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  • From: "Tradingpost" <tradingpost@lobo.net>
  • To: livingontheland@lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: [Livingontheland] Local food: success is 100% possible
  • Date: Sun, 01 Mar 2009 22:32:32 -0700


Local food: success is 100% possible
Saturday, February 28, 2009
http://cluborlov.blogspot.com/2009/02/local-food-success-is-100-possible.htm
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This is a guest post from Tim, a city planner from sunny Moncton, NB. Tim
has spent some time looking into the viability of local, small scale
agriculture, and has come up with some results that give us every reason to
be optimistic regarding our ability to feed ourselves through our
individual and neighborhood-scale efforts, even as the systems of
large-scale, industrial agriculture and food delivery unravel due to a
combination of high input costs, epic droughts brought on by accelerating
climate change, and a shortage of credit caused by the financial collapse.
The remaining challenge is start doing it quickly enough: this summer, that
is.

"Russian households (inclusive of both urban and rural) collectively grow
92% of country's potatoes on their garden-plots, the size of which is
typically 600 square meters [0.15 acres] for urban households, and
typically no more than 2500 square meters [0.62 acres] for rural
households," tells me Dr. Leonid Sharashkin, whose dissertation, "THE
SOCIOECONOMIC AND CULTURAL SIGNIFICANCE OF FOOD GARDENING IN THE VLADIMIR
REGION OF RUSSIA" contains a wealth of specifics, based on original field
research as well as Russian government data. For instance, he writes:

"In 2003, 34.8 million families (66% of all households in the country)
owned gardening plots (subsidiary plot, allotment, garden, or dacha) and
were involved in growing crops for subsistence (Rosstat 2005b). By 2005,
53% (by value) of the country’s total agricultural output was coming from
household plots (which in 2006 occupied only 2.9% of agricultural land),
while the remaining 47% (by value — Rosstat 2006) came from the
agricultural enterprises (often the former kolkhozes and sovkhozes) and
individual farmers, requiring 97.1% of agricultural lands (Rosstat 2007b)."
[Sharahkin, p.12]

Elsewhere in his disseration, he details how much food was being produced
in household plots, and its figures were on the order of 90% of all the
potatoes in Russia, 80% of all the vegetables, 50% of the meat and milk
etc. In other words, very high proportions of certain products, including
at least one calorie staple (potato).

Dr. Sharashkin quotes the previous figures from Russian government
publications, but his dissertation also contains the results from his
primary field research (and therefore are isolated from the usual concerns
one might have about the reliability of government statistics): on page
162, Figure 24 indicates that, of the gardening households in the study
area:

* 39% were cultivating under 0.05 hectares (i.e. 500 sq.m.);
* another 36% were cultivating between 0.05 and 0.1 hectares; and
* none of them were cultivating more than half a hectare.

In other words, 3/4 of gardening households were gardening the equivalent
of two suburban house lots. (At least based on the typical house lots we
have around here, which are 50-60 feet by 100 feet.)

Considering that Russia has just 110 days of growing season per year, while
most of America has much longer growing season and significantly more
sunshine, this is all quite encouraging from the standpoint of what
Americans and Canadians could do with their tiny suburban house lots,
assuming they all learn to garden quickly enough.






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