Carbon Footprint of Homegrown Food 🍅 GARDEN

A recent University of Michigan-led study claims that Urban Agriculture, including Home Gardens, have a carbon footprint SIX times that of conventional farming. I've uncovered exactly HOW they came up with these results.

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[Artanis]

Anyone with half a brain cell instinctively knows that these studies are total nonsense. Thanks for taking the time to dig into this. Great job.

[sundevil]

Thanks for digging into this! I find it so troubling that researchers thought that the actual cost of living--e.g., living in your home--should be connected to your garden's carbon footprint. If you remove the garden itself, the biggest carbon emitters are still there--producing carbon. We'd still have the house/dwelling, so how is the garden responsible for those carbon emissions? I'm sure it's very rare that the home was constructed solely for the purpose of the garden itself. There is so much faulty reasoning in this study and the benchmarks created. Thank you again for taking the time to spell it out!

[MrJim]

Do you remember when “they” said backyard chickens are dangerous? “They” do not want us to be self reliant at all.

[GerryMantha]

I'm unsure why anyone would think that "infrastructure allocated to food production" includes a residential home, considering that is specifically repeated both in the paper and within the supplementary material. If they did include a house, no doubt the emissions intensity would cause a serving of food from UA to be millions of times more GHG intensive than conventional field farm production.

[Robert-vhcl]

Where in the study did you find the breakdown percentages for the top 10 GHG impact components? I can't find them. thanks. Awesome video!

[soyews]

Thanks for the video. I oive in a house so I guess i can cross off the largest part. I capture underground runoff water for irrigation for free nitrogen. Sometimes the water is a little anoxic but it really makes plants green. I add 2 cubic yards of municipal wood chips each year to add carbon. 1/2 acre of lawn clippings goes between the row. 2024 i had over 250 lbs of vegetables with 25 dollars worth of seed and plants. Cut my grocery store trips in half but i am so sick of squash. 😂

[calmkate]

you've really gone into this, kudos! Including the house is rather ridiculous ...

with all the farmers protests happening around our world I do wonder if commercial farming can survive ... urban ag might soon be the only way to get fresh fruit and veg!

[ZennExile]

Compost done wrong is carbon intensive, but if you instead process waste through animals, then worms and insects, you can then lay down the castings and frass in continuous layers over soil beds. And as long as you keep laying down this thin layers, and don't till back up the soil, that carbon stays in the soil, as living organisms. And those organisms remove the need for fertilizers, lower water use, lessen the need for greenhouses, etc... Doing agriculture wrong is the single largest contributor to atmospheric carbon. Doing it right, however, is the single most effective solution. Industrial agriculture, as described in this study, is the most carbon intensive human activity there is.

Life is carbon. More life alive, is less carbon in the atmosphere. It's simple math.

[anndennis]

Were comparable land sizes maintained as lawns surveyed? Nope. They just proved that houses are the problem not the gardens. Think I'll go expand my garden by several sq. ft.