As I understand it, there's lots of problems with things like this, and that's one of the potential issues, but I would imagine that this mostly uses raised beds with clean soil brought in from elsewhere.
We thought about doing some gardening when we had a backyard in an apartment in New York, but even grass wouldn't grow in that soil - it didn't help that the soil was littered with debris like glass, concrete, random bits of metal, etc.
It's pretty cheap to have soil samples tested, but it winds up just confirming what you expect - our NYC backyard had 18x the upper limit for lead! Definitely raised beds.
Hydroponics is also perfect for polluted urban areas. Generally produces a higher yield per area and absorbs co2 at a higher rate; with the caveat being that there is potentially a higher rate of maintenance.
Assuming you're not converting some dense residential zoned area into a garden and no one moves away due to their dislike of hydroponics, I don't think it's going to tangibly effect traffic rates which are show to fluctuate based on availability. Ie. after reaching a certain point of urban density; if you increase the availability of the road (by widening it for example), you'll increase the number of people driving such that the availability is reduced again.
If you want to reduce traffic and co2 further while increasing livable, walkable space in dense urban areas - then that can be accomplished by reducing the width of the roads.
Locally, definitely. If urban heat island effects are a problem then co2 displacement would be beneficial. There is also the future possibility of processing waste streams locally and using that.
The majority of humans have very few natural predators, and to even be exposed to animals like bears, mountain lions and sharks usually requires a bit of effort. (What's going to eat me in a city? Maybe my cat, if I die in my apartment.)
And while there are more people that starve to death that should, and more people who cannot get affordable health care, I would still much rather live in the modern world than head out into the forest and try to survive by myself, or as a subsistence farmer on a manor lord's land.
What animal would you trade places with? For that matter, would you be willing to roll the dice and change places with a random "free" human being living 5,000 years ago?
How about rolling the dice now and ending up in a backwater of SE Asia or the DRC?
I don't disagree that this is probably the best time to be alive on average, but the standard deviation is pretty enormous, and I would argue that it might not be the best time to be alive in all places.
> How about rolling the dice now and ending up in a backwater of SE Asia or the DRC?
Still statistically better than a random human being in 3,000 BC.
And of course, we don't live in the best possible universe; but on average, a random human's odds of being eaten by a figurative grue monotonically increase as you go backwards in time.
>> ...a random human's odds of being eaten by a figurative grue monotonically increase as you go backwards in time.
Humans don't live alone in the woods--not now, not 5,000 years ago (nor 45,000 years before that). They band together to modify, control, and tame their environment.
Now, you might miss your devices, pastimes, and widespread sanitation...however, from my understanding, humans don't typically worry about malevolent grues.
A grue doesn't have to be malevolent to kill you. A bobcat that bites your neck is hungry, a mis-step that breaks a knee is careless, a tooth infection that spreads into the blood is indifferent, the blood that pours out of a woman giving birth is just following the laws of pressure and gravity.
> For that matter, would you be willing to roll the dice and change places with a random "free" human being living 5,000 years ago?
We're all priviledged for being literate and having access to the internet.
A more representative what-if would be to choose between trading places with a random person 5000 years ago, or with a random modern person anywhere in the world.
I would rather trade within the modern world, but it's nowhere nearly as sure a thing.
It isn't that hard to analyze ecology in economic terms. "Money" doesn't particularly exist due to (almost!) none of the participants being cognitively capable of processing it, but you do have some barter, and a whole lot of supply/demand curves based on differential valuations, as well as a lot of things that can be or are even best analyzed as cost/benefits analyses. Predation, for instance, has a big cost/benefit analysis on the cost of the energy input plus the risk of being injured vs. what the predation may produce. It isn't the same as a human economic analysis but it's another useful lens to look at the natural world.
I thought we are paying for convenience and not to live on the planet. Like, I could do it all by hand for free, but I am choosing to pay so I don't have to.
In my hand-crafted artisan shed that has hand-crafted (from rare wood) tool boxes!
Jokes aside, but I think this idea applied like many centuries ago. I think I might read it in some philosophical text. So today you would not be able to do that obviously, since you need to purchase land etc. and the whole society is based on purchasing to satisfy your needs.
We wouldn't have to work as much if automation is done right. However it sure looks like we are going to use automation to further concerntrate wealth.
>> However it sure looks like we are going to use automation to further concerntrate wealth.
The only problem I have this statement is if you do not believe in the notion of freewill, then yes this is accurate.
If you believe in the notion of freewill, then you would think instead of seeing what's happening and think that all the wealth is being concentrated into the top 1% of society unfairly, what's to stop you from being in that 1%?
Nearly every obstacle you will list, I can name several people who have overcome those impediments to be successful. When you stop thinking the deck is stacked against you, it frees your mind to think of what your capable of, not of the greater odds that stacked against that will prevent you from achieving what you want to.
> If you believe in the notion of freewill, then you would think instead of seeing what's happening and think that all the wealth is being concentrated into the top 1% of society unfairly, what's to stop you from being in that 1%?
The free will of the top 1% that don't want to have their wealth diminished by sharing it with others.
The practical impacts of poor education and healthcare leading to delayed educational and/or career opportunities.
Businesses buying politicians to diminish individual access to education, healthcare, and other opportunities.
Politicians and businesspeople working to reduce worker rights to fair wages and safe working conditions.
Politicians working to disenfranchise voters, which in turns leads to their lack of representation and further diminishing their status and reducing their chances of success in life.
> Nearly every obstacle you will list, I can name several people who have overcome those impediments to be successful.
Anecdotes, almost as useful as real data.
> When you stop thinking the deck is stacked against you, it frees your mind to think of what your capable of, not of the greater odds that stacked against that will prevent you from achieving what you want to.
This is true, and it is mentally and emotionally freeing once you're out of the mindset. It doesn't negate the fact that, for many people, the odds are still, in fact, stacked against them.
Striving to be in the top 1% is not an acceptable answer to the concentration of wealth issue. Not everyone is in a position to do that and not everyone wants to measure success by wealth. This ignores the damage that wealth concentration and business-driven decisions affect people and the environment. I don't want to live in a world we've destroyed, even if i can be in the top 0.1% of it. That's the issue.
There are of course exceptions, but you are much more likely to end up in the 1% if your parents are also in that segment.
In the US I have the feeling that a lot of people support its social structure because they believe themselves to be future [mb]illionaires, aka the American dream.
In Europe where most realize that they will never end up in that spot, even with hard work, there is a much more egalitarian structure to society.
I'm not saying any of them are bad, but the notion that everyone can reach the 1% is by definition false. Only 1% of the population can be in that spot.
You can via social structures even it out though so more people can share in the generated wealth. And I think that is actually free will since the social structure is chosen unless one lives under a dictatorship or such.
You wrote this like it were a rhetorical question, but let's talk about social mobility. Wikipedia[1] will tell you that it's "movement of individuals... between social strata." Surely you'll agree that "the 1%" is a prime example of a social stratum, and that becoming a member of that stratum is a clear movement.
Obstacles lie between them.
To overcome these obstacles one requires capital: economic, social and cultural.
If you start without them, you'll not go far. Physics are relentless. It may be impossible — within one lifetime — to navigate the socially constructed maze from third-generation-diabetic-of-color to business services firm partner, despite the two persons being physically proximal!
Yes, one can and must make decisions in this life, and if one has free will then by all means, enjoy the faculty, but one is not free to purchase items that aren't in store. One is not free to pull levers that aren't available.
You might ask "why do poor folk fall prey to predatory lenders? Why not invest that windfall in a CD, or a more appropriate financial vehicle?" But that question only exposes your naïveté: some folk have simply never heard of the phrase "financial vehicle". They lack the cultural capital to even see the social constructs allegedly available to them. They are literally blind to them.
Free will does not enable one to open invisible doors.
Apologies for this long-winded tirade: your rhetorical question struck me as absurdly naive. You claim you "can name several people who have overcome those impediments," but "several" is not a statistically significant number, and will not convince a rational person that the United States has high social mobility.
What's to stop one from being in that 1%? Massive, invisible, entrenched social constructs requiring immense luck or capital to navigate. And then your "free" will — certainly not free of biases, neuroses or addictions — can still fuck it up.
A great deal of (US) income consumption goes toward people bidding against each other just on where to live.
Take out wildly overpriced education, healthcare, and housing, and you can get by with barely working. 40% of Americans over 16 don't work at all, granted they may rely on government transfer payments and other services. https://data.bls.gov/timeseries/LNS12300000
Given that 21% ish of the population is under 16, that leaves a total of just under half the population doing any paid work. This seems surprisingly low to me.
Yeah that seems silly, money is just a tool we created to organize our activities. It's no different than any other kind of animal behavior.
This statement is just as "profound" as saying "Did you ever consider that bee's are the only animal that has to make honey just to live on the planet?" Mind blowing!
..and didn't have specialized professions that allow for all the wonders we get to experience - I like my cancer and heart specialists and would rather not go back to the tipi and chase buffalo up and down the plains[1].
What does "feeds 2,000 households" mean? This is a three acre project. From what I can find it takes about half an acre to provide a single person's caloric requirement for a year.
I was thinking something similar, and I think it is weirdly both simplified and exaggerated.
I'm gonna guess if they give a family food once, they are counted as "one family fed", and their output ranges from April (if they are growing lettuces, spinach, and peas) to October (for some squash varieties). I very highly doubt they grow and store such things like potatoes and carrots for wintertime use.
The produce from our production farm (which produced over 50,000 lbs of produce since 2011 years) goes to 1 of 4 places (listed in order of priority):
Individual households using a pay-what-you-can model. Think of it as a suggested donation grocery store.
(Note: we have supplied over 200 households within 2 square miles supplied in the last 2 years)
Local Markets
Thousands of lbs of produce go to over 5 markets within 5 miles)
Local Restaurants & Vendors
thousands of lbs of produce supply locally-owned businesses all over southeast Michigan)
Food Pantries:
Local Churches
Coalition on Temporary
Shelters (COTS) & Forgotten Harvest
> despite the fact that there is presently more than enough resources to care for every citizen
This is wrong. The fact there are more than sufficient resources to care for every citizen does not preclude the need to pay for something.
Suppose that I self-sacrificed by under consuming and taking a risk. Instead of enjoying my free time and spending my money, I choose to spend many days building bricks. After a while, in a hut-less society, someone might ask why they need to pay for my bricks, when there are more than enough to build huts for everyone.
Raw materials may be abundant and "free", but labor, investment, and capital are not. They're they product of blood, sweat, and tears. Hardly free.
This. I think it's actually an important issue that's not being talked about - to actually create the automated future of surplus, we need to significantly reduce the effort that goes into maintaining things. We need to start creating self-maintaining systems.
The overall point is good - that there's nothing that's actually free (as in beer) once all costs are accounted for.
However - Things get muddier (heh) when you consider:
- The supply so vastly outstrips demand ("more than enough for everyone") that the market price would be negligible
- When the "true" per-person cost of "enough bricks" is negligible; only society as a whole needs enough brick to notice the cost.
- When you consider what you are not charged for as a human; in other words, what other people are giving away for free that costs them their blood, sweat, and tears. (Typically, public art and the emotional labor that goes into being a human)
Note - I am very much not saying you're wrong. I'm saying that the real world appears to get waaay more complicated than that.
For example - If the per-person price is a dime, that's negligible, but across a billion people, that's a hundred million dollars. Hardly negligible. Taxes do this now - what's the space program cost each American, on average? A dollar a year? To each person, the space program is pretty much free, but to society, it's not.
For another example - Yosemite. Yosemite is free-ish - it's not charging market rates, that's for sure - and there definitely is NOT enough Yosemite "to care for every citizen". What's going on there?
So you're spot-on that it's not ultimately free, but also missing the point, which is that if society decided it was a good idea, it (probably) could be free for each individual.
This article is really dumb. It's only 3 acres, there's no way that satisfies 2,000 households' caloric needs, it's just a small supplement.
Not to mention that it's 'free' because of volunteers. I can also feed myself for close to free by growing my own vegetables...but it's way more efficient to just work and pay for food.
Agreed. It's a little bizarre how gardening went from being a default feature of American life to REVOLUTIONARY INDUSTRY-DISRUPTING IDEA in less than one generation.
There are indeed numerous statistical inaccuracies.
However,
Let's see if we can pick out the good here.
When you say it's a little bizarre, you're right. We are massively estranged from almost all forces that supply our life. Just as the average American has no idea how to host a website from scratch on DO, most don't know where their food comes from, how to fix their car, has no financial literacy and no civic literacy.
After years of animal husbandry, our leaders have moved toward treating the vast majority us like agricultural elements, simply repeating one small action of a larger whole for our whole lives. Projects like this can help get us out of the matrix.
As most people who try to grow food learn, it's not a one-size-fits-all activity. The art of food production has many, subtle, non-sexy details. Real world experience counts for an awful lot.
I'm not saying we must all live in tipis, playing homebuilt instruments around a fire, wearing dresses from from potato sacks, BUT living life out of debt with a strong degree of self-sufficiency and freedom from The Invisible Hand of corporate life will bring us a lot closer to our pursuit of happiness than the apparent Ponzi scheme of centralized economy.
Urban farming is one of those things that "feels" good, but doesn't make any economic sense. Why would you move farms, which are currently on the cheapest land available, into cities, where the most expensive land is? I agree that more vegetation in cities is a good thing, but the allure of an "urban farm" is misguided. If these people are serious about providing food for as low a price as possible, they should move their farm out of the city.
Carbon food print. Less storage and transport and middle men. Green lungs for the city. Many urban farms have minimal fossil fuel needs. There is a case to be made here.
In the short term maybe, but once our transportation is electric (and our electricity isn't coming from coal or gas), the difference in environmental impact is negligible. Some trees and a nice garden would provide the same environmental benefit to a city, and look nicer too.
There's no case to be made that there is any economic benefit to farming in the city. By all measures, it's much more expensive.
To add a slight positive to urban farming - where I live used to be the agricultural heart of the region. It was settled partly because of this and the volcanic soil is very good. Move 100-150 years forward and urban sprawl has completely swallowed the good soil and we mainly farm further out on worse land.
The same can be said of other places I'd have thought?
> here's no case to be made that there is any economic benefit to farming in the city. By all measures, it's much more expensive.
I think that is a bit myopic.
A small farm can look nice too. And even with electric transport, there's the fact that cities have to bulldoze over miles and miles of nature in order to accommodate the kind of transport you're talking about, mainly cars. Which is why some cities are moving away from cars and into more dense kinds of environments. Once that's done, transporting your crop of the day from the farm into the city becomes a bit of a hassle
There's also enjoyement and quality. Some of us enjoy gardening, just like others enjoy tinkering on their cars, their computers, their open-source software... It's a manual activity like any other.
And then there is the quality aspect. Mass-produced food in the US does not taste good. The varieties you can buy in the store are optimized for 3 things: high yield, long shelf life / tolerance to travel & warehousing and appearance. When you grow your own food, you can optimize for taste. You can have a tomato that is actually sweet, not something that tastes like a cucumber. You can grow varieties that won't do well in transit (ie. fragile or easily bruised) because you're handling the vegetable from the garden to the kitchen.
Most of the time, it is impossible to even buy produce with high quality characteristics. When it is, it is often very expensive. This increases the value proposition of a personal/urban garden.
Urban farming is in early days so ideas are still be attempted that may not make sense for the long term. That may change.
There are many things we do in our worldwide agriculture system precisely because they make economic sense. That doesn't mean they are a good idea. We are going to pay the price for that lack of judgement. I am excited to see anything that bucks that trend.
You're ignoring psychological benefits (or maybe that's what you were getting at with the 'more vegetation in cities is a good thing'). These kinds of operations can have very big impacts on children who are very separated from the natural world in their concrete jungles. I agree though that producing cheap food shouldn't be the goal, but it does help that this farm produces something.
I think it makes sense for fragile veggies like greens.
Potatoes do fine on the truck ride in from the countryside, but baby arugula, not so much.
Potatoes are also a lot easier to plant and harvest by machine.
Lawns don't make any economic sense; convert them to leafy greens and fancy perennials that are not economic to grow at a scale. Deliver greens to your neighborhood via bike. They are light. Sell them to fancy restaurants for $15 a pound and not have to pay for trucking them in from 50 miles away.
Then, convert equal amount of farmland being used for green, back into wildish stuff, so birds, bees, etc have room to live and improve (pollinate) the staple crops.
Yes, they do; the fact (if this is the case) that you don't personally gain utility from them doesn't mean they don't make economic sense, neither does.the fact that they generally aren't part of the production chain for a product for sale.
US style lawns definitely don't make economic sense. That stuff only happened because of cheap energy, which in term is artificially cheaper/subsidized due to not including negative externalities. In Europe lawns don;t make sense, Asia neither.
On empty plots, yes it makes no sense. On rooftops with greenhouses it adds the benefit of additional insulation. That alone is already enough to make it worth it.
Farming is a business. Industrial farming is a giant business. Even urban farming like this project requires inputs, labour, seeds, water and most importantly land. Food isn't free. I can't even...argh. Anyways...1. Even for-profit small farm in 3-5 acres can barely break even because farmers don't pay themselves. They usually cannot survive without a second job. Farming goals are out of the window if they want to start a family. Because babies are expensive. Secondly: when someone says a three acre farm can feed 100s if people, they probably include produce like lettuce which are not calorie or nutrient dense. You can sautéed a lb of spinach to two tbsp of cooked spinach. It's a lot of space(and $) to grow a lb of spinach! Squash and pumpkins etc are very heavy. You can grow 1000 lbs of produce from 100ft. But what does it really mean? Diverse food choices that are calorie and nutrient dense should be the key words. Having said that, this is very laudable and necessary as America has many food deserts in urban
Area where people do not have access to fresh organic food. Definitely appreciate projects like this.
> enough food is produced around the world to feed 10 billion people. However, because 70% of the mono crops which are grown are feed livestock intended for slaughter, a distribution problem exists.
No, the distribution problem is largely political - in fact modern famine and starvation is almost always a problem with local government, or the warlords that pass for it.
This looks like a commendable project. But why do we need a buzzword like "Agrihood"; can't we just call it a garden? It just seems like the language throughout is over-reaching.
Regardless, any time more food is grown close to where it will be eaten, this is a good thing. I just put up a new site this week focused on sustainable food systems: https://terra.farm. I'm adding content to the wiki atm, so if anyone has suggestions on stuff that might fit, lmk.
88 comments
[ 5.2 ms ] story [ 28.4 ms ] threadIt's a really nice idea I just can't imagine it's as scalable or sustainable as the article seems to wish for.
We thought about doing some gardening when we had a backyard in an apartment in New York, but even grass wouldn't grow in that soil - it didn't help that the soil was littered with debris like glass, concrete, random bits of metal, etc.
If you want to reduce traffic and co2 further while increasing livable, walkable space in dense urban areas - then that can be accomplished by reducing the width of the roads.
The traffic comes from the fact that every family not living in the city, but living near it, ends up commuting there anyway.
This sounds vaguely profound, until you realize that other species are also predated on, starve to death, and die from trivially preventable issues.
Sounds profound until you realize we are too.
And while there are more people that starve to death that should, and more people who cannot get affordable health care, I would still much rather live in the modern world than head out into the forest and try to survive by myself, or as a subsistence farmer on a manor lord's land.
What animal would you trade places with? For that matter, would you be willing to roll the dice and change places with a random "free" human being living 5,000 years ago?
I don't disagree that this is probably the best time to be alive on average, but the standard deviation is pretty enormous, and I would argue that it might not be the best time to be alive in all places.
Still statistically better than a random human being in 3,000 BC.
And of course, we don't live in the best possible universe; but on average, a random human's odds of being eaten by a figurative grue monotonically increase as you go backwards in time.
Humans don't live alone in the woods--not now, not 5,000 years ago (nor 45,000 years before that). They band together to modify, control, and tame their environment.
Now, you might miss your devices, pastimes, and widespread sanitation...however, from my understanding, humans don't typically worry about malevolent grues.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anatomically_modern_human#Mode...
We're all priviledged for being literate and having access to the internet.
A more representative what-if would be to choose between trading places with a random person 5000 years ago, or with a random modern person anywhere in the world.
I would rather trade within the modern world, but it's nowhere nearly as sure a thing.
Jokes aside, but I think this idea applied like many centuries ago. I think I might read it in some philosophical text. So today you would not be able to do that obviously, since you need to purchase land etc. and the whole society is based on purchasing to satisfy your needs.
Although I would argue hunting and foraging is work, so most animals don't get out of it either.
The only problem I have this statement is if you do not believe in the notion of freewill, then yes this is accurate.
If you believe in the notion of freewill, then you would think instead of seeing what's happening and think that all the wealth is being concentrated into the top 1% of society unfairly, what's to stop you from being in that 1%?
Nearly every obstacle you will list, I can name several people who have overcome those impediments to be successful. When you stop thinking the deck is stacked against you, it frees your mind to think of what your capable of, not of the greater odds that stacked against that will prevent you from achieving what you want to.
The free will of the top 1% that don't want to have their wealth diminished by sharing it with others.
The practical impacts of poor education and healthcare leading to delayed educational and/or career opportunities.
Businesses buying politicians to diminish individual access to education, healthcare, and other opportunities.
Politicians and businesspeople working to reduce worker rights to fair wages and safe working conditions.
Politicians working to disenfranchise voters, which in turns leads to their lack of representation and further diminishing their status and reducing their chances of success in life.
> Nearly every obstacle you will list, I can name several people who have overcome those impediments to be successful.
Anecdotes, almost as useful as real data.
> When you stop thinking the deck is stacked against you, it frees your mind to think of what your capable of, not of the greater odds that stacked against that will prevent you from achieving what you want to.
This is true, and it is mentally and emotionally freeing once you're out of the mindset. It doesn't negate the fact that, for many people, the odds are still, in fact, stacked against them.
There are of course exceptions, but you are much more likely to end up in the 1% if your parents are also in that segment.
In the US I have the feeling that a lot of people support its social structure because they believe themselves to be future [mb]illionaires, aka the American dream.
In Europe where most realize that they will never end up in that spot, even with hard work, there is a much more egalitarian structure to society.
I'm not saying any of them are bad, but the notion that everyone can reach the 1% is by definition false. Only 1% of the population can be in that spot.
You can via social structures even it out though so more people can share in the generated wealth. And I think that is actually free will since the social structure is chosen unless one lives under a dictatorship or such.
[1] http://www.economist.com/news/united-states/21715735-new-dat...
You wrote this like it were a rhetorical question, but let's talk about social mobility. Wikipedia[1] will tell you that it's "movement of individuals... between social strata." Surely you'll agree that "the 1%" is a prime example of a social stratum, and that becoming a member of that stratum is a clear movement.
Obstacles lie between them.
To overcome these obstacles one requires capital: economic, social and cultural.
If you start without them, you'll not go far. Physics are relentless. It may be impossible — within one lifetime — to navigate the socially constructed maze from third-generation-diabetic-of-color to business services firm partner, despite the two persons being physically proximal!
Yes, one can and must make decisions in this life, and if one has free will then by all means, enjoy the faculty, but one is not free to purchase items that aren't in store. One is not free to pull levers that aren't available.
You might ask "why do poor folk fall prey to predatory lenders? Why not invest that windfall in a CD, or a more appropriate financial vehicle?" But that question only exposes your naïveté: some folk have simply never heard of the phrase "financial vehicle". They lack the cultural capital to even see the social constructs allegedly available to them. They are literally blind to them.
Free will does not enable one to open invisible doors.
Apologies for this long-winded tirade: your rhetorical question struck me as absurdly naive. You claim you "can name several people who have overcome those impediments," but "several" is not a statistically significant number, and will not convince a rational person that the United States has high social mobility.
What's to stop one from being in that 1%? Massive, invisible, entrenched social constructs requiring immense luck or capital to navigate. And then your "free" will — certainly not free of biases, neuroses or addictions — can still fuck it up.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_mobility
https://orionmagazine.org/article/the-gospel-of-consumption/
Take out wildly overpriced education, healthcare, and housing, and you can get by with barely working. 40% of Americans over 16 don't work at all, granted they may rely on government transfer payments and other services. https://data.bls.gov/timeseries/LNS12300000
https://www.census.gov/prod/cen2010/briefs/c2010br-03.pdf
We are an industrialized, domesticated species, whether we like it or not.
This statement is just as "profound" as saying "Did you ever consider that bee's are the only animal that has to make honey just to live on the planet?" Mind blowing!
1) Dad's side, farming I guess for Mom's side
I'm gonna guess if they give a family food once, they are counted as "one family fed", and their output ranges from April (if they are growing lettuces, spinach, and peas) to October (for some squash varieties). I very highly doubt they grow and store such things like potatoes and carrots for wintertime use.
For reference, an average 1kg rabbit eats 2.6oz of greens a day, or 57lbs a year.
So it sounds like they can feed one rabbit per household for one month of the year.
- Agrihood numbers: http://www.miufi.org/america-s-first-urban-agrihood
- Rabbit numbers: http://rabbit.org/suggested-vegetables-and-fruits-for-a-rabb... http://www.cookitsimply.com/measurements/cups/lettuce-shredd...
"""
The produce from our production farm (which produced over 50,000 lbs of produce since 2011 years) goes to 1 of 4 places (listed in order of priority):
Individual households using a pay-what-you-can model. Think of it as a suggested donation grocery store. (Note: we have supplied over 200 households within 2 square miles supplied in the last 2 years)
Local Markets Thousands of lbs of produce go to over 5 markets within 5 miles)
Local Restaurants & Vendors thousands of lbs of produce supply locally-owned businesses all over southeast Michigan)
Food Pantries: Local Churches
Coalition on Temporary Shelters (COTS) & Forgotten Harvest
"""
This is wrong. The fact there are more than sufficient resources to care for every citizen does not preclude the need to pay for something.
Suppose that I self-sacrificed by under consuming and taking a risk. Instead of enjoying my free time and spending my money, I choose to spend many days building bricks. After a while, in a hut-less society, someone might ask why they need to pay for my bricks, when there are more than enough to build huts for everyone.
Raw materials may be abundant and "free", but labor, investment, and capital are not. They're they product of blood, sweat, and tears. Hardly free.
Renewable energy and automation are free once bootstrapped. Its the initial investment that requires concessions to give it away.
Given enough of both, I don't need your labor nor capital.
The overall point is good - that there's nothing that's actually free (as in beer) once all costs are accounted for.
However - Things get muddier (heh) when you consider: - The supply so vastly outstrips demand ("more than enough for everyone") that the market price would be negligible - When the "true" per-person cost of "enough bricks" is negligible; only society as a whole needs enough brick to notice the cost. - When you consider what you are not charged for as a human; in other words, what other people are giving away for free that costs them their blood, sweat, and tears. (Typically, public art and the emotional labor that goes into being a human)
Note - I am very much not saying you're wrong. I'm saying that the real world appears to get waaay more complicated than that.
For example - If the per-person price is a dime, that's negligible, but across a billion people, that's a hundred million dollars. Hardly negligible. Taxes do this now - what's the space program cost each American, on average? A dollar a year? To each person, the space program is pretty much free, but to society, it's not.
For another example - Yosemite. Yosemite is free-ish - it's not charging market rates, that's for sure - and there definitely is NOT enough Yosemite "to care for every citizen". What's going on there?
So you're spot-on that it's not ultimately free, but also missing the point, which is that if society decided it was a good idea, it (probably) could be free for each individual.
Not to mention that it's 'free' because of volunteers. I can also feed myself for close to free by growing my own vegetables...but it's way more efficient to just work and pay for food.
However,
Let's see if we can pick out the good here.
When you say it's a little bizarre, you're right. We are massively estranged from almost all forces that supply our life. Just as the average American has no idea how to host a website from scratch on DO, most don't know where their food comes from, how to fix their car, has no financial literacy and no civic literacy.
After years of animal husbandry, our leaders have moved toward treating the vast majority us like agricultural elements, simply repeating one small action of a larger whole for our whole lives. Projects like this can help get us out of the matrix.
As most people who try to grow food learn, it's not a one-size-fits-all activity. The art of food production has many, subtle, non-sexy details. Real world experience counts for an awful lot.
I'm not saying we must all live in tipis, playing homebuilt instruments around a fire, wearing dresses from from potato sacks, BUT living life out of debt with a strong degree of self-sufficiency and freedom from The Invisible Hand of corporate life will bring us a lot closer to our pursuit of happiness than the apparent Ponzi scheme of centralized economy.
Overall I think you are right, but it seems like a non issue in a (relatively) stagnant depopulated city.
There's no case to be made that there is any economic benefit to farming in the city. By all measures, it's much more expensive.
The same can be said of other places I'd have thought?
I think that is a bit myopic.
A small farm can look nice too. And even with electric transport, there's the fact that cities have to bulldoze over miles and miles of nature in order to accommodate the kind of transport you're talking about, mainly cars. Which is why some cities are moving away from cars and into more dense kinds of environments. Once that's done, transporting your crop of the day from the farm into the city becomes a bit of a hassle
And then there is the quality aspect. Mass-produced food in the US does not taste good. The varieties you can buy in the store are optimized for 3 things: high yield, long shelf life / tolerance to travel & warehousing and appearance. When you grow your own food, you can optimize for taste. You can have a tomato that is actually sweet, not something that tastes like a cucumber. You can grow varieties that won't do well in transit (ie. fragile or easily bruised) because you're handling the vegetable from the garden to the kitchen.
Most of the time, it is impossible to even buy produce with high quality characteristics. When it is, it is often very expensive. This increases the value proposition of a personal/urban garden.
There are many things we do in our worldwide agriculture system precisely because they make economic sense. That doesn't mean they are a good idea. We are going to pay the price for that lack of judgement. I am excited to see anything that bucks that trend.
Potatoes do fine on the truck ride in from the countryside, but baby arugula, not so much. Potatoes are also a lot easier to plant and harvest by machine.
Lawns don't make any economic sense; convert them to leafy greens and fancy perennials that are not economic to grow at a scale. Deliver greens to your neighborhood via bike. They are light. Sell them to fancy restaurants for $15 a pound and not have to pay for trucking them in from 50 miles away.
Then, convert equal amount of farmland being used for green, back into wildish stuff, so birds, bees, etc have room to live and improve (pollinate) the staple crops.
Yes, they do; the fact (if this is the case) that you don't personally gain utility from them doesn't mean they don't make economic sense, neither does.the fact that they generally aren't part of the production chain for a product for sale.
(corn, wheat, soy, others)
But if it makes people happy, it might be worth it.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
No, the distribution problem is largely political - in fact modern famine and starvation is almost always a problem with local government, or the warlords that pass for it.
This article from The Economist gives a good overview: http://www.economist.com/news/business/21591650-walmart-carr...
Well, that and outright theft by warlords with AK47s and thugs riding around in trucks...
[1]http://www.nbcnews.com/id/44147002/ns/world_news-africa/t/so...
Regardless, any time more food is grown close to where it will be eaten, this is a good thing. I just put up a new site this week focused on sustainable food systems: https://terra.farm. I'm adding content to the wiki atm, so if anyone has suggestions on stuff that might fit, lmk.