it might be the american in me, but damn if im more than a couple hours from a costco thats probably a no go

we just want a sustainable community

and this is coming from someone who has raised chickens from chick to processing

im unwilling to walk too far backwards

the urban farming stuff on the tubes is great info for what can be done on an acre, and what an acre actually looks like, curtis green is a hippie fuck, but he actually works his plots in most of his vids, and i think he's still under an acre total

whos curtis green, youtube search doesnt give me anything

curtis stone, excuse me

oh i saw his vids

understand that his business model preys on hipsters

but its still valid if you're close enough to a big city

he cash crops salad greens and rare-ish veggies mostly for upscale restaurant consumption

you also have jean-martin fortier who mass markets on >10 acres in quebec

they require a perpetual supply of chemical fertalizers though dont they?

haha nope

just compost?

their appeal is organic no-till

the reason jm fortier makes bank is because they can advertise as full organic, they dont even use a tractor to prep beds

im pretty amazed they can make that much food

the really nice thing about a lot of the urban guys, is that you have to grow holistically in those locations or you burn out your soil immediately

your backyard suburban lot doesnt have 200 years of loam in it to suck dry, so you have to take different steps

i mean, the big farm guys could do this too, but its economy of scale

if you have 1000 acres of corn, if you cant get a linear return on investment(money or time), you arent going to do it

these dudes working small land, they dont have the option or manpower to just buy more land and plant more crops

1000 acre guy isnt going to spend 900 bucks to make 905 bucks, not when he can just crank up the john deere cornfucker 9000 and print subsidy money

yeah and only so many people care about organic food

right

and no one really cares about organic corn, or if farmer moneybags used a clean fert or not

chemical ferts arent satan, they're just really easy to use as a crutch

do you think soil erosion is a serious problem on a global scale?

i think that monocropping on a large scale is the underlying concern behind the increaing lack of arribility in US farmland

this falls back to a basically unsolvable governmental issue of farm subsidy

in life, once an easy solution to a problem has been implimented, you're never going to be able to take it away or go back to the hard solution

yeah that sums up a lot of our problems today

the corn subsidy ensures that we have X amount of corn every year, because fuck we eat a lot of corn products

however, we actually get X+Y every year, because that guarenteed money from the subsidy outprices and outcompetes large farms taking risks on other crops

so, how do you tell the guys producing Y to fuck off?

you cant

you cant choose who you subsidize

you are subsidising the crop, not the farmer

this is why there's corn ethanol in your gasoline btw

gotta do something with those doritos that werent