The High Cost of Self-Sufficiency

Mike Riggs and his wife dreamed of returning to the land. It wasn’t as easy as it looks on Tik-Tok:

How many square feet of raised beds do you need to meet a toddler’s strawberry demand? I still don’t know. We dedicated 80 square feet to strawberries last season. The bugs ate half our harvest, and the other half equaled roughly what our kid could eat in a week.

Have you ever grown peas? Give them something to climb, and they’ll stretch to the heavens. Have you ever shelled peas? It is an almost criminal misuse of time. I set a timer on my phone last year. It took me 13 minutes to shell a single serving. Meanwhile, a two-pound bag of frozen peas from Walmart costs $2.42. And the peas come shelled.

…In addition to possums and deer, we’ve faced unrelenting assaults from across the eukaryotic kingdoms: the tomato hornworm caterpillar, the cabbage looper caterpillar, the squash vine borer, the aphid, the thrip, the earwig and the sowbug; cucurbit downy mildew, powdery mildew, collar rot, black rot, sooty mold, botrytis gray mold and stem canker; the nematode, the gray garden slug, the eastern gray squirrel, the eastern cottontail rabbit and the groundhog. All of these organisms reside in the North Carolina Piedmont and like to eat what we eat. Many of them work toward this existential goal while humans sleep, which is why the North Carolina State Agriculture Extension advises growers to inspect their plants at night. No, thank you.

…. In the early 1900s, one of my paternal great-grandfathers moved from urban Illinois to a homestead in Oklahoma. Our only picture of him was taken shortly before the Dust Bowl destroyed his farm. After his farm failed, he abandoned my great-grandmother and their children and migrated to California with thousands of other Okies. When my crops fail, I go to Whole Foods.

Some good lessons here in self-sufficiency, comparative advantage and the productivity of specialization and trade. Of course, it might have been easier for Mike had he read Modern Principles:

How long could you survive if you had to grow your own food? Probably not very long. Yet most of us can earn enough money in a single day spent doing something other than farming to buy more food than we could grow in a year. Why can we get so much more food through trade than through personal production? The reason is that specialization greatly increases productivity. Farmers, for example, have two immense advantages in producing food compared with economics professors or students: Because they specialize, they know more about farming than other people, and because they sell large quantities, they can afford to buy large-scale farming machines. What is true for farming is true for just about every field of production—specialization increases productivity. Without specialization and trade, we would each have to produce our own food as well as other goods, and the result would be mass starvation and the collapse of civilization.

Oh, and by the way, don’t forget Adam Smith, “What is prudence in the conduct of every private family can scarce be folly in that of a great kingdom.”