this post was submitted on 31 Jul 2025
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Individual Climate Action ✊

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Discuss actions that we can directly take as individuals to reduce environmental harm.

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The Rise of a New Grain Alliance – Germany’s Free Bakers Sow the Seeds of Change (www.resilience.org)
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[–] stabby_cicada@slrpnk.net 1 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

Unlike industrial-scale grass-based agriculture, a tree-based agriculture doesn't lend itself well to centralisation; no big ploughing or harvesting machines, no synthetic fertilisers, and economical at just about any scale.

And there's the problem.

The problem isn't "big corporations exploiting people and land", though that certainly is a problem.

The problem is, because of centralized agriculture, only a handful of people in the West today know how to, or want to, grow their own food.

In Colonial America, for instance, 90% of people worked directly in agriculture. In 21st century America, less than 1% do.

And even in developing countries, where significant fractions of the population still engage in subsistence farming, farming is seen as hard, dirty, insecure, poorly paid work - because it is - and most people try to find jobs outside agriculture if at all possible.

And this is a problem because forest-based permaculture, without big machinery and economies of scale, requires a lot more human labor to maintain. Not only that, but it requires expert human labor - people who know what needs to be planted when, how to recognize invasive weeds and protect desirable seedlings, when and how to harvest, how to process and store that harvest, and all the other details of keeping a food forest functional.

And, because industrial agriculture has these huge economies of scale, expert human labor costs a lot more in wages than the food a food forest produces.

I mean, look. It takes three hours of labor to produce 100 bushels of wheat - 6,000 lbs, nine million calories, enough to feed 12 people for a year, produced with three hours of human labor and a ton of fossil fuels and chemicals.

How many hours of labor does it take to produce nine million calories from a food forest?

How much training does it take to reliably manage a food forest?

Who's going to do that labor?

Who's going to train people to do that labor?

And what countries are going to accept the decrease in standard of living that comes with relocating so many labor hours to food production and away from everything else?

I don't think "but the food is healthier" is going to cut it.

[–] wolfyvegan@slrpnk.net 1 points 1 week ago

I am well aware that the majority of people don't want to plant food forests or have the training to plant food forests. I'm not claiming that people will do so on a large scale.

forest-based permaculture, without big machinery and economies of scale, requires a lot more human labor to maintain

Compared to using big machines and diesel fuel to do the vast majority of the work, sure, but you could say that about almost anything.

three hours of human labor and a ton of fossil fuels and chemicals

Have you tried growing wheat without the fossil fuels and chemical inputs? Compare doing that to growing a food forest.

How many hours of labor does it take to produce nine million calories from a food forest?

Not sure, but averaged out over a human lifetime, probably less than three.

How much training does it take to reliably manage a food forest?

The cool thing is that after the first few years, a forest will mostly maintain itself. Even just a few weeks volunteering would give someone the training that they'd need to get started, and then they'd learn the rest the same way that I did: through experience.

And what countries are going to accept the decrease in standard of living that comes with relocating so many labor hours to food production and away from everything else?

I think that ending capitalism and dismantling the notion of a "country" are co-requisites to fixing the food system. Of course the "powers that be" would never adopt a tree-based agricultural system when the basis of their power is an entire society dependent on grass.