Thank you for that video - it gave me a few interesting articles and a new book for my reading list 😁

And one of the points in that video is there’s a huge difference in the carbon footprints of different types of urban agriculture - actual urban farms make efficient use of resources, whereas home gardens and community gardens don’t.

And even then, those urban farms are not “self sufficient” the way prepper fantasies like this meme promise - they rely on external inputs like fertilizer and building material and irrigation.

Which is, yeah. I love competently designed urban farms. I love competently designed home gardens. The image in my post is neither.

The image in my post is selling a rugged individualist, manifest destiny, pioneers breaking sod in the prairie image of homesteading - the lone smallholder supporting himself and his family solely through the production of his land - which has rarely been true and, when it was, really sucked for the people stuck doing it.

Small scale farming is viable. Rugged individualism is crap.

I love that book!

The interesting thing about Seymour’s one acre compared to the prepper fantasy in the meme is that he doesn’t try to pretend an acre is “self sufficient”. He optimizes the space for crops that make a big difference to his quality of life - fresh vegetables take up almost half his diagram, for example - instead of putting in a few tiny plots of grain and a duck pond. He has a cow in the same space as the meme does but notes he’ll have to buy fodder for it because that’s not enough land to feed a cow - but he’s cool with that because fresh milk is so important to him…

The difference between an actual farmer and an online bullshitter, I guess.

Bonus: