The Cash Value of Home Gardens
The ROI (return on investment) of a home garden can be $1,000 a year and $30/hour.
The benefits of a vegetable garden extend beyond the food being grown and the superiority of that food in nutritional value and quality over agribusiness-grown vegetables. I listed some of these intangible benefits in The Hidden Value of Gardens(September 13, 2014).
But we shouldn’t overlook the actual cash value of gardening. The ROI (return on investment) of a productive home garden can be $1,000 a year and $30/hour.
Longtime correspondent Bart D. (Australia) recently shared a spreadsheet of his garden’s yields, the cash value of these harvests and his cash/labor costs. Rather surprisingly (at least to me), his garden produced over $1,000 in cash value and netted him over $30/hour.
“This economic summary excludes my fruit growing and poultry enterprises.
A major point of value that this overview doesn’t show is the huge improvement in the ‘quality’ of the product being consumed as prices are only for ‘supermarket grade’ product. I believe that the real value amount should be raised by somewhere between 50% and 100% of the amount shown to reflect the improved quality.
The quantities are metric. Conversion is 1 square metre is about 10.7 square feet. There are 2.2Lbs to the Kg.
I feel the $33.30 per hour of time invested is a return worth pursuing for anyone in a low to medium income household. Beats the $9.00 per hour being offered by Walmart!
One hour in your own garden means 4 hours you don’t have to spend shifting stock at Walmart to earn money to buy food.”
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