The Self-Sufficient Garden Blog
The Industrial Food System: UPFs Are Us
Believe it or not, an insightful way to really “get” the value of ultra-local is to examine its extreme opposite: ultra-processed. Which these days is very on-point, because rising concerns about UPFs (ultra-processed foods) may well be moving us toward...
The Surprising Economy of Scale
So far you’ve seen an introduction to the self-sufficiency garden system, how it relates to a broad description of farms and gardens, and what food self-sufficiency can mean. Next up: exploring why gardens are inherently far more efficient than farms, especially the...
The Feather and the Corn Leaf
Once in a while I’ll insert a mini-post having something to do with gardening, just as a break from the longer posts. So here is the first such.One day while walking through the rows of my garden corn plants, I came upon this little scene. A feather had blown in and...
Self-Sufficiency Gardening – What Exactly Is It?
I noted in my introductory post that food self-sufficiency means different things to different people. Here, I’ll describe what it means to me, based on my research over the last several years, and how I arrived at that version. Along the way, I’ll weave in various...
Gardens and Farms — So Very Different
Nowadays, there’s really only one way to feed millions of people, right?Wrong. There are two ways: with farms, and with gardens. Yet we think that only the former can actually deliver massive amounts of food to millions. Simply because that’s what we’ve been taught to...
Setting the Stage for a Self-Sufficiency Garden Food System
For years, as a college professor of sustainability, I thought that the amazing efficiency of our industrial food system was due to clever technology powered by energy-dense fossil fuels. But then, spurred by the Covid shock to the food chain, accelerating climate...
Food Shocks and Garden Solutions
What Is A Food Shock? In case you haven’t been following the news lately, we’re currently facing what the media call climate change food shocks. These mega-threats will be triggered by already serious but increasingly extreme droughts, aquifer and surface water...
The Garden Food System and Diffusion of Innovation Part I
By now you know—if you’ve been following my blogs—that I intend to build up a GFS (Garden Food System) as a viable alternative to the IFS (Industrial Food System). But just how would that rather ambitious goal play out? Perhaps the best way to describe it is in terms...
The Garden Food System and Diffusion of Innovation Part II
Rate of adoption All successful innovations go through an adoption curve in which the new technology or idea reaches a critical mass, at which point it becomes self-sustaining. But not all innovations are successful. For instance, many have predicted that some form of...