, I’ve found that loki (a.k.a. lauki) squash is a prodigious producer, requiring only a couple plants (provided with plenty of compost and water) along a perimeter fence. The deer and rabbits won’t bother it (beyond an exploratory nibble) if some of its leaves emerge through the fence. Which, due to the heavy vines and leaves these plants generate, needs to be either stout enough (e.g., 2”x4” welded wire, 4’ high), or, if you’re using chicken wire, more closely spaced T-posts for extra support.

I know that many people love their lettuces for salads. Yes, they can be delicious, but compared to almost all other garden vegetables, they offer very little in the way of nutrition for the amount of room they occupy. Then there are a number of other watery favorites like cucumbers, bell peppers, zucchinis, summer squash and radishes. Fresh or canned sweet corn, though somewhat watery, does provide some 500 calories per pound, about the same as sweet potatoes. Nevertheless, they need only about a third of the 1,500 calories per pound you get with dry shell corn in the same amount of garden space.

Preservation for the winter

There are many videos and other resources for how to preserve garden fare, so here, I’ll just mention the five major ways to do it: dry storage, canned, frozen, pickled, and dehydration. These days, canning is much, much easier with one-step electric canners, and you can now even buy vacuum-packers as an additional way to preserve at least some foods. Other than that, once you get beyond starter garden status you need to think about storage space, which depends on what and how much you choose to grow. Extra space in your kitchen cabinet or pantry for dried beans and corn? A basement cool room for potatoes and other root crops? A small room with beaucoup sturdy shelves for canned or pickled goods? An extra freezer, and a place to put it? And if you favor that route, do you need a backup generator or solar panel and battery in case of a power outage? Many variables, many possible routes to think about, which is another reason to ramp up gradually with your garden efforts.

Above all, recall again the gold rule of gardening: If you’re not having fun with all aspects of it, you’re thinking or doing something wrong. Joy is key.

The value buy-in

The first step is to ask yourself a couple basic questions: 1) Do you like the idea of being able to eat only from your garden—should you decide to—for an extended period of time, whether it’s a day, a week, a month, or up to a year? And 2) Would you like to get a nutritionally balanced diet from your garden? Contrary to what you might think, the usual home garden features only watery vegetables (compared to dry shell beans and dry dent or flint corn) that, while high in minerals and vitamins, are low in protein and energy. That’s not a balanced diet, and thus would not sustain you for long. Hence the need for most gardeners to rely on higher-calorie items at the grocery store.

Not that you have to be ideological about what counts as self-sufficiency. Do you like condiments like salt and pepper, olive oil, cinnamon, or maybe a little parmesan cheese sprinkled on homegrown tomato sauce over a plate of spaghetti squash? I do. Besides, I don’t expect anyone to jump to an all-garden diet overnight, or even at all if they’re used to and like meats. Changing gradually and to whatever degree you’re comfortable with is the rule here. It’s the fundamental premise that’s key: not being existentially dependent on the grocery store to meet your food needs. Even more important is deriving the self-empowerment, satisfaction, and re-connection to the earth, yourself, and others that comes from taking deeper control (literally, from the life-giving soil) of your life. Does that sound good to you?

If it does, and if you’ve never had a food garden before, I suggest you start with a modest 1.5’x7’ plot. The immediate goal is to be able, toward the end of the growing season, to enjoy at least one whole day of eating only from your garden. Then, if that brings you benefit that has meaning for you, so that you want to continue it for a longer period of time, say a couple weeks’ worth of food the following year, or even just now and then, you can expand your efforts proportionally. Actually, even with a 2.5’x7’ plot, you’ll probably get a good bit more than just one day’s worth of a balanced diet. Would you be okay with that?

The garden

First, you need an area that gets at least 5-6 hours of direct sunlight a day, preferably around the middle of the day. Second, it should be a spot that doesn’t stay waterlogged for a day or two after a heavy rain; it needs to be either on a higher level in your yard, or drainable (e.g., by a small ditch) in some way. Overall, your plot should be a 1.5’x7’ bed surrounded by a two-foot border, so you have room to walk around it while still inside a 5.5’x11’ fence. (The graphic is for illustration purposes, not to scale.)

Below is a little more detail on the overall plot, divided into 1.5’x2’ subplots. You’ll have only one plant each of winter squash, potato, greens, and tomato, and two each of corn and beans, about 4-5” apart. You may want to plant the winter squash and sweet potato, which will send out vines, at the ends so they have room to wander about. You can arrange the rest of them in any order you like.

Each subplot should have loose, friable soil measuring about 1.5’x 2’ x 8-10” deep. It can be either dug up from within the existing ground, scooped up somewhat above the ground level but without enclosures, or with soil added to produce raised beds within a wooden frame or other border. There are pros and cons for each of these options. I prefer in-ground with enough compost added to build up a 4-6” raised bed. Enclosing raised beds requires constructing or buying the enclosure and then sourcing and adding 8-10” of good quality topsoil. It’s a significant added expense, but many people favor it. As for soil fertility, to avoid having to do soil tests and then figuring out how to adjust fertilizer and pH, I suggest just mixing in enough good-quality compost to comprise about one-third of the soil volume. Of course, finding adequate compost (well-decomposed organic matter that is more or less loose/powdery, chocolate-or-darker brown, and fresh-smelling) can also be a challenge, but at least you won’t run the risk of over-fertilizing your plants with chemicals.

And finally, once the plants are well established (i.e., sufficiently high enough and strong not to get easily covered up), it’s a good idea to apply about 6” of mulch that’s thick and dense enough to prevent the growth of weeds (but don’t use wood chips—too easy for weeds to find their way through). This goes for not only around the plants themselves, but also in the two-foot border around the outside of the plot but inside the fence.

Plant varieties

The table below summarizes my suggestions; I have just a few additional comments.

Winter squash: Several favorites to choose from, but it’s a challenge to protect many of them from squash vine borers. Butternut is not only immune to the borers, it yields and usually keeps well, and has very good flavor.

Beans: Here I mean varieties that are allowed to mature until dry and then be shelled, not green beans. Dry beans are where you get most of your protein from the garden.

Corn: Sween corn is great, but for protein, energy, and easy storage you want what’s called dent or flint varieties that are allowed to mature into dry kernels. Seed catalogs describe them as suitable for grits and cornmeal. Corn requires a little extra nitrogen and hand pollination, as you’ll have only two plants. See the two references I mention below.

Potatoes: These have to be planted as “seed potatoes”, pieces of potatoes that have at least two “eyes” that grow into shoots and then whole plants that bear tubers underground. Kennebec is a good choice, but there may be others—maturing early, midseason, or late—that you may simply prefer.

Greens: Swiss chard is the most versatile and easiest to grow, but kale gets a lot of publicity for its excellent nutritional value. Easiest to plant pre-started seedlings.

Tomatoes: The varieties you get at Wal-Mart will grow, but the flavor is about as disappointing as your average grocery store fare. If you have a local farmers market where you can get heirloom (e.g., Brandywine or Chef’s Choice) starter plants, the taste is far superior.

Sweet potato: Here, you plant what’s called “slips”, seedlings with just a few young leaves and roots, available from the larger seed catalogs and nurseries. To get the sweet taste, you need to either keep the harvested sweet potatoes for a week or 10 days at a temperature of 85^oF, or store them several weeks at 55^o. I’ve found Beauregard to yield and keep very well.

Supplies and equipment

As indicated below. The most important tool is for digging. I recommend a spade with an 11” long by 8” wide, flat-blade and a D-handle. It’s the best for preparing an in-ground bed, but you’ll most likely have to order it (about $65). Some people prefer a more conventional convex-bladed shovel you can get at the hardware store. In my opinion, the cheaper price of a shovel doesn’t justify the extra effort it requires. Whether you go with a spade or shovel, a hoe is also useful; not so much for weeds, which with properly applied mulch will not be a problem, but to pull fluffed-up soil/compost mix back into a dug-out garden bed, as you will presently see.

Short-term supplies consist of things that need to be replaced each year, minus any seeds and seed potatoes you’re able to save. You can grow your own sweet potato slips from saved sweet potatoes that have sprouted shoots over the winter, which you can place in water about a month ahead of planting. By that time they will have produced plenty of roots and leaves, so all you have to do is stick them in the ground.

Unless you live somewhere that has absolutely no deer or rabbits, you’ll need to put up a four-foot high fence. This means purchasing seven 5.5’-long, sturdy “T-stakes” and setting them into the ground with a T-stake driver (available at home-improvement and some hardware stores). The positions of the T-stakes are indicated by the red dots in the upper-most illustration, which also includes the location of a rabbit-proof gate. The fencing itself should be standard “chicken wire” with one-inch hexagonal openings to keep out even baby rabbits. Since chicken wire usually comes in two-foot widths, you’ll need to fasten one above the other to the T-posts (with zip-ties). A watering can is sufficient for watering a small garden like this, and for the tomato plant, a sturdy, four foot-high cage of some kind is handy. Or just drive a 5’ wooden stake into the ground and tie the main stalk up (while pinching off most of the axillary shoots, with either type of support).

Bed setup

Once you’ve located a sunny, reasonably well-drained location, the most common of which will be a lawn, you have to decide whether to do a raised bed—within an enclosure or not—or an in-ground bed. A raised, enclosed bed is easy, if not cheap, assuming you are able to build the enclosure yourself or buy one, and can find a source of healthy topsoil (i.e., not scraped off some chemical-drenched agriculture field) to fill it to at least 8” deep, with about a third of the volume consisting of compost.

Not so easy with the boxed-in raised-bed route—if you eventually want to grow a year’s worth of food—will be multiplying the boxes to enclose 720 square feet of beds in a 35’x40’ garden. Even with placing every two 1.5’-wide x 40’-long beds adjacent to one another, that would require about 500 feet worth of 8”-high wooden enclosures (or 4-6”-high, if you don’t mind scrimping on yields), plus 1,200 cubic feet of added topsoil (at 8” deep; 600 ft³ at 4” deep). Just say’n. But maybe you’d be happy with some fraction of that goal for the time being.

For an in-ground starter garden, first mark out your 1.5’x14’ plot with string pinned to the ground, then make 4”-deep incisions along the string all the way around, preferably with your flat-blade spade. Then, kneel down and slide the spade under the sod, gradually prying and lifting off partial pieces of it and setting them aside. Then, while applying pressure to the top of the blade with your foot, dig out a little soil at a time until you have an initial hole 1.5’ wide by about 6” front to back and 8-10” deep. Gradually, taking off 1”-thick slices at time and setting them aside, extend the hole—at the designated width and depth—front-to-back until you have a trench 7’ long. Then mix the compost and soil evenly while refilling the hole, pulling the mix in a little at a time with your hoe. It will mound up well above the original ground level, rendering a raised “windrow” but without enclosing it in a box.

And by the way, if this sounds like too much effort to do all at once, by all means do just a little at a time. There are also several spading skill tricks you can use to eliminate unnecessary strain on your back, legs, and arms. Namely:

• Don’t dig if the soil is too wet (sticks like glue to the spade), or so dry it’s too hard (gradually add just enough water to soak down and soften it.

• Only dig out 1”-thick slices at a time.

• When lifting out a slice, have one hand relatively close to the blade and the other on the D-handle, pry the blade back toward you using the front edge of the hole as a fulcrum, and lift mostly with your legs. Keeping your non-handle hand too close to the D-handle ruins the leverage and strains you back.

• If the ground is compacted, you can swivel the blade, again while applying pressure with your foot, either back and forth to the left and right, or push and pull it to and fro to help ease the blade in a little deeper. Do this repeatedly, a little at a time; no need to do it all by brute force, unless maybe you’re a football player with plenty of extra muscle.

• Gently dice and chop up the set-aside soil with the spade to make it easier to incorporate the compost.

Still sounds intimidating? Then know that at age 73 it took me only about 5 minutes per foot to extend a trench—in a very tough site that had never been hand-dug before—to an eventual total length of 400’. Not all at once, of course. It’s always steady as you go, a little at a time.

Congratulations, your in-ground or raised bed garden is ready to be planted. Because this post is already getting long, I’ll address how to gradually increase a starter garden to larger plots in a separate post. For those who already have a garden, just set aside the space and do a starter as I suggest, and see how it goes. Or otherwise adapt my self-sufficiency criteria as you see fit.

Full disclosure, please understand that this is all just a simple introduction, a primer, not an exhaustive description of all I could say about it. To get the most out of this post, I suggest first reading up a little on each of the suggested plants. My favorite reference books are Steve Solomon’s Gardening When it Counts – Growing Food in Hard Times, and Carol Deppe’s The Resilient Gardener – Food Production and Self-Reliance in Uncertain Times. That said, you’ll see that some of what these books advise differs a bit from what I propose. Besides, there are plenty of other fine gardening books, articles, videos, etc. to consult as well. So try what I suggest and see how it works—gardening should always be a fun and fulfilling experiment.

Above all, get started and have fun. If you’re not having fun, you’re doing something wrong. Let me know in the comment prompt what the problem is.

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 soon⁹—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.

⁹Canon, G. 2026. ‘Nothing but tree skeletons’: record-breaking wildfires devastate US cattle country. The Guardian. https://apple.news/AGc2KACy7S_WJO6WpvSk8vg

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. Not to mention the Iran war that now threatens to disrupt multiple avenues of the global food chain. 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 food system in slow-motion free-fall; How gardens supply 50% of Russia’s food; and The industrial hidden-costs economy of illusion.

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 Ultra-Processed Foods

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 self-sufficiency garden fare. 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 associated 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; to dealing with the enormous negative health outcomes such as obesity and diabetes; and to losing many other second- and third-level jobs that subsidize the industrial system. 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 (supposedly?) 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 could relatively quickly (within a few years, at very low cost) 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 or sinking 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 redistributed as it becomes available?

It's easy to lose sight of, but industrial agriculture is basically a brutal 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 waging “total war” against this or that disease. For many years, commercial ag has used ever-heavier tools to demolish natural “enemies”, 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.