I could see their idea of a parts kit working better for specific tasks than for "farming in general".
In my limited experience with mushrooms I almost instantly went from too much wood and sawdust to know what to do with to the opposite. Even in the field of mushrooms there are the wood varieties and the animal waste compost varieties. And I suppose the psychedelic varieties. I grew my own shiitake with some modest success. The people who burn their scrap woodworking wood are on to something in that a fire turns scrap into heat with 100% success which is a much higher success rate than I experienced with mushrooms.
Surely a veg garden kit would look wildly different than a grain farm kit. Ditto orchards and berries. Then you get into cash crops, I can't live off peppers directly but I can certainly grow a lot of them, and I can trade.
There is an aspect of specialization that I've fooled around with most of the above or have a family member who did, but my green thumb is container-style-garden pepper production and given a marginally functional economic system I'd be better off maxing out my pepper production, selling almost all of it, and buying a nice balanced diet, than trying to grow my own "everything".
In a grid-up normalcy situation my mint production is economically worthless, but in grid-down crash situation I suspect my mint would be quite valuable for flavoring. Grid down in USA is unlikely but has Ethiopia been grid up at any time since the 60s? Perhaps now? If so good, for them. But the point remains that not all of the world is booted up in the world economy and for areas that are not, some weird stuff like sunflower oil probably would sell pretty well until the world economy boots up again in that country. It might not matter if you can't get a shipping crate delivered intact to a down-grid situation country.
In my limited experience with mushrooms I almost instantly went from too much wood and sawdust to know what to do with to the opposite. Even in the field of mushrooms there are the wood varieties and the animal waste compost varieties. And I suppose the psychedelic varieties. I grew my own shiitake with some modest success. The people who burn their scrap woodworking wood are on to something in that a fire turns scrap into heat with 100% success which is a much higher success rate than I experienced with mushrooms.
Surely a veg garden kit would look wildly different than a grain farm kit. Ditto orchards and berries. Then you get into cash crops, I can't live off peppers directly but I can certainly grow a lot of them, and I can trade.
There is an aspect of specialization that I've fooled around with most of the above or have a family member who did, but my green thumb is container-style-garden pepper production and given a marginally functional economic system I'd be better off maxing out my pepper production, selling almost all of it, and buying a nice balanced diet, than trying to grow my own "everything".
In a grid-up normalcy situation my mint production is economically worthless, but in grid-down crash situation I suspect my mint would be quite valuable for flavoring. Grid down in USA is unlikely but has Ethiopia been grid up at any time since the 60s? Perhaps now? If so good, for them. But the point remains that not all of the world is booted up in the world economy and for areas that are not, some weird stuff like sunflower oil probably would sell pretty well until the world economy boots up again in that country. It might not matter if you can't get a shipping crate delivered intact to a down-grid situation country.