We save tons on transportation costs, but lose many orders of magnitude more on redundant labor and economies of scale (one tractor working in a big field is a lot more economical than 1200 humans working in 1200 gardens). Maybe technological advancements will change all of that--perhaps we could have fully robotic farms, but even then I would expect one big factory farm with a handful of big, expensive robots to outperform many gardens each with a small robot.
>(one tractor working in a big field is a lot more economical than 1200 humans working in 1200 gardens).
Sure. But 1200 humans working in 1200 gardens is also a lot more economical than 1200 humans sitting at home playing Fortnite all day because there are no jobs.
The idea of employment guarantees as welfare policy has been getting traction, and programs like this where raw output isn't the main goal would be good candidates.
> is also a lot more economical than 1200 humans sitting at home playing Fortnite all day because there are no jobs
No it is not. I personally care about people being able to do what they want with their free time.
The situation you describe is only "efficient" if you value everyone's free time and happiness at 0. I care about people's happiness, on the other hand.
The main goal of society should be to provide people with things that they want, and that includes leisure time.
On the contrary, I think it would be a great benefit to people if they could be more self reliant / not as dependent on state and corporations to survive. I prefer self reliance to more leisure time.
You might prefer that. But other people don't. If they did care about that, then they wouldnt be using that leisure time, they would be becoming more self reliant.
I personally want people to have a choice of what to do with their time, and not have values forced on them.
>No it is not. I personally care about people being able to do what they want with their free time.
Just tranq them all with a guaranteed supply of opiates then. Problem solved.
People's needs and wants are socially conditioned. It's not like their "wants" just sprang out of thin air. They were created by the culture and social expectations around them. And many of those social expectations make people feel obligated to feel useful.
That means they need to be provided with avenues where they can feel useful instead of doping themselves with addictions to fill the sense of purposeless anomie that they fall into when alienated from public life. Make work programs, like urban forestry or gardening, are good ways to do this as they beautify the spaces where we live and are unlikely to be done adequately without some societal coordination.
Basically efficiency isn't the chief concern. If you really have a bunch of people with nothing better to do with their time (e.g. Fortnite), then we don't really need to care about allocating labor as efficiently as possible to maximize yield.
We can use labor in a very inefficient (where yield is concerned) way if we think it will confer ecological, aesthetic, or sociological side-benefits, as would having lots of private gardens.
Fortnite is just an example of something people fall into doing when they don't have any other productive opportunities available to them.
I'm not sure whether you're taking issue with leisure time generally or the tendency for people to participate in leisure that you believe is inefficient, but both are orthogonal to the question of which type of agricultural system is more efficient.
In particular, if your solution is simply "spend less time on [your current] leisure activities!", it can be applied to either aggricultural system. In the case of specialized agriculture, it simply means spending more time on the individual's specialization or really anything with a greater opportunity value than growing one's own food (if your goal is to maximize earnings, it's tough to do worse than spending an hour per day growing your own food to save ~$5).
Somehow it doesn't seem likely to be less efficient when my food grows a few feet away from my dinner table. How much extra labor is involved in logistics (field to silo to warehouse to grocery to home)?
That said I think it's rather naive to assume that everyone in the world has a garage or other indoor space to spare, the resources to climate control it, etc. The world's hungry don't live in single family homes in California.
If it were cheaper, the market would very likely have sussed that out by now (unless you're proposing some recent game-changing technological advancement). In all likelihood, the cost of all of that extra labor is well under $100/week/family, and the time cost alone of managing a greenhouse (maintenance and repairs, cultivating the crops, preserving the food, managing the whole operation, etc) exceed that amount pretty handily (for most families).
