Well, three cheers for technology. “Season extension,” which means exactly what it sounds like, is increasingly practiced by farmers servicing a market eager to eat locally but hungry for tomatoes in December. High tunnels, hoop houses, and plastic structures of other sizes protect plants from plunging temperatures, devastating winds and precipitation, and other seasonal hazards. The structures have their own problems, however—among them high heating costs. “You just have to sell an awful lot of greens to pay for the fuel,” said a farmer who chose to shut his tunnels down and just lay low over the winter.

In most cases, modern intensive farming deserves its appalling reputation, but maximizing the yield of a certain soil isn’t necessarily a bad thing—some argue, in fact, that it’s what’s best for the soil. The farmers discussed in Erica Barnett’s article on biointensive farming “focus on growing soil, not crops.”

Essentially, these farmers use techniques such as tilling beds down 24 inches, planting complementary crops, composting all their waste (including their own human waste), planting in hexagonal or triangular patterns, and rotating crops according to a strict schedule, for the purposes of getting much caloric yield as possible out of small plots of land. Naturally, they plant high-calorie crops (like carrots or potatoes) rather than salad, but still, their claims of beating conventional farmers’ yields by a factor of eight to ten has resonated amongst farmers in places where arable land is in short supply—like Kenya and Mexico—but also in Brooklyn, Hackney and other places where urban home gardeners seek to grow as much food as possible in limited space.

All of this is very impressive indeed. Imagine the scenario if these two factions ever met: double-dug December beets thriving on human waste and compost, under a high tunnel in Saskatchewan!