Keys facts: According to the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development, about a third of the global seaborne trade in fertilisers pass through the Strait of Hormuz(1). Essential components of fertiliser like urea and ammonia are made with energy-intensive production processes including gas. This means that, for efficiency, production tends to be clustered near low-cost gas producers, particularly around the Persian Gulf in countries like Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain the UAE and Iran. This density meant that a single Iranian strike on a Qatari facility has been reported as disrupting 1/7th of global urea production. Volatility in supply is likely to continue(2).
Fertiliser costs are surging for the second time in just 5 years after similar trade disruptions following the invasion of Ukraine caused fertiliser prices to spike to $815 per tonne in April 2022. This is more than four times the price of just over $200 per tonne in 2020(3). Arguably the situation is worse this time round as there is less spare production capacity elsewhere to fill the gap.
UK farmers – as well as those elsewhere – are rightly highlighting the risks of higher farm input costs, especially of red diesel and fertiliser, because of the Iran conflict. They are also simultaneously facing increasingly unpredictable and extreme weather events due to accelerating climate change. The deluges that put productive fields underwater in 2023/24 led to millions of pounds of government intervention to protect farmers with flooded fields.
Something I think should also be added to the article is an encouragement for people to grow their own. Reduce reliance on farmers for the entirety of our diets. Have a patchwork blanket throughout villages, towns, and cities of gardens filled with organic vegetable gardens.
There’s precedent, in WW2 the population was encouraged to grow some of their own. To increase resilience.
It has multiple benefits. From the obvious like food supply resilience, to increasing biodiversity, reducing floods by improving soils (and therefore their ability to absorb water), improving community (getting people outside together and sharing surplus food), reducing fertiliser and fuel use (therefore reducing costs), and improving people’s mental health (by getting them outside playing in the dirt but also getting them to learn and be creative).
It’s hard to provide significant calories from home gardening, so I don’t think it’s practical to reduce reliance on commercial farming from a pure sustenance standpoint. But home gardening can fill in the need for lots of flavor and variety.
Perhaps the most significant thing one can do for reducing reliance on commercial farming output and the associated fertilizer/fuel inputs is to reduce consumption of the least efficient meats (beef, lamb) and shift towards more ecologically efficient foods. It doesn’t even have to be full plant based, either, as shifting from beef to chicken or fish goes a long, long way.
Aye, that’s why I said entirety. Grains for example are just not feasible on a garden plot. I’m not saying we stop using farmed foods. I’m saying we don’t rely on it 100% for the entirety of our food, as most in the West do. If even just 10% is from elsewhere it reduces the power supermarkets have, and increases our own autonomy and community.
Reducing meat intake is all well and good, but it doesn’t aid biodiversity like a patchwork of gardens does. It doesn’t prevent soil erosion. It doesn’t create community. It doesn’t improve mental and physical health through exercise and sunshine. That’s not to say we shouldn’t reduce our meat intake, of course we should. It just doesn’t provide the pros that widespread community vegetable gardening would.
If even just 10% is from elsewhere
I’m saying that’s really hard to do. Even 1% is ambitious. If the average person is eating 2000 kcals of food per day, and 10% is 200, then you’ll still want to generate 73,000 kcals per year per person.
From this source, growing wheat is about 1000 kcals per square meter. Dry legumes (peas, beans, lentils) seem to mostly be between 200 and 500 kcals per square meter, although soybeans are especially productive at 1000. And generally if you’re growing while minimizing fertilizer use you’re probably rotating a grain, a legume, and a fallow year. So every 3 square meters you’re getting 1500 calories per year.
So to get 10% of your caloric needs, you’ll want to set aside 150 square meters of farmland per person you want to feed.
Meanwhile, beef requires about 50 square meters per kg. So just eat 3 kg less beef per year, and that’s the equivalent of farmland covering 10% of your caloric needs.
The average onion is about 50kcals. The average carrot is about 30 kcals. The average aubergine is about 50 kcals. Getting 200kcals out of a garden, particularly in the growing season, is not that difficult. Especially as I’m talking about a community patchwork, where people share their overabundance of squash for someone else’s potatoes.
I have a tiny garden, and yet I’m able to make a decent dent in my grocery bills from it. Not just in calories but in cost, because I can priorities growing crops that are more expensive in the supermarkets. Chard for example is £2.55 for a small bag in Tesco. I can grow a bags worth every day for weeks in summer. Without the plastic, without the refrigeration, without the labour and fuel of packing, transporting, shelving, and accounting.
Farming has its place, but it shouldn’t be the only source of our food. Especially when it’s dominated by capitalist agrochemical profit over people ideology. Destroying soils and biodiversity, and ultimately our ability to grow food in future decades. The UN Sustainable Development Goals have several categories dedicated to the changing of farming practices because current practices cannot go on indefinitely.
The professor emeritus of food policy at the Centre for Food Policy, City St George’s, University of London seems to agree with me as well.
Finally, we need vastly more allotments and for gardening organisations to help (re)skill consumers. The Royal Horticultural Society’s (RHS) 2025 State of Gardening report found that while 2.5 million people had participated, more than 14 million wanted to. Growing a bit of food for yourself and others is good for collective wellbeing and health. Gardening organisations “get” it but need a new land strategy to deliver. When Dig for Victory, the national campaign to get Britons to grow food during the second world war, was launched, the RHS was asked to help organise it. Today, academics, metro mayors and regional councils should be asked to ascertain what land across the UK could produce diverse food produce and then facilitate growers to get growing.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/apr/09/uk-food-security-iran-war
particularly in the growing season
And if you’re getting 10% of your calories from your garden for 10% of the year, that’s 1%.
Especially as I’m talking about a community patchwork, where people share their overabundance of squash for someone else’s potatoes.
Yes, so that’s why I’m saying per person, because each person needs to eat. Yes, people should work together, too, but if you’re talking about a few households adding up to 10 people, then you’re talking about 10 times the food needs (and wants). A community of 100 people needs 100 times as much.
The amount produced by gardening is never going to be more than a rounding error, while imposing significant efforts on the people who participate. A serious conversation about fertilizer and energy use is going to address the sheer amount of feed and energy that goes into dairy and beef.
Gardening is a fun hobby and an enriching activity, but it’s not going to move the needle in aggregate ecological statistics like national fertilizer consumption or demand for commercially farmed product.
So keep growing the things that make economic sense with the resources you have. For me, it’s herbs, alliums, and spicy capsicums, where I go for things high in flavor so that the tiny amount I produce can still make an impact on the dishes I make, for at least a few weeks out of the year. But I’m not laboring under any kind of misconception that I’m appreciably changing my demand for farmland, fertilizer, agricultural inputs like fertilizer or pesticide, water, or energy. And there’s nothing wrong with gardening for flowers or other plants that don’t produce food, either.
For these large scale problems, we need hard numbers, not just feelings of one’s perceived personal sacrifices. Follow the math.
I fear this is descending into a classic internet argument where we each write longer and longer pieces, to convince the other of a position neither of us are likely to budge from.
So instead, I’ll give this article as a final adieu and wish you well with your capsicums and alliums.
https://www.unsustainablemagazine.com/home-gardens-vs-farms-efficiency/
Home gardening (in aggregate) is way worse than farming in terms of fertilizer use, fossil fuels burned, and any other efficiency, economic, and environmental measures you may want to improve on.
Sure, there are a tiny percentage of home gardeners who are masters of no-till growing, cover cropping, and all that. The other 99.9% are driving their pickup trucks to Home Depot to buy plastic bags of topsoil and jugs of synthetic fertilizer. The issue with widespread deployment of community gardening (at a level that significantly replaces farmed food) is that regular people don’t have either the time or the knowledge to do it.
I think everyone vastly underestimates how much knowledge farmers actually have and think they just clumsily dump vast amounts of fertilizer on their fields like maniacs. In reality, farmers are experts at using the least amount of fertilizer possible for their fields because if they don’t they LOSE MONEY on the crop.
The original linked article is the kind of stuff that can make a difference: changing commercial large scale practices to be more efficient. Trying to add some amateur part time production isn’t going to make any appreciable difference.
Really the best thing home gardeners can do is grow their own fresh herbs. Fresh herbs in the store are not economical and are often nearly spoiled by the time you bring them home anyway.
This is mostly a thing for people who get really into home cooking though. Most people just use dried herbs.
You know your piss is full of nitrogen, right?
And also uric acid, which is why if you piss in the yard in the same spot over and over, you now have a dead patch of grass.
Most plants like a little acid.
Mix one part pee to 10 parts water 2x a month.
