Why I am building permapeople.org
&gt; I got hooked on growing food for my family and me. It is really magical if you think of how much you spare our planet with growing your own food: You need to get a job to make money so that you can spend that money on buying food which was produced and delivered close to you by large, complex and very inefficient industries. This system spends incredible amounts of resources (time, energy, labor) which you can save by simply growing your own food.<p>I mean, I know what the author is getting at here, but that&#x27;s...really not true at all as written. Comparative advantage is a thing. And also, large agribusiness and monocropping and industrial farms exist <i>because they are stupidly efficient</i>. They have a lot of drawbacks and problems, but efficiency is never one of them; if anything they&#x27;re <i>too</i> efficient. In the past we used far more land per person to grow food, and spent far more of incomes on food. That&#x27;s <i>still</i> the norm in some countries.<p>If we&#x27;re trying to minimise resource usage and maximise efficiency, it&#x27;s obviously better to have people focus on app development, doctoring, food production, clothing production, etc., and trade, than everyone split their time between all of these. I&#x27;m going to spend a <i>lot</i> more time, energy, and labour growing my food than an industrial farm would, much like the workers there would spend more time trying to debug a malfunctioning cache invalidation scheme than <i>I</i> would.<p>Of course, all of that is irrelevant. It&#x27;s a cool project and a cool idea; I wish them every success. It&#x27;s just that the intro wildly misses the mark in terms of describing the advantage. People want to grow plants, it&#x27;s a fun hobby, growing your own food is fun, this is great. Efficiency shouldn&#x27;t be our only goal in life, it&#x27;s totally fine to grow some potatoes, and I bet they&#x27;re <i>delicious</i>.<p>...you&#x27;re just not saving the planet. Which is fine!