No Food - No Humans - No Carbon Footprint

No garden for you!

When you tinker in your backyard garden, you don’t think much about Climate Change. Well, apparently you should, with immense sense of guilt and shame: “Food from urban agriculture has carbon footprint 6 times larger than conventional produce, study shows” (Science Daily,2024.01.22):

A new University of Michigan-led international study finds that fruits and vegetables grown in urban farms and gardens have a carbon footprint that is, on average, six times greater than conventionally grown produce.

Farmers and gardeners at urban agriculture sites in France, Germany, Poland, the United Kingdom and the United States were recruited as citizen scientists and used daily diary entries to record inputs and harvests from their food-growing sites throughout the 2019 season.

So, they started this program of war against food back in 2019 or even earlier. As the questions one asks betrays the train of thought one has. Or intents.

Now, compare a raised bed in your garden with millions of square miles of thousands of feet deep carbonate deposits in Earth’s crust for proper perspective (not to mention all hydrocarbon deposits, including pit moss, coal, gas, and oil). For example, carbonate reef deposits are about four kilometers (12,000 feet) thick off the West coast of Florida:

That’s a lot of carbon taken out of the atmosphere in just this one location!

Actually, it’s all over the Earth’s coral regions still working hard on carbon sequestration, “Global distribution of modern shallow-water marine carbonate factories: a spatial model based on environmental parameters” (Nature Scientific Reports volume 9, Article number: 16432, 2019):

Observed worldwide distribution of modern shallow-water marine carbonate factories. Carbonate factory extent is exaggerated for visualization purpose. Background oceanographic map corresponds to remote-sensing data of marine primary productivity (absorption due to phytoplankton). Carbonate platform distribution come from bibliographic data (see text for details). The 4 factories are defined after Michel et al.22,28, by splitting the Schlager9,16,17 T-factory into “biochemical” and “photozoan-T” factories and the C-factory into “photo-C” and “heterozoan-C” factories.

And that is only the most immediate earth crust sequestration of the vastly more broad notion of carbonate reservoir geology:

Back to your backyard garden:

"Most of the climate impacts at urban farms are driven by the materials used to construct them -- the infrastructure," Goldstein said. "These farms typically only operate for a few years or a decade, so the greenhouse gases used to produce those materials are not used effectively. Conventional agriculture, on the other hand, is very efficient and hard to compete with."

Leave it to professionals - save the planet from overheating!

Although, from the Canadian perspective, go right ahead, knock yourself out!