I live on a 54 acre property: I can picture 12 acres as about a quarter of my property. If I further divide that into 72 plots, I end up with a bunch of little gardens.
What works in a small garden plot is usually totally unscalable at crop production volumes. My experience (over decades) is I couldn't sustain my family for a year on a 1-acre garden plot even if I had the time to work it intensively and used nothing but recycled organic byproduct (compost and, uh, other stuff) as fertilizer. Even if we tried to reproduce the great Kampuchean agricultural experiment of the mid-1970s and put everyone to work in the fields full time we could not feed the world this way.
I don't have a problem with folks idly dallying in this kind of research, and I think useful practices could possibly be revealed, but scale and practicality need to be taken into account when interpreting results.
I live on a 54 acre property: I can picture 12 acres as about a quarter of my property. If I further divide that into 72 plots, I end up with a bunch of little gardens.
What works in a small garden plot is usually totally unscalable at crop production volumes. My experience (over decades) is I couldn't sustain my family for a year on a 1-acre garden plot even if I had the time to work it intensively and used nothing but recycled organic byproduct (compost and, uh, other stuff) as fertilizer. Even if we tried to reproduce the great Kampuchean agricultural experiment of the mid-1970s and put everyone to work in the fields full time we could not feed the world this way.
I don't have a problem with folks idly dallying in this kind of research, and I think useful practices could possibly be revealed, but scale and practicality need to be taken into account when interpreting results.