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Scott,

I grew up on a farm, and yes this kind of thing is doable. We were wheat farmers, but lots of folks around us had a significant garden. Fresh fruit and vegetables rock.

This is how people lived for thousands of years, and there is a reason why we don't do it anymore.

Your other posters are right, economies of scale give us access to good, healthy (and diverse) food much less expensively than we could grow ourselves.

Factor in the cost of a greenhouse irrigation seed fertilizer miscellaneous other costs and it would take you years to break even (if you ever could) versus what you can get at a grocery store.

But the big cost is time. It would take a significant amount of time every day to do this kind of thing.

Is being called a commie such a bad thing?
I mean with everything they now label socialist - from opposing 7 figure bonuses for people who make exotic financial derivatives while people who make mattresses get food stamps to wanting to provide decent medical care for those who need it - I think the sting has gone out of this term. It has been too overused to have real meaning. If I have to support everything they do in the name of capitalism, then I also have to wonder if we were on the right side in the cold war. Seriously, if you had told the average worker in 1955 that capitalism meant his job was going to be shipped overseas while his tax dollars were going to provide seven figure bonuses to bankers, would he have been so willing to say, "Better dead than Red!"?
In world war two they would have called something like this a victory garden. These days with so many people out of work, labor is in plentiful supply while food is more highly priced than ever. I'm going to rate this as one of your more practical ideas. Even if you can't provide all the food for your family, you can at least enjoy some fresh, healthy vegetables without worrying about just how they were processed before they reached your table.

EleanorMuller: "I can confirm that an area the size of 4 doors will feed a family of 4 all year round for veg and salad"

This sounds much more like it, I'm a veggie, right now I weigh exactly what I should and there's no way I couldn't mainly feed myself from a well rotated small patch. For dairy and, if I didn't want chickens, for eggs I would still rely on farms and similar smallholdings, but I don't accept the idea that buying from small farms means crazy prices, scaling up the cost from pennies is no big deal, and I'm not some rich guy saying that.

Commie worlds only sound good to people that dont know anything about economics and history, which explains why still all those years after the fall of the wall in Berlin we still see marxist biases and commie world dreamers everywere. That kind of eco production is only viable to small companies that charge 5 or 6 times the price for each tomato that you can get from regular masive agricultural production. It wouldnt make economic sense to produce at that huge costs, and those only manage to survive thanks to people that are willing to pay such overpriced products.

Anyway in Commie countries production was insanely massive not local. In rusia commies did try a few massive production schemes and all the commie dreams ended up in nightmares as always, with people relying on the black market and what they could produce at home to survive as they could. In china there has been a famine in at least one region since the begining of records like a thousand years ago. Black market and local production, was not enough and they were very near starving and the only thing that saved another million death by famine like in the 30ies in russia were the massive wheat exports by the USA.

But anyways, you just cant feed millions of people by producing locally with that kind of home production scheme. If the economy needs to rely on that kind of local production population would need to be reduced to the times when production was that way and that is to pre-napoleonic times, when If Im not mistaken there was around 500mil humans around. If people numbers were reduced to that size then it would be viable but we would return to an economy based on periodic famines, not a green paradise like eco-commies like to tell us. Last famine in france trigered the Revolution and it wasnt pretty.

There is a limit of people that can be feed witout using an obscene amount of nitrates and until a new way of fertilizing land is invented it currently relies on gas and oil.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haber_process
The overproduction of food is a produce of cheap energy, oil(for transportation and machinery) and specially natural gas(a subproduct of oil extraction that allows the proccess to work and produce fertilizers), that allows to produce the indispensable fertilizers that allow the levels of mass production needed to feed so many humans around.

When oil again leaps into 3 digit prices, and it will surely will in the near future, food prices will rise acordingly as they did, and demand would need to contract again. You just cant make up for mass production using nitrates with local production. That only sounds good to people that dont know, or choose to ignore, all the facts about the matter.

The only viable solution is that when it becomes ecominally atractive(when oil prices are way up and they will be soon enough) companies start investing in researching new ways of produccing nitrates and fuels for transportation and machinery that doesnt rely on fossil fuels. Home production its like recicling. It wont solve the problem although it can make you fell good about doing your part. Water will also be a problem. As with anything else, as demand rises and supply stays the same, prices will inevitably go up. All this means periodic recesions. I understand that scott and other technocrats think that science and tecnology will break the circle. Lets hope they are right!

Sorry Scott communism/socialism doesn't work. To prove it why not help me with my own comic strip and I'll send you whatever tomatos I raise in my greenhouse. Oh, you go first.....

You can't really grow food in a greenhouse - you can grow vegetables in a greenhouse, but to grow food you would need cows, and I bet cows would get too hot in a greenhouse.

Scott,

In your post you suggest that relative to health care, "government would take care of [pay for] that". I think it is fair to say that since, even in Canada, people pay the taxes that pay for government, and those people are, in one way or another, your neighbors, you are really saying that your neighbors would pay for some of the costs of this community.

If the concept of neighbors paying for parts of the community needs is on the table, it is pretty easy to assume one's way to a zero cost living very quickly.

There are plenty of "cohousing communities" in the US that pool expertise, labor, and money to support better standards of living for their members. Many of these communities seem to have a significant shared agriculture component. Another interesting common thread among cohousing communities is the use of consensus decision making. So it's not just about sharing stuff; there seems to be some magic in the way you organize the community.

I highly recommend joining one of the cohousing tours (the last link below). I took one earlier in the month and, while I'm not sure whether I will choose to join a community, it was very thought-provoking.

http://www.cohousing.org/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consensus_decision-making
http://www.cohousing.org/tours

In answer to the question "how much land do you need" I can confirm that an area the size of 4 doors will feed a family of 4 all year round for veg and salad. (This excludes wheat and rice.) I grew up living in a semi-desert area (Karoo in South Africa) and this is how my parents provided veggies for us. Today I have a similar-sized area in our garden in Cape Town (similar climate to San Franscisco). To be successful you need to have direct sun on the area for at least 5 hours a day. You are more successful if you don't practice mono-agriculture because combining certain crops makes them grow better. For example, potatoes planted next to horseradish will give a far better crop. Also other crops provide shade etc.We do the whole composting thing and the reduction in waste is amazing. We are also very clear about the seasonal nature of home-grown food. You simply don't have tomoatoes and lettuce all year round. So you learn to bottle and preserve for the winter months.

One point I would make to those who suggest big farm spreads using max efficiency monoculture methods is the only way to go, is that this is essentially pretty unhealthy for the land, and seen by many as the reason for the waning of the bee (essential for pollination) populations. I'm definitely not saying that we should all become small holders or anything as I like being a programmer. However the modern American way of devoting 10 million acres to almond trees (or potatoes or wheat or whatever) is some reason for concern. I do believe rural areas need hedgerows for insect diversity and different crops to support varied populations of pollinators.

I would actually be willing to devote some time to community farming though as this would be a good counter to being indoors programming all day long.

If you're interested in greenhouses, look at a book called The Survival Greenhouse. It was published back in the 80's, I think. The idea is to use natural stuff to make a hydroponic greenhouse. That way you don't use much water OR soil. You use gravel to give the root systems something to hold onto and flood the trays with hydroponic solution as needed. (You do this by picking up the 5 gallon jerrycan containing the fluid -- it's attached by a hose to the tray.) Interesting idea, as it would avoid the water issue and needs much less space than using regular farming techniques.

The fundamental flaw in your concept Scott is you are saying "how cheaply can a family live". By ignoring economies of scale, you are not really trying to find that out. What you are actually finding out is "how cheaply can a small group of people live without using THESE specific resources (corporate farms) but still using THESE specific resources (government health care, roads, utilities, infrastructure, police, fire, corporate internet).

If you truly want to pursue your thought experiment to a useful and logical conclusion, you'd need to assume something like a seastead or space colony. Or something like a town-state. The town of Dilburb would require routers and wifi maintained by the town, and they cannot via an adhoc line-of-site to the next town (or two) - there's your internet. You have a few local doctors and can use the net for your healthcare. You have people in a militia for your police and fire. Etc. etc.

Then of course the 'cost' in dollars might be zero for a family of four, but the cost in Time might be pre-industrial (u?). Or the cost might be in some kind of non-tangible whuffie or karma dollars.

With your mythical commune: who works in the satellite companies for the internet, and the car factories? Who works in the hospitals? Who works in the government, the manufacturing for the tools? Sounds like what you have are people pretending to be self-sustaining and off the grid without any real way of being so.

Or just a another pro-veg post ;)

Why does this sound just like cheapatopia? I'm not complaining, actualy I loved the cheapatopia posts. But if you're going to do a cheapatopia post, try actualy saying that it's a cheapatopia post.
On an unrelated note, for the greenhouses, maybe we could do some genetic engineering and get healthier, higher nutrient "including protein," faster growing, and more biochemicly efficient plants, like the tomeato from the Dilbert TV series, but better looking so people will eat it. However, a lot of us like meat, so you might want to work on a way to incorperate that.

Planning "everything just right" of course has no costs, and since we all want exaclty the same things out of life it should be easy to coordinate our collective actions.

If the goal is inexpensive living, you only want to farm if you don't value your free time or if you consider farming an enjoyable hobby (as many people apparently do, given the amount of time they lavish on their tomatoes). Farming has moved to large industrial farms primarily due to the economies of scale that come in planting, harvesting, and even pest and weed control over large swaths of land using machinery. The myth of the family farm is increasingly just that: a myth. It is quite probable that unless you really enjoy farming, it will be less costly to pay someone else to grow your food and ship it to you than to grow it yourself.

The biggest problem I see is that you'd have to be wealthy already to do this. Super energy efficient homes cost lots of money (I'm sure you've noticed that already) and so do, I assume, huge greenhouses.

Another problem - how are you supposed to have time to work over your high speed internet connection when you've got a full time job farming? I've heard farming's quite the time consuming and labor-intensive task. If you're already wealthy, that's not a problem. The rest of us schlubs would have to get a huge mortgage to afford the house and the greenhouse, and then would not be able to earn enough to pay them off.

So go ahead and do it, Scott. We'll cheer you on from the poor section.

In your world, your biggest expense becomes taxes - to pay for the healthcare, the roads to use your rented car on, the schools, and all the other essentials we have come to expect in the modern world.