From Lawns to Gardens

It is a paradox in our suburbs that if you own a yard then you are too busy, perhaps even too old, to garden it fully. If you are young, you probably don't own land. Statistically, home owners keep lawns, not gardens. Lawns are expensive. You may spray weed killer, mow with a lawnmower, maybe even play catch once in a while. But a garden will produce enough food to make an impact on your budget, every year. It is one of the smartest investments you can make.

How Does Food-Share Work?

This website connects volunteers who are willing to work for a share of the produce with land owners who are willing to let a neighbor help tend their garden. Perhaps you would like to turn the backyard into a garden, but have a career and children. Perhaps you are retired and no longer have the health or stamina to keep your garden in good repair. The people who are young and eager to work are unlikely to own land. The goal of this website is to bring these two groups together, to get some gardens growing some nutritious food. We have to draw together as a community, neighbors working together, to create wealth in our own backyards. In difficult economic times, volunteerism is the leverage we need to make ends meet.

Why Gardens Are More Efficient Than Farms

The small backyard garden is the most productive form of agriculture in the world. Large farms, with their fields of rolling wheat, allow the heads of grain to be harvested with large tractors. Much of the gathering can be automated. This means one man with a tractor can tend a thousand acres... but where did those other farmers go? They must take a job building or repairing tractors. The labor and the costs do not disappear. The real source of inefficiency is the wheat itself. One square foot of wheat just isn't that much food. A family needs at least a couple acres of wheat if it happens to like buttered bread in the morning.

Wheat, corn, and soybean have a reputation for being the staple crops that put the West on top. Going back in time, they are right. Beginning in Egypt, at the time of the first pharaohs, wheat made Egypt the first great conqueror. The flooding of the nile, and the digging of trenches to further spread the flood and irrigate wheat fields, allowed Egypt the food surplus to maintain a large standing army. In the days of Rome's greatness, Egypt remained "the Bread Basket of Rome". If there is one lesson to draw from wheat, corn, and soybean, it is that every great nation produced vast quantities of its own food. This food surplus is a vital component of their national power.

Importing Food Compromises Our Security

In terms of national defense, if our shipping lanes were to be disturbed, our trucks to run low on oil... every major city would begin to starve within a week. Food comes such great distances that we are nationally vulnerable to collapse. Conditions like the sieges of Acher or Jerusalem could result today from a strike in trucking and shipping unions. This system is expensive, consumes vast quantities of foreign oil, and undermines our ability to meet threats upon our own soil.

Armies, too, require great amounts of food to keep in the field. In the days of the Assyrian empire, the invading army would pillage the fields and flocks. In Rome, the highway system was both a quick response tool for the army to march the breadth of the empire, but was also an important logistical support line, allowing them to move grain from Egypt to Gaul to support their northern army. Modern warfare experiences great starvation in the ranks of the soldiers, from the WWI trenchman with neither boots nor rations, to the soldier wintering at Valley Forge, food has often been a major factor in national power and readiness.

It is in every nation's self-interest to cultivate a strong local food industry to provide for their citizens in times of need.

Focusing on Greatest Yield Per Unit of Land

The reason wheat, corn, soybean, and rice no longer work is because they don't use land efficiently. In the days of Egypt, conservation of space was pointless. Land was everywhere readily available. Today, land is scarce. Millions live packed within cities, but each of those millions consumes their acre of food, which must be grown somewhere. Today, the value of land makes wheat, soybean, and corn monoculture outmoded and costly. Farming has to be more yield intensive, and more space intensive. We have to return to high labor, low machinery, local farming to produce quality food for the population boom of the future.

As a ready example, the potato is a much more efficient staple crop. Per unit of land, it will out-produce wheat by a factor of a hundred times. Yams, Jerusalem artichoke, taro, parsnips and radishes all out-produce wheat by large margins. If you want to feed your family, and maybe a few neighbors, grow many root vegetables. Yield per acre can be multiplied many times by layering vegetable crops. The home garden can cultivate a root layer, herbaceous layer, bush layer, lower and crown tree-bearing layer, and a vine layer climbing up the tree trunks.

The single most productive food system is the small manufactured pond. A sustainable pond can incorporate free range ducks, eel, shrimp, tilapia, even trout. Since fish do not fight gravity as much as land animals, they convert more of their food into body protein, resulting in quicker, bigger harvests per unit of land.

About Good Neighbor Farms Charitable Trust

It is the goal of this charity to acquire lands and funds to create many small ponds and farms in order to relieve hunger. Using a combination of layered gardens, chickens, and ponds, we can make food cheap, healthy, and abundant for all.

What We Can Do

Lower the cost of living. Raise the bar nutritionally for the children of next generation. Sign up and help. We will plant the seeds now. Later, we'll harvest.

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