JoeSpareBedroom wrote:
"dpb" wrote in message ...
....

As purely a point of reference, I'm guessing you don't have any
involvement w/ agricultural production nor in the production of a major
portion of your own? (I'm not planning a bash here, just trying to
actually establish some context for discussion.)


"Major" production depends on the whims of the weather and the friggin'
deer, but I've been a fanatical vegetable gardener for 30+ years. I'm not
involved with any sort of commercial production, other than giving away a
lot of herbs to a friend who runs a small restaurant.

OK, that's what I had figured, maybe.

Turn that into _having_ to produce enough to feed you and your family
reliably every day of the year or in producing enough product to sell to
be able to pay the daily bills and provide a comfortable standard of living.

Our family has made our living farming for right at 100 years now in
middle of US. Changes are phenomenal in practice and scope in the time
since my grandfather homesteaded here. W/o any commercial herbicides
production costs would skyrocket and yield would be dramatically reduced.

It's kinda' like solar or wind power generation -- a good thing but the
energy density is so low as to make it a very hard economic replacement
for all higher-density generation techniques. While you're growing some
veggies and all, we're providing the wheat, etc., that you need for the
bread to put that tomato into a sandwich...

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