RADICAL GARDENING: Growing Food Like Your Life Depends On It
In 1720, the average North American colonist and Native American fed themselves. Most people either farmed, maintained a vast garden, or hunted and gathered wild foods. Hotels and wayside inns maintained their own farms. Colleges, prisons and sanatoriums were wedded to produce production and animal husbandry. Most homes boasted large vegetable gardens, a small jersey cow, a few pigs, and a flock of free-range chickens, at the very least.
In 2020, the average American does not grow food of any kind, of course, nor even eat the majority of meals at home. Some 53 percent of Americans eat fast food or takeout meals every day of the year.
In 2070, just two generations forward from today, the average citizen on this continent will have to have more in common with the citizens of 1720 than 2020. There are more than a few reasons why that will be likely, and we’ll get to those reasons shortly. In the meantime, I suggest that you and I consider practicing Radical Gardening; that is, learning to grow food like your life depended on it. And if not your life, per se, then the lives of your children or certainly the lives of your grandchildren.
In order to make the case for Radical Gardening as a resuscitated mode of living, it’s best to run out the backstory for you. In the simplest terms, the Industrial Revolution and the rise of capitalism created an insatiable need for labor. Hardscrabble hill farm family members and the landless flocked to the new mill towns and bustling cities to take the new jobs being created. Once on the job, they had no time whatsoever to do the work of growing food to sustain the body. In the early 1900s, mechanization of the farm and the use of cheap fossil fuel created an explosion of agricultural productivity, commodity oversupply, the rapid depression of farm product prices, and the non-viability of small farms by the millions. People left the land in a human flood. And the knowledge they once possessed left with them and died with them.
So here we are. In the Northern Hemisphere there are currently half a billion souls and perhaps two million farmers -- averaging nearly 60 years of age, by the way -- working acreage large and small. There is no more arable land to grow food upon, of course. In fact, the amount of land suitable for growing food is beginning to contract in size here and all over the world. Because the number of productive acres is beginning to decline even as world population increases dramatically, the average North American over the next 50 years will likely be confronted with some very uncomfortable choices.
Today, in the relatively wealthy Northeast, in the bucolic state of Vermont, one in four citizens makes use of a free food pantry at sometime during the year. In the United States in general, one in eight citizens depends on food stamps to keep hunger at bay. One in five children come to school hungry every day across the continent. For those individuals, right now, food insecurity is starkly real.
On the road to the next 50 years, food insecurity will evolve into a multi-headed hydra, made flesh by persistent severe drought, continental heat waves, irrigation water scarcity, super storms and floods, energy supply swings, salt infiltration along the coasts, fertile delta land inundation, ruinous mass-agricultural practices, ever increasing human mouths to feed, and the decline and even loss of critical species that pollinate our crops and keep pests at bay. Right this very minute, the total grain crop for Australia is projected to decline 20 percent during their summer (it’s summer south of the equator now) because of exceptional long-duration drought and scalding record temperatures across 80 percent of that continent.
In order for us and our children and grandchildren to meet our own needs in the face of the climate change juggernaut, we will need to turn to the small plots of land at our feet in cities, suburbs and in rural areas and begin to relearn the ways of our forebears. We will have to get busy learning how to grow a greater and greater percentage of the calories we are going to need in the face of an uncertain future.
Bluntly speaking, we will have little choice but to turn away to some extent from dependency on mega-farms, mass agribusiness, superstores, and the fast food blight stores everywhere and turn to ourselves and our immediate communities to build a massive and sustainable local food network whose foundation will be backyard and community garden plots, small traditional mult-product farms, family greenhouse vegetable production, and small-scale specialized egg, dairy, meat and fish production.
There are techno-wizards who preach the gospel of skyscraper-size vertical farms in cities and petri-dish meat cell culture to feed the masses. Those things will come to pass, perhaps, but I no longer believe that giant centralized, high-investment, high-tech mass-production systems dependent on an aging electrical grid are a wise or even sustainable means of delivering food to tens of millions. In fact, going forward, I fear dependence on such energy intensive mega-systems is dangerous, particularly in the face of the widely swinging climate variables that we are all witnessing.
Food must be grown locally in every community, every state, every region in substantial quantities by a multitude of new, young farmers and skilled backyard gardeners who utilize organic practices and who renew the soils instead of, as is currently the practice, mining the soil by dousing it with chemical fertilizers, pesticides, herbicides, and fungicides that are proving to be progenitors of disease.
Throughout all of the history of our species on this planet, we had an intimate relationship with our food. Most all our calories were literally right outside our door, our hut, our cave. Now the average calorie travels 1,500 miles to reach our mouths. That will have to change because, eventually, change will be thrust upon us. Here are a few very plausible examples why:
The decline in snowpack in the West and the loss of huge underground aquifers in the West and Plains states will spell the disruption and eventual end of crop irrigation on a grand scale. No water, less food, higher prices.
The decline of productivity of pasture and cropland due to persistent severe drought and increasingly extreme summer heat wave events in states west of the Mississippi River, increasing major rain events and soaking soils in the Midwest and East, and salt water infiltration into coastal farmlands. All will amount to crop yield declines the likes that are underway now in Australia, India, Pakistan, portions of Africa, and Indonesia.
Fisheries decline due to overfishing and pollution is well documented. As oceans warm and acidify as they absorb ever more carbon dioxide emissions from human activity, ocean productivity will continue to deteriorate.
Bankruptcy of tens of thousands of farmers who repeatedly lose crops and livestock to climate change-induced natural disasters.
Disruption of the world’s energy supply chain due to war, terrorist attack, or natural disasters.
Electrical grid disruption due to storm and wildfire damage, aging infrastructure, excessive demand during heat waves, and even electro-magnetic solar storm.
A New Madrid, Missouri earthquake series like that which hammered the Midwest in 1811 (thought to be the most powerful quakes ever experienced in America) would devastate a dozen Midwest and Southland cities and road and rail systems on a catastrophic scale, particularly road and rail bridges over the Mississippi River. Disruption of transportation systems, food production plants, farms, and government aid services would be widespread over a dozen states.
There is one bright avenue among these dark thoroughfares. The reestablishment of local, small-scale agriculture and personal food production at home or in a community garden can only mean a more vibrant, secure, safe, and healthful future. Placing the highest priority on local food production over the course of a generation would spawn local economic revival, environmental improvement, lower energy use and therefore lower carbon footprint, rebounding rural employment, healthier lifestyles, and resuscitated rural communities. And local food production would be the ultimate buffer against the possible future horrors listed above. That spells security, the ultimate security.
Don’t buy into this argument? We’ve been here before. The nation underwent such a local food production revival in the ‘40s, during World War II. The Victory Garden campaign launched by the federal government to supplement home supplies and support the troops and our allies was highly successful, generating nearly 40 percent of all calories available during those years.
If we have plentiful food, all other things are possible. Little food, then there is soon anarchy. Climate change is already affecting food supplies across the globe. It will get worse, most assuredly. Best to get busy locally getting our own hands dirty in the good earth.
