Exerpts -
"The seemingly limitless reserves of petroleum that fueled the past century’s exodus from the farm are about half gone. From here on, fossil fuels — and all the everyday essentials that depend on them, like transportation and food — will grow increasingly costly.
Without some miraculous new energy source, muscle power could soon again be a cheaper alternative to fossil fuels for growing food."
Fortunately, in the United States, "suburbia occupies vast swaths of former prime U.S. farmland. NASA’s ecological forecasting research group reports that the people living there already water about 30 million acres of lawn, three times the land planted in irrigated corn.
Those lawns average somewhere between one-fifth and one-third of an acre. Authorities like gardening guru John Jeavons and 'The Contrary Farmer' author Gene Logsdon say that’s ample land for growing a substantial portion of a family’s food."
"The most effective tactics for making farmers out of more of us are local: convincing homeowner associations that vegetable gardens look as nice as lawns, zoning boards that chickens belong in back yards, and state health agencies that bread baked in home kitchens for sale to neighbors isn’t any likelier to hurt anybody than Wonder Bread."
"'Farmers' who grow substantial amounts of food for their families and perhaps also for sale to neighbors, as primary income or not, are far better equipped to weather a forced fossil-fuel fast. This is the kind of farmer many of us are already within a hoe handle’s reach of becoming, and perhaps with less effort than we realize."
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