Overwhelmingly sympathetic to the cause here, but I also think it's easy for some us to build up unrealistic expectations for its viability as a large-scale alternative to corporate agribusiness. For one thing, farming costs money---if you're starting from scratch, you need garden tools, seeds/seedlings, topsoil and emendments/nutrients, abundant water, and of course a plot of land. Some sort of fencing is desirable too, to keep out critters and thieves, and when you add it all up, it's a huge commitment of resources that a lot of people just can't afford.
Second, farming takes time. When I grew my own vegetable and herb garden a decade ago, I typically spent an hour or two each day digging, watering, weeding, picking and pruning. I was able to allot the time for these tasks because I worked out of my house, but if I had a conventional office job that took me away from home during daylight hours, there's no way I could have kept up with all of the daily maintenance a well-tended garden requires. So for many of us---especially in the suburbs, where people commute longer distances to work each day---it's a luxury of time we can't easily accommodate, even if we have the money to convert our suburban lawns from crabgrass to cabbage. Not trying to dump on the idea---I absolutely loved having my edible garden (it's one drawback to living in an apartment like I do now), and I certainly would like to see more government money being spent to acquire and develop community garden sites, as well as making it simpler for individuals to sell homegrown products---but I think we also need to be realistic in terms of how outwardly scalable "citizen farming" can be expected to be for the foreseeable future. More succinctly, seems to me we'd need to reengineer the social order along greatly more egalitarian lines,i.e., where more people make more money at their jobs and have more leisure time to spend at home before personal/urban farming presents a reasonable alternative to retail grocery chains. A tall order!
---Baron V
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