40 acres is the working-class minimum for the South where something edible grows year round. There's a reason they picked 40 acres- it was enough to mostly stop a family from begging but not enough for them to build wealth. : / https://twitter.com/fgcallari/status/1249488770337886208

The replies here are wild

Meanwhile what *really* happened is:

-US reneged on "40 acres & a mule"

-folks staked out their own 3-10 acre slice of the plantation that formerly enslaved them; gardened food & cash crops to supplement wages from continuing to work on plantation.

(Source for the 3-10 acre thing: the 1870 USDA census)

-Plantation owners had no idea how to run their own farms & didn't like paying money, so they instated sharecropping.

BTW the reason they adopted sharecropping is *because that was already the norm for farm labor in the rest of the US*. It's not a special weird Southern thing.

-3-10 acres aren't nearly enough for a family to live on, so they were still economically dependent on wages. From the plantation that used to own them.

Small plots aren't the only reason ex-slavelords were able to loop Black folks into sharecropping, but they were part of it.

Y'all can miss me with the "but farming is different now" bullshit. Gardening really isn't. Enslaved folks weren't just growing cotton under plantation's direction- they'd had their own food plots growing African crops (okra, peanuts, watermelon, etc) w traditional methods.

Enslaved & newly-freed Black folks were expert farmers. They worked cash crops w commercial methods & also grew their own subsistence plots. I'm not a better gardener than they were. And unless you've personally *made a living off it for generations,* you're not either.

"But there aren't enough acres in the US for everyone to farm 40, therefore the math doesn't work out & you're wrong."

Ya no shit. Industrialized agriculture sucks, but it exists for a reason. The reason: universal subsistence ag doesn't cut it. That's my whole point.

And my personal fave, "But with ~permaculture~ you can grow supermagical high yields."

This actually has some truth to it. Before Anglo conquest, the Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) were getting 40-70 bu/A of corn using the 3 Sisters cropping style.

Once white settlers took over, they had a decade or so of their own high corn yields. Then they collapsed, & didn't recover until the invention of artificial fertilizers.

BTW this Anglo yield collapse wasn't caused by "corporate agbiz." That was small family homesteaders.

Most US soils are degraded way past where they can support the yields the Haudenosaunee were getting with their cropping system.

Can they be regenerated? Absolutely.

However: that takes at least 5 years, more like decades to pull off.

That means in order to make that work, you need to pay for it with an off-farm job.

At which point you're not longer "homesteading."

You're just a burgher with a big fucking garden.

That's great! But it should absolutely not be confused with "homesteading."

That is the entire point I was making.

What US "self-sufficiency" culture passes off as modern "homesteading" is not.

It's the modern version of Jane Austen-era petty gentry dicking around in the yard.

Which again: is entirely valid for what it is.

Suburban "self-sufficiency" is a hell of a consumer market. Who can garden? Largely folks who can afford to be homeowners with a yard. Middling to affluent.

It's also a v white population. Getting well-off white folks nervous enough to buy shit is like shooting fish in a barrel.

As someone who enjoys gardening: there's so much fucking money to be made in scaring (largely white & nervous) suburbanites into gearing up to grow fear gardens.

ain't no capitalism like "here's a catalog of stuff you can buy to fuck over the capitalists" capitalism

Meanwhile p much anytime you actually dig into the bio of someone claiming to have "homesteaded their way to independence," there's a whole-ass story they're hiding.

Thoreau: Mom did his laundry

Laura Ingalls Wilder & her dad: made living as gov't employees not homesteaders

Scott & Helen Nearing: trust fund babies

At this point maybe some of the peanut gallery are thinking "But isn't it good & virtuous just to garden for its own sake?? How dare you attack gardening like this"

I said it's worth doing for its own sake once, nay, twice within this very thread, fair reader.

That was- as a matter of fact- the entire argument of the article that kicked off this hellscape of a thread.

"Yes gardening is good & worth doing. Just don't do it out of a hope for financial payoff or food security bc that will be disappointing."

Congrats on finally arguing yourself into the OP from like three days ago

In conclusion, there is a HUGE difference between the age-old tradition of BWABFG (burghers with a big fucking garden) and the relatively new, short-lived, & unhappy history of homesteading.

But modern homesteading/self-sufficiency culture deliberately conflates those two things for the purpose of profit.

And even taken at face value, homesteading is self-parodying poison & always has been. The end