The real value of food in Hours

[Deirdre Kent]

Been thinking. If we were to value a cabbage in terms of the hours we put in growing it, then what would its price be? Hours planting seed, weeding, feeding and watering. And creating the feed from seaweed or worm wee. Carrots have to be thinned and there are many hours in that.

I have been thinking about the true price of homegrown food in terms of the hours spent. If we were to sell our homegrown produce to other growers in Hours, would this change the balance of the oil based economy?  Flour has to go through several stages and the mill has to be built in the first place. Market gardeners get such a pittance for their veges from the supermarkets. It is all wrong. The value of work in the garden is underestimated. I see these Chinese market gardeners down the road from me spending all day weeding..

We have a timebank here in Otaki where the unit is Hours and I have been thinking how we use this unit to trade homegrown goods and things like gathered leaves. The latter isn't hard, spend an hour gathering leaves and charge an hour for them. Spend an hour collecting manure and charge an hour for it.

The hour is such a robust unit. It doesn't inflate. It stays the same. Since everyone keeps getting another 24 hours each day, there is an abundance of hours available.

Do we undervalue our homegrown produce? Anyone care to do an estimate?

[Richard Watson]

Interesting thought you have raised Deirdre,i would think also that there's some veggies that would have higher hours spent than others,what's the most for the least return and i would think peas comes to mind.The most efficient return i would think for our family would be potatoes,to grow the 400kgs which is enough to keep us going for the year takes me 10 hours digging, planting,covered with a mulch layer to stop weeds and to harvest. So 10 hours at $20 per hour = $200, that comes to 50 cents per kg.Peas would work out at $20 per kg.
But then how do you value the freshness of your own stuff verse brought veggies

[Pete Russell]

Fair question. I guess one of the variants in this scenario is the skill and knowledge base of whoever is growing the food. For a beginner or someone entrenched in ineffective growing techniques, the cost per unit would be much higher than for a master food gardener.

[Kelly Ronayne]

This is a really interesting topic, but using hours as the unit of exchange (or whatever) would take us all back to industrial agriculture - eg once your economies of scale are great enough you afford to plough/plant/irrigate/harvest with machines that greatly increase the efficiency in terms of the hours spent...

I think the starting point would have to be well defined - eg. home grown/organic/urban/without the use of 'machinery'... what do we value in our home grown produce? Why do we do it? Would anyone buy beans at $20 per kilo? Does it matter? Are we imagining a world without industrial agriculture where we are all forced to recognise the true value of our food? Are we just theorising among ourselves as home growers that do it for the joy of it?

Totally over-analysed I know, but these are the things that spring to mind when we start discussing things like this (I spend a lot of of time thinking about this sort of stuff already :P ).

[KATE MORONEY]

Hi Deidre,
sorry I don't have time to look into the estimate but society definately undervalues the value of homegrown produce & I am interested to see how we could estimate the amount of time spent
Kate