External Benefits
FOOD MILES
One of the benefits of home growing food is that it reduces food miles. Food miles are essentially how far food has to travel from where it is grown to get on your plate. Food miles are a big issue today as there are greenhouse gas emissions for every mile food travels. We currently put almost 10 kcal of fossil fuel energy into our food system for every 1 kcal of energy we get as food. Also, desire for fresh food means that more is being transported by air, which is 50 times more polluting than shipping by water.
Buying food produced locally is obviously better than buying what is produced overseas in regard to having far fewer food miles. Therefore, food that you grow in your home have little to no food miles, especially if you can produce your own compost as well.
Find out more about food miles here.
CHANGING CURRENT PRACTICES
The environmental issues the current agricultural practice, and how it affects both us and our environment, are many and solutions cannot be easily applied without fundamental changes to how farmers can grow food and still be profitable.
However, the focus of Home Grown UK is what small actions we, the consumers, can do to help bring larger change. We are hoping to start large-scale change with smaller actions from everyone. Growing your own food can reduce what you need to buy from supermarkets, which in turn reduces pressure on what farmers need to grow and sell. They can then afford to take up more sustainable practices such as (permaculture) without the pressure of needing to meet larger demands. They can branch out into a larger variety of plants and move into other areas such as a nursery for plants to sell seedlings to those looking to grow them.