Growing your own food in a permaculture system can drastically reduce your global footprints.

No more petroleum-based fertilizers, no more petroleum-based pesticides, no more petroleum-powered machinery, and no more transporting food all the way to your table…using petroleum. Oh, and no more energy to produce, process, market, and transport fertilizers, pesticides, machinery, trucks, etc. either. On top of that, many ways that energy is used indirectly for food (building and powering grocery stores, food marketing, pesticide companies, law firms, fertilizer mines, and the millions of employees who work for all of these, etc.) are no longer contributing to your footprints. These savings could potentially reduce the average carbon footprint by a third¹ and cut the average petroleum footprint in half!²

As a huge bonus, when we build soil instead of destroying it, we can effectively sequester carbon from the atmosphere into our soil. For example, in chapter 17 we’ll talk about hugelkultur beds – essentially raised beds with rotting wood buried inside.³ A lot of the carbon that was previously in the wood is incorporated into the soil instead of being released into the atmosphere.⁴ The natural process of soil building is accelerated, we get delicious food, and we reduce our carbon footprint at the same time. Depending on how much of this kind of stuff you do and the amount of space you have, you may be able to reduce your footprint by 40%, 70%, 100%, or even reduce the footprints of other people!

Then there’s the health factor. Conventional food is loaded with toxic gick. I think this plays a huge contributing role in all of our health problems. And when you go to the store, even if it’s labeled organic, what is the true story of that food? Organic growers are still permitted to use pesticides, just ones that are considered “natural.” And there are certainly enough stories out there that question the integrity of the organic labeling system…again, it’s kind of hard to know what’s really going on.

I prefer eating food that I’ve grown myself because I know the full story. I can know without a doubt that it was not sprayed with some kind of toxic gick and that it comes from a healthy, diverse polyculture. Plus, the nutrient quality of most food degrades as we wait for it to get from the source to our belly. By harvesting food in our backyard, we can pack more nutrients into our body, and the food tastes better.

In addition to the possibility of lower medical bills, growing your own food can result in other significant savings as well. Can you imagine not paying for groceries? That’s a lot of money we could use for something else! If done right, the costs of growing your own food can be miniscule when compared to the benefits. For example, if you spend $1 on a packet of seeds, you might get $10, $100, or even $1000 worth of food out of it! And if you save your own seed you can even eliminate those costs and grow varieties that are better adapted to your site.⁵

A lot of people want to compare the time it takes to buy food at the store versus growing a garden. And growing a garden seems like a huge time commitment. I think traditional gardening is a huge time commitment, which is why I prefer to follow the permaculture path. In the next chapter, we’ll address this issue by talking about ways to grow double the food with one tenth of the effort.

If we’re going to do a proper comparison, what we really need to consider is that when you buy food from the grocery store there is time involved too. First of all, you need to get there. Then you have to look for your food and put it in your cart, wait in line, tally up your purchases, and pack it home. Plus there’s this: In order to buy groceries, you need money. And in order to get money, most people exchange their time for money at a job that they might not particularly enjoy. Rather than working at a job that I don’t like, I think spending time in the garden is far more enjoyable.

Now, to be fair, you might not necessarily be able to grow all of your own food where you live. For example, if you have ¼ of an acre (~1000 m2) of an urban lot and you bring in no inputs from off-site (I have a whole host of concerns about importing materials), you will likely only be able to grow half your food.⁶ And you’re probably not going to be growing much animal protein in the city – so you’ll have to buy that from somewhere else. Unless, of course, you are vegan. Then you will have to buy more grains and vegetables from somewhere else.

It’s still important for people in the city to grow food – it makes a big difference. And the biggest difference will be with a bigger plot of soil – big gardens can produce more than you eat. If you feed yourself and sell or give away a million calories of food, then just through the act of gardening (and nothing else), you may have offset 100% of your petroleum footprint, 100% of your toxic footprint, and 70% of your carbon footprint. With a few more fruit trees, zucchini plants, salsa, and jams, you might be displacing the footprints of several people!

There are many ways to build a better world. The most effective is permaculture gardening.