[joseph]

I built 3 raised beds for an elderly woman this spring and filled them with a mixture of compost and sand. The cost using a combination of new and recycled materials was over $500 and netted 120 square feet of growing area. The cost of the sand and compost was $120. So it cost more than $4 per square foot to build the beds for her.

I built a greenhouse this spring. The cost was slightly more than $4 per square foot. In my cold climate the greenhouse provides a better return on investment than raised beds do. The USDA already has a program in place that provides grants for building hoop houses.

This spring I planted a 40000 square foot garden. It cost me about $50 in diesel for the tiller. So that's 1/10th of a cent per square foot. That makes it more than 3000 times more expensive to grow in the raised beds than it does to grow in the pre-existing dirt.

In this particular case I expect the raised beds to yield almost nothing, because raised beds in this area dehydrate extremely quickly and the elderly lady is unlikely to provide sufficient water. I also expect that the herbicides, heavy metals, and woody materials in the compost that she insisted on will be detrimental to her plants.

I've farmed for decades. Boots on the ground as they say. I have had plenty of experience with these issues... If people wanted to grow their own food they could. People always say things to me like: "My garden is not doing anything and yours is thriving. What are we doing different?" I can't answer that question and be polite, and in any case I don't know what they do in their gardens... But I know that I am in my garden an hour and a half before sunrise. And I plant when it's snowing, and I weed when it's way too hot/sunny, and I sow while it's raining, and no matter how hard the wind is blowing I'm out there harvesting. I work by moonlight when it's plain old too hot during the day or during frost emergencies. I irrigate on a meticulous schedule. I have watched lots of people build lots of infrastructure (raised beds) for gardening, but for the most part it is wasted effort because they won't follow through with the hard work in uncomfortable conditions.

If you really want to help people eat better food, I'd suggest working to get rid of laws that require manicured lawns and forbid poultry keeping. And teach them how to have enough ambition to actually get out and work in the garden, whatever that garden is made out of.