Planet Veggie Garden

So what if 40% of our produce was grown by amateurs… “home hobby gardeners”?

If I use press articles as an indicator, there’s definitely more resonance with grow your own food these days.
A number of seed companies (in the US and UK) have commented that veggie seeds outsold flower seeds in 2006-07 – the first time since those Victory Garden (or the “Dig for Victory” campaign as it was known in the UK) days in the early 1940’s.

While the number of home gardens is certainly up big in year over year percentage, I’d venture it’s still quite a small number. If you pour the veggie garden count into the pool with 304,780,413 people, it would get quite diluted.

For sure there are RahRah-ers when it comes to growing your own (and I personally wear that cheerleader outfit and shake those pom-poms myself).

And naturally, there are also nay-sayers.
They offer:

The “Efficient Producer” Argument

which goes like this…

Mammoth-farm with mega-acres and behemoth-machines can more cost effectively produce an ear of corn than Helen and Harry home hobby gardeners can.

And they may roll out the oft promoted model of “outsourcing” – calculate how much you earn an hour (don’t forget to add in the value of your benefits). Whatever tasks you can pay someone less than that to do, you should “outsource”.
So if you get paid $40/hour and you can pay someone $10/hour to clean your house you should do so.

Funny thing about arguments and models (at least one’s based on human behavior)… there always seem to be fallacies and exceptions.

The Outsourcing Rule

Well that presumes that instead of cleaning the house (or whatever task), you would actually be engaged in making that $40/hour. In other words – it presumes you technically could make $40/hour every hour of every day, except if you choose to do something else (like cleaning the house, or sleeping).

It also presumes earning $40/hour equals $40 of tradeable money, i.e., it doesn’t pay Uncle Sam and all his relatives their demands. Nor does it account for such things as commute time and costs and various other monies you spend in the pursuit of earning money.

And you don’t necessarily realize value of your benefits equal to their cost {insert health insurance rant here}.

Ok. Moving on to

The “Efficient Producer” Argument.

Yes, from a pure top line monetary measure, mammoth-farm can produce less expensive per ear corn than Helen and Harry hobby home gardeners generally can.

Let’s call that the potato leaf conclusion… one can see the potato leaf, but the “fruit” is underground.
Ya gotta dig a little.

Let’s presume the calculated cost of that ear of corn takes into account the cost of the behemoth-machinery with some kind of depreciating asset formula. And the cost of the land itself as well. Again with some kind of depreciating asset formula.
And naturally it includes the employers cost of labor as well as the cost of seed, fertilizer, pesticide, ect.
And it includes the direct costs of getting the corn to market… processing, packaging and transporting.
In general, fine accounting work.

However…

it doesn’t include the fuzzier costs of the health effects on people working in that environment and exposed to chemicals and machine emissions. The employer doesn’t directly realize those costs.
It does not calculate the impact such agricultural methods have on the land and environment. Nor the future cultural and health impacts of these bio-altered “franken-crops”.
It does not calculate the carbon costs of processing, packaging and transporting.

As for Helen and Harry home hobby gardeners… well, many home gardeners choose the activity of gardening over other activities.
And I’d venture to say a majority of the activities they would otherwise do would not be income producing such as watching TV, and may in fact be income costing such as going out to movies.
And maybe in fact gardening is a family activity – strengthening family bonding and transferring learning.

And the efficient-producer equation does not take into account the superior freshness, generally not chemically fertilized and typically superior nutrition of home grown produce. This would also have a positive health effect that likely offsets some of the negative health effects and consequential costs of our modern life. (And maybe EVENTUALLY could lead to lower health care costs… some time after leading to higher health care profits).

And of course the whole processing, packaging and transporting dollar and carbon costs don’t exists in the hobby home gardeners world. As well, the food safety issues arising from processing, packaging and transporting are zapped (ah, worry free eating).

And how can you cost calculate the value of good exercise and pride in accomplishment. As well as the social interaction and sharing which also often accompanies home – and especially community – gardening.

Then there’s the land use issue in the hobby home gardening model. The land would not be made otherwise economically useful. It’s not detachable from it’s main economic function – housing.
So to put it to a more productive use would in fact be increasing the economic value through more effective utilization.

And don’t forget the lawn

To go a step further… perhaps the land would otherwise be a cost mechanism, i.e., it might be a lawn.

• 30% of the water used on the East Coast and 60% of the water used on the West Coast (hotter, dryer, more golf courses?).
• receive 10 times as much chemical pesticide per acre as farmland
• compared to an auto: lawn mowers emit 10-12 times more hydrocarbons; weed-wackers 21 times more and those horrid jet engine loud, blow the dirt, dust and leaves around leaf blowers 34 times more

And that chemical fertilizers on said lawn… well that runs off into bays, streams and oceans.
It is the case, the exploding jellyfish population – a.k.a. sea nettles – playing hostile with beach goers as well as the Gulf shrimp industry over the last few years is partially attributable to grass fertilizer.

Has anyone noticed?

I suspect that at the level the nation is currently gardening – while it’s peeking through the cultural zeitgeist – it’s but an unnoticed trickle in the macro-agriculture equation.

But I’m sure, at 40%… even 5% of national produce production, it would be economically measurable. And you’d be reading more hobby home gardening articles in the Wall Street Journal than the New York Times.
There would indeed be an impact on the profitability of mammoth-agriculture and there’d be jobs lost.

This is true with every industry when demand declines either because that demand is met with a different supply (as we’ve seen over and over in our globalized world) or because that demand is extinguished for other reasons (such as the once quintessential typewriter).

So the macro-economists would quantify the cost of that decrease in demand. But might side-step the principal of substitution. Because hey, it’s not that people would stop eating. The demand for food would still be there. Only the supply source would shift.

Hobby home gardeners Helen and Harry would still earn the same amount of money. Their hobby garden doesn’t prevent them from working.
However, now instead of spending a certain sum of their earned money on store bought produce and benefiting the gigantic seed company – mega fertilizer & pesticide companies – behemoth machine companies – mammoth farm corporations – farm workers – monsterous processing and packaging plants – colossal transportation industry and huge chain grocers;
They’d be spending less of it on seeds, starter plants, garden tools & accessories.
And most years – tho perhaps not the first year (start-up costs) – they’d have money “left over” from that certain sum of their earned money, i.e., they’d spend less on growing their produce than they would have spent on buying it.

That money doesn’t evaporate (well aside from the whole inflation issue). They’d either spend it on something else and/or save it… a novel concept these days.

You see, from a strict cost calculation Helen and Harry hobby home gardeners cannot produce an ear of corn as cheaply and mammoth-ag.
But in the real world, Helen and Harry’s labor is cost-free… well actually, their labor is the corollary of “sweat equity”.
It has value and it earns them their end desire (food), but there’s no (or at least less) money exchanged in the transaction from field to plate, from producer to product.

And I would strongly argue: the food is of higher quality, less environmentally abusive and socially, physically and mentally healthier.

So the home hobby gardener model transfers revenue from a domestic industry (big agriculture) to domestic individuals (Helen and Harry)… No transfer of wealth to other countries, no bi-lateral trade agreement. Delicious.

No related posts.