Much of the discourse around the industrial food system—and how to make it more sustainable—hinges on the six untrue but largely unquestioned narratives discussed here. Together, they present a decidedly distorted picture about how the U.S. and the world produces and...

The hand-wringing was oh, so predictable. In March (2022), ominous headlines began to warn of impending doom wrought by the loss of grains, sunflower oil, and fertilizer exports from Russia and Ukraine: War threatens to cause a global food crisis – NY Times War takes...

I say: If we wanted to, we could grow enough food on our lawns to feed about 90% of our population. You say: You’ve got to be kidding, right? I say: Nope, I’m not. And the reason is that numbers don’t lie. See if you agree. Start with the baseline data of what one...

What a bracing discovery for self-sufficiency gardens! I just found that in 2008 Leonid Sharashkin, a Russian grad student at the University of Missouri, did his PhD research on “The Socioeconomic and Cultural Significance of Food Gardening in the Vladimir Region of...

It’s just so telling how mass food production is portrayed as a set of trade-offs, regardless of whether conventional or sustainable systems are being invoked. Yes, you get some wins if you do it this way, but also some losses. And if you go this other way, you...

Part 1 Once, upon a time when I was a botany prof at the University of Hawaii, I got called to jury duty. It was a routine case of drunk driving, hit and run, and driving without a license. However, one juror adamantly doubted the breathalyzer evidence. “There’s just...

I’ve said repeatedly that per pound of production, no one has comprehensively compared the efficiency of self-sufficiency gardens to the industrial food system. Then I came across a 2019 scientific study, published in the prestigious Proceedings of the National...

Corn is the one crop where I engage in a little crop breeding. Not as serious as the USDA-funded research in potato breeding I did for years, but rewarding nevertheless. In Just Grow It Yourself I speculated that if I duplicated standard commercial corn spacing in my...

Some people may have a hard time believing that I grew over a thousand pounds of produce on a garden plot of just 35’ x 40’. However, I kept meticulous records, and loaded everything into spreadsheets that churned out the numbers automatically—all based on my 30-day...