"Recession Gardens"

Image courtesy of oOOo.

This was front page on Yahoo Finance tonight:

"Dollars from dirt: Economy Spurs Home Garden Boom."

With the recession in full swing, many Americans are returning to their roots -- literally -- cultivating vegetables in their backyards to squeeze every penny out of their food budget.
Industry surveys show double-digit growth in the number of home gardeners this year and mail-order companies report such a tremendous demand that some have run out of seeds for basic vegetables such as onions, tomatoes and peppers.

"People's home grocery budget got absolutely shredded and now we've seen just this dramatic increase in the demand for our vegetable seeds. We're selling out," said George Ball, CEO of Burpee Seeds, the largest mail-order seed company in the U.S. "I've never seen anything like it."

Gardening advocates, who have long struggled to get America grubby, have dubbed the newly planted tracts "recession gardens" and hope to shape the interest into a movement similar to the victory gardens of World War II.

Those gardens, modeled after a White House patch planted by Eleanor Roosevelt in 1943, were intended to inspire self-sufficiency, and at their peak supplied 40 percent of the nation's fresh produce, said Roger Doiron, founding director of Kitchen Gardeners International.

Doiron and several colleagues are petitioning President Obama to plant a similar garden at the White House as part of his call for a responsible, eco-friendly economic turnaround. Proponents have collected 75,000 signatures on an online petition.

"It's really part of our history and it's part of the White House's history," Doiron said. "When I found out why it had been done over the course of history and I looked at where we are now, it makes sense again."

But for many Americans, the appeal of backyard gardening isn't in its history -- it's in the savings.

The National Gardening Association estimates that a well-maintained vegetable garden yields a $500 average return per year. A study by Burpee Seeds claims that $50 spent on gardening supplies can multiply into $1,250 worth of produce annually.

Doiron spent nine months weighing and recording each vegetable he pulled from his 1,600-square-foot garden outside Portland, Maine. After counting the final winter leaves of Belgian endive, he found he had saved about $2,150 by growing produce for his family of five instead of buying it.

Well, I guess it is not just rural Tennessee that is seeing this reaction.  

For me, it is a personal relief:  Several years ago while doing research on the energy complex, other data points kept cropping up in the literature. After further consideration, in addition to my view that the energy complex would be unable to meet its projections I came to the conclusion that:

1. The banking system was going to blow up.
2. The food supply system might not have the necessary redundancies.

 I met with friends, clients, and prospects and told them of my thoughts... and people thought I had flipped my wig.

Since then the banking system blew up, and it is now conventional wisdom that we will have to move away from imported Oil, one way or the other.  But food... food was a given.  That was 3 years ago.  I guess a lot has change since then.

I do believe that people are growing more of their own food.  I do not believe that the reason they are doing so is solely for economic reasons.  My best guess is that there has been enough internet chatter about how utterly dependent we are for the very food we eat on a very complex system that could very well come unglued for any number of reasons at any time - crop failure, currency failure, drought, energy shortages, etc... that the idea of food security as well as personal economic security has worked its way into the national mindset.

70 years ago people were thin (actually, 30 years ago people were still thin - none of the kids I went to college with were significantly overweight... I don' think that is true today), food was expensive, and people knew where their food came from - with many producing a significant amount on their own.  In one lifetime we went from an Agrarian/Industrial society to a consumer society... and in the last 6 months many of us looked down and realized (Holy Sh-t!) we were working without a net.

This is unbelievably good stuff.  We don't need to grow all of our own food.  If the average person grew 10% of their food, and did it in an organic and "sustainable" way, and if local producers contributed a further 10% (I am just guessing at the numbers, but you get the point) the risks to the system would be greatly reduced.

Yours for a better world,

Mentatt (at) yahoo (d0t) com