Undergraduate Thesis Or Project
 

Invest in Vegetables: A Cost and Benefit Analysis of Container Grown Roma Tomatoes (Solanum lycopersicum cv. ‘Roma’) and Italian Basil (Ocimum basilicum cv. ‘Italian’)

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https://ir.library.oregonstate.edu/concern/undergraduate_thesis_or_projects/gm80j340w

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  • The COVID-19 pandemic highlighted disparities in land access and food security. Research has shown that access to gardening reduces financial burdens on low-income households. Compared to homeowners, individuals and families in rental housing face added barriers to vegetable gardening and growing food. These barriers include rental housing regulations and the financial costs of starting a garden. Container gardens might offer a low-cost solution that addresses the barriers renter, and other land-restricted households face and would provide the benefits of gardening to communities that would otherwise be limited. However, the relative financial costs and benefits have yet to be established for container-grown vegetables. We thus conducted a financial cost-benefit analysis of container-grown tomatoes and basil in the summer of 2020 in Corvallis, Oregon. Forty experimental units were evenly allocated into a 2X2 factorial design, where treatments included container size (3-gallon or 5-gallon) and planting regime (tomatoes alone or tomatoes with basil). We monitored the costs of gardening as materials costs and time spent gardening. The financial benefit of the gardening system was determined using the average harvested mass of the tomatoes and basil and the national average retail cost. The first-year costs of container gardening did not outweigh the financial benefits. However, the costs of gardening are mainly financial, while the benefits gained challenge systemic social justice issues that, if realized, could dramatically increase the well-being of at-risk communities. These benefits cannot be measured financially but should be taken into consideration when weighing the costs and benefits of container gardening.
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  • This work is supported by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, National Institute of Food and Agriculture NIFA Higher Education MSP 2021 (grant no. 2018-38413-28145, project accession no. 1015949), and USDA NIFA AFRI EWD REEU 2021 (grant no. 2020-67037-30670, project accession no. 1021806).
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  • Pending Publication
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  • 2021-09-03 to 2022-04-04

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