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What Hacker News says
- For a far more in depth look into high intensity gardening, with real data and realistic expectations, I strongly recommend John Jeavons: How to Grow More Vegetables: Than You Ever Thought Possible on Less Land Than You Can Imagine
- >How many cubic feet of soil, at what depth, do I need in order to stop purchasing food plants from the store, year-round?
Nobody can provide that evaluation for you without quite a bit more data. Your latitude will make a huge difference to the answer. Your altitude will make quite a bit of difference to the answer. The amount of available water will make a large difference to the answer. Those 3 alone (and notice that none of them are equivalent to "climate" though they all play a role in determining that) mean that the answers will vary across a huge range. There's also the nature of the soil in question, another far from trivial issue.
You can get some answers, however, from "How to Grow More Vegetables Than You Ever Thought Possible on Less Land Than You Can Imagine" by John Jeavons. Some of the answers can be very encouraging, some not so much. I did a weekend course with Jeavons a couple of decades ago in which he pointed out that a typical single olive tree will not even produce 1 cup of olive oil. The scale on which humanity now produces food is sometimes hard to imagine.
- I have grown Jerusalem artichokes in my home garden a few times. Each plant easily produced two pounds of tubers before boiling and cleaning. Plant spacing of around 9 square feet per plant. That comes to over ten TONS per quarter acre. They are amazingly productive.
I highly recommend "How to Grow More Vegetables: Than You Ever Thought Possible on Less Land Than You Can Imagine" by John Jeavons.
Every year, my garden produces an ever increasing portion of the food for my household and this year it has expanded to provide a significant amount of food for a small flock of chickens. Important things that aid my productivity and reduce the time it takes are a heavy mulch to minimize weeds, improve soil fertility and reduce water consumption as wel as drip irrigation on timers.
There are plenty of people using sustainable techniques to produce more food than they can eat if you look around on the internet.
- Recently posted on HN, under the thread "A remote UK community living off-grid (bbc.co.uk)":
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18498110
Excerpt from the comment:
[ A political science graduate of Yale University, Jeavons worked for the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) and Stanford University before launching his career in small-scale agriculture education. He is the author of the best-selling sustainable farming handbook How to Grow More Vegetables, Fruits, Nuts, Berries, Grains, and Other Crops Than You Ever Thought Possible On Less Land Than You Can Imagine, now in its 8th edition in eight languages ]
- >I just read The Market Gardener
What's your impression of that book? Asking because interested in that area, have done some on it (organic gardening in general, though not the intensive kind like in that book), and have read a similar book by John Jeavons:
Excerpt from this page on his site:
http://www.johnjeavons.info/john-jeavons.html
[ A political science graduate of Yale University, Jeavons worked for the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) and Stanford University before launching his career in small-scale agriculture education. He is the author of the best-selling sustainable farming handbook How to Grow More Vegetables, Fruits, Nuts, Berries, Grains, and Other Crops Than You Ever Thought Possible On Less Land Than You Can Imagine, now in its 8th edition in eight languages ]
- I wish the article had more facts and was more scientific. Blanket assertions like "we'll need 5 billion more cows" do not convince me.
Anybody read about John Jeavon's work? I just bought his book (How to Grow More Vegetables) a couple of days ago. He claims that we have the technology to create self-sustaining farms which can feed a person on about 4000 sqft. Present day agriculture requires between 9000 and 30,000 sqft per person.
So it's entirely unclear to me that industrial agriculture is the only way to feed the planet.
Certainly his method is human-intensive (by design), so you can't have situations like a family of 2 adults farming 1000 acres of corn. So it's unlikely to be adopted in the US.
Web sites: www.growbiointensive.org
And they have a store in Palo Alto: www.bountifulgardens.org
