Could we grow all the food we need in our yards? [View all]

[NeoGreen]

https://www.treehugger.com/lawn-garden/could-we-grow-all-food-we-need-our-yards.html

Could we grow all the food we need in our yards?
A few months ago, I worked on a small farm for a weekend. I spent one full day digging up potatoes and picking squash. By the end, I had around five buckets full of food, all from just a few rows of plants that couldn't have spanned more than 20 yards.

"You can really grow a lot in a small space," I remarked to the farmer, hiding that I was one or two more potatoes away from collapsing from exhaustion. "You could probably feed a family for year just on this acre."

"You could feed a lot more people than that," she responded.

This is going to sound hopelessly naive to any farmers out there, but I grew up in an urban environment surrounded by miles of cornfields. I imagined that people needed huge swathes of land to grow enough to eat. And the data seemed to back me up. A few years ago, University of Wisconsin scientists found that humans use nearly half of the Earth's surface for agriculture.

But apparently, I'd missed something. We've written about how a family only needs a couple acres of farmland to grow food. One California family even says it grows 6,000 lb. of food a year on a tenth of an acre. That's enough to feed the family and sell $20,000 worth of extras.

Perhaps this used to be common knowledge. During World War II, the government encouraged people to grow their own vegetables, and these tiny "victory gardens" provided nearly half of the country's vegetables.

"At first the federal government was skeptical of supporting these efforts like they had before. Officials thought large-scale agriculture was more efficient," writes reads Smithsonian's digital archive.

The government was in for a surprise. "Reports estimate that by 1944, between 18-20 million families with victory gardens were providing 40 percent of the vegetables in America," the Smithsonian continued.