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by sensanaty·1y ago·view on hn ↗
I'm aware, I grew up on a farm growing potatoes (amongst other things). My point is, again, growing a few potatoes is very, very different to growing multiple field fulls of potatoes at an industrial scale and the whole hubris thing is people thinking such a thing is scaleable.

Sure, grow a few potatoes in your garden, growing your own food is commendable. But to pretend a home garden is scaleable to a proper farm is ignorant at best, and is exactly what happens very often when technologists talk about the topic of farming.

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It's possible to go to extremes in either direction in this topic, because there are things you can do objectively better but are cost constrained. For instance with indoor potato farms you can harvest multiple times per year anywhere, get crazy yields/health by jacking up CO2 levels, grow in absolutely perfect temperature/humidity conditions, have far less issue with pests/weeds, and so on endlessly.

And in the context of an early Mars expedition, which probably wouldn't have more than a dozen people anyhow, you could get practically infinite potatoes in a very small land area. This is all dramatically better and more efficient than classical farming with long sprawling fields in every way except for cost/kg, but in contemporary industrial farming the only thing that matters is cost/kg.