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Conservation Communities Takes Root Across US
Hugh Pickens DOT Com writes "Kate Murphy reports at the NYT about a growing number of so-called agrihoods, residential developments where a working farm is the central feature, in the same way that other communities may cluster around a golf course, pool or fitness center. At least a dozen projects across the country are thriving, enlisting thousands of home buyers who crave access to open space, verdant fields and fresh food. 'I hear from developers all the time about this,' says Ed McMahon. 'They've figured out that unlike a golf course, which costs millions to build and millions to maintain, they can provide green space that actually earns a profit.'
Agritopia, outside Phoenix, has sixteen acres of certified organic farmland, with row crops (artichokes to zucchini), fruit trees (citrus, nectarine, peach, apple, olive and date) and livestock (chickens and sheep). Fences gripped by grapevines and blackberry bushes separate the farm from the community's 452 single-family homes, each with a wide front porch and sidewalks close enough to encourage conversation. The hub of neighborhood life is a small square overlooking the farm, with a coffeehouse, farm-to-table restaurant and honor-system farm stand. The square is also where residents line up on Wednesday evenings to claim their bulging boxes of just-harvested produce, eggs and honey, which come with a $100-a-month membership in the community-supported agriculture, or CSA, program.
'Wednesday is the highlight of my week,' says Ben Wyffels. 'To be able to walk down the street with my kids and get fresh, healthy food is amazing.' Because the Agritopia farm is self-sustaining, no fees are charged to support it, other than the cost of buying produce at the farm stand or joining the CSA. Agritopia was among the first agrihoods — like Serenbe in Chattahoochee Hills, Ga.; Prairie Crossing in Grayslake, Ill.; South Village in South Burlington, Vt.; and Hidden Springs in Boise, Idaho. 'The interest is so great, we're kind of terrified trying to catch up with all the calls,' says Quint Redmond adding that in addition to developers, he hears from homeowners' associations and golf course operators who want to transform their costly-to-maintain green spaces into revenue-generating farms. Driving the demand, Redmond says, are the local-food movement and the aspirations of many Americans to be gentlemen (or gentlewomen) farmers. 'Everybody wants to be Thomas Jefferson these days.'" The city of Detroit is planning a 26.9-acre urban farm project on one of its vacant high school properties. Produce from the project will be included in meals for students in the district and later to the larger community.
Agritopia, outside Phoenix, has sixteen acres of certified organic farmland, with row crops (artichokes to zucchini), fruit trees (citrus, nectarine, peach, apple, olive and date) and livestock (chickens and sheep). Fences gripped by grapevines and blackberry bushes separate the farm from the community's 452 single-family homes, each with a wide front porch and sidewalks close enough to encourage conversation. The hub of neighborhood life is a small square overlooking the farm, with a coffeehouse, farm-to-table restaurant and honor-system farm stand. The square is also where residents line up on Wednesday evenings to claim their bulging boxes of just-harvested produce, eggs and honey, which come with a $100-a-month membership in the community-supported agriculture, or CSA, program.
'Wednesday is the highlight of my week,' says Ben Wyffels. 'To be able to walk down the street with my kids and get fresh, healthy food is amazing.' Because the Agritopia farm is self-sustaining, no fees are charged to support it, other than the cost of buying produce at the farm stand or joining the CSA. Agritopia was among the first agrihoods — like Serenbe in Chattahoochee Hills, Ga.; Prairie Crossing in Grayslake, Ill.; South Village in South Burlington, Vt.; and Hidden Springs in Boise, Idaho. 'The interest is so great, we're kind of terrified trying to catch up with all the calls,' says Quint Redmond adding that in addition to developers, he hears from homeowners' associations and golf course operators who want to transform their costly-to-maintain green spaces into revenue-generating farms. Driving the demand, Redmond says, are the local-food movement and the aspirations of many Americans to be gentlemen (or gentlewomen) farmers. 'Everybody wants to be Thomas Jefferson these days.'" The city of Detroit is planning a 26.9-acre urban farm project on one of its vacant high school properties. Produce from the project will be included in meals for students in the district and later to the larger community.
This sounds like the fake plastic plants approach to agriculture, all fashion and no substance.
I myself live in the middle of 20 acres of my own farmland, and thats barely enough to anything even close to useful in the way of actual farming, we call it a 'lifestyle block'. ;)
'The square is also where residents line up on Wednesday evenings to claim their bulging boxes of just-harvested produce, eggs and honey, which come with a $100-a-month membership'
Yeah, right.. the boxes wont be bulging from the produce of 20 acres.. not if they have any livestock area as they claim, not for 452 families..
Mind you, $45,200/month is not a bad scam for the people running it.. I suspect it buys a lot of outside produce
To the best of my knowledge, the only useful thing to come out of Agritopia in Phoenix (Chandler/Gilbert) is Joe's Farm Grill which is a nice place to grab a fresh burger or some BBQ and eat on the patio with the other Mormon families.
If you look at the map, you'll see that there's basically a little bit of citrus, a field growing something alfalfa-esque, and a greenhouse where someone's got some tomatoes.
It's not Pauly Shore Biodome.
It's just a place with fresh tomatoes.
About one acre per person per year. So this would at best be supplementary.
I am sure the unending drudgery of 16th century work will wear pretty thin within a year.
Those 454 homes are no different from any other suburban home in Gilbert AZ.
There's just a pair of plots where a strip mall full of dentists and swimming pool supply stores could have been full of fruit and grass.
Every person in there just goes to the grocery store like everyone else, minus a bag of oranges once in a while that they probably let rot.
You can't FEED that many from that small a block, but all the small luxury veges yes, you can do that.
Herbs, tomatoes, lettuce. They aren't talking bulk rice/wheat/potatoes, just the extras which make that carb loaded crap edible ;)
BIG cost savings if you eat a lot of veges, because the luxury stuff costs much more than the staples that provide most of the calories.
This stuff has been going on longer than Communism had a name. Some of the early settlements tried such things.
...seriously, "Conservation Communities Takes Root Across US"? Come on...
... it's such a nice idea to think about, but as the other comments have mentioned the reality is a bit different.
'I hear from developers all the time about this,' says Ed McMahon.
I thought he died...
Hmm, 452 families, $100 each per month. So they're taking in better than $540K a year for the produce from 20 acres?
A professional farmer might make $17K on the same land (assuming he's growing corn, at average production levels and prices).
Sounds like quite a scam to me. Where can I get in on it?
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
This actually makes some sense. Of course you're not going to -feed- all these people off of one farm, but it provides some food, a natural meeting place, and some open area that's not annoying subdivisions.
Sounds cool as long as it's not a HOA that runs with deed. The community pool where I grew up was like that and it worked fine. If you were in the community you had the right but not the obligation to purchase a membership.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
452 families, not people. and 16 acres total.
So, maybe 0.01 acres per person? Sounds more like an Allotment Garden than a working farm...
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
Same here (but 10 acres, mostly oat hay). This is more like performance art than farming.
Hmm, short of bulk foods like wheat and rice I have been able to feed my family just fine from a 1/2 acre city lot.. Maybe you'r doing something wrong?
The real insanity of this project is a simple number. 1-2" rainfall a year. Even with 20-30" of rainfall, these crops still requires quite a bit of water. Water that comes, probably, from the same river that irrigates most of the desert west. Farming in the desert. It is special kind of crazy. And I bet each of those houses each has a lawn.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
To be fair, the average farmer would also spend probably 1/10th (or less) the time on that 20 acres growing corn: planting, spraying, irrigation, harvesting is all handled with heavy equipment in corn production. You can't do that with tomatoes. Well, the irrigation is probably automated, but if it's organic, you've gotta hand-examine plants for bugs and weeds. Not sure how they're raising sheep and everything else, you need probably 1/4-1/2 an acre per sheep (unless you grain feed them), which doesn't give you a lot of room for produce. I'm guessing the sheep are just for show.
"None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license." --John Milton
Actually there are a lot of ways that they could make this happen. Vertical farming, interplanting, and aquaponics all are producing very high yields. They can be more labor-intensive, but there's a lot of pay-off in having a local, resilient food system.
This place, for example, is growing a million pounds of food per year on two acres, even through the winter: http://growingpower.org/
you beat me to it.....another TV reality show concept.
Sorry, I meant that subsistence requires one acre per person per year. Much less for solely vegetarian diets, about a quarter to half off the top of my head. Maybe 1 acre per small family, less if you don't like your kids too much.
Either way, it's only going to provide a pretty small chunk of the diet.
In a couple hundred square feet in my back yard I get more tomatoes, more cucumbers, more yellow squash, more watermelons, more eggs, more pomegranates, more jalapenos, more green chiles, more strawberries and more herbs than I can eat in a growing season and can freeze enough to last a good chunk of the rest of the year and I'm a fairly lame farmer that just tossed together a couple of raised beds in the corner of a yard.
In a basic sense, you could get a lot of stuff from 20 acres. Definitely nowhere near enough for 452 families, and at $100/mo they are just getting ripped off, but acting like you need 20 acres or more to get into "Actual farming" may be true, but given what a family might need a couple hundred sq feet is enough to get a ton of veggies.
If this wasn't yuppie rip-off town, it might be interested. Some areas locally have put raised planter beds in abandoned or trashed lots that residents can claim if they just maintain them and it's really a good use of otherwise bad space. Same could be said about this versus having a golf course, if done right and not just a yuppy rip-off scam.
Then there's the idea of calling a farm a "conservation community" after placing it in a desert that has already depleted its groundwater, will be getting a shrinking share of the Colorado, and is in the middle of the worst drought in over 100 years. I'd believe the "conservation community" label if they xeriscaped Agritopia as opposed to farming it.
... assuming he's growing corn
Bad assumption. They are not growing feed corn. They are growing high value vegetables: endive, arugula, tomatoes, artichokes. Just outside Phoenix, you can grow year round, harvesting continuously.
I live in San Jose, CA. We also have a long growing season. With a 1/4 acre garden, small orchard, beehive, and a half dozen laying hens, I produce about 80% of my families food by value, and about 50% by calories. We mostly buy bulk cheap stuff like rice, soybeans, flour, and soybean oil, and get everything else from the backyard.
Sorry, I meant that subsistence requires one acre per person per year. Much less for solely vegetarian diets, about a quarter to half off the top of my head. Maybe 1 acre per small family, less if you don't like your kids too much.
Either way, it's only going to provide a pretty small chunk of the diet.
Why the fuck is it per year?
It's just 1 acre per person, for as long as they subsist on it. You're not going to need 10 acres for 1 person over 10 years, just 1 acre for 10 years for 1 person for 10 years. The years cancel out.
It's not bulk corn, it's all the expensive, low volume stuff that they're growing there. In addition, it seems to be organic, which adds even more to the cost.
harvesting is all handled with heavy equipment in corn production. You can't do that with tomatoes
I picked tomatoes and various other commercial vegetable crops in the early 80's (Australia), even back then they had mechanical harvesters. Hand picked tomatoes were the "cream of the crop", you pick them for about 2-4 weeks when the crop starts ripening, they are early to market and good quality so the farmer gets top dollar. However once the contract date* comes up for the entire crop to be harvested they were
mechanically harvested and ended up in cans and/or sauce bottles. Same with peas, a 1980's era pea harvester could pick the peas, pod them, wash, snap freeze, and bag them. Again "shop peas" were picked by hand and sold with their pods intact before the crop was at the optimum point for mechanical harvesting.
* - Large commercial vegetable crops are often sold on contract before they are even planted. The thing about tomatoes (other than copper coloured hands from the chemicals on them), is that a heavy summer downpour will cause a ripe tomato to swell to the point it's skin bursts. When such a scenario occurs all the mechanical harvesters are in full demand since everyone wants their tomato crop picked before it turns into tomato sauce and simply drips onto the ground. The farmer doesn't wait days/weeks for a harvester turns up. While it is raining he will be recruiting as many pickers as he can at a higher dollar rate per bin. From my experience the extra dollars did not make up for the futility of trying to fill a half ton wooden vegetable bin with tomato jelly.
As to TFA, unless they set up the whole plot as a hydroponic farm there's no way it's going to significantly reduce the food bill for ~1500 people. However I think that's the wrong way to look at the project, TFA compares the farm to a public park, pool or golf course in conventional towns, it's nice if such amenities can pay for their own upkeep but profit (in dollar terms) is not the goal. If nothing else the people in the community who use it will gain a much greater appreciation of where their food comes from and just how much planning, hard work and patience is involved in growing something edible and eating it before some other critter does.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
Several studies in South Africa found that one can provide year round vegetables for a family of four on a plot the size of a door. Of course, in South Africa, one has a year-long growing season.
"...the aspirations of many Americans to be gentlemen (or gentlewomen) farmers..."...And they said that was a purely British disease...what next? Will youse guys all start listening to The Archers http://www.bbc.co.uk/programme... (1950), is still running (January 2014), and is the world's longest-running soap opera with a total of over 16,800 episodes
"Cock Up Your Beaver" does not mean what you think. This sig is intended to clog filters and annoy do-gooders
Yeah, yeah, you're right. But, at least show some respect for your 4-digit elder. Sheesh, kids these days.
Just another day in Paradise
16 acres of water-thirsty crops outside Phoenix in a development with 452 homes? This isn't a farm, (much less something you could call a "conservation community") it's landscaping that happens to produce something you can eat. Better than a golf-course, I suppose, but still a bit "slacktivist."
What next? Maybe we'll start cocking up our beavers!
Just another day in Paradise
Like most utopias it's probably got a downside.
The fees will go up and those who can't afford them will be converted into serfs or indentured labourers. Finally the CSA (Confederate States of America) will arise again with the newly recruited serfs growing cotton on those 20 acres.
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
The part of this story that the Slashdot audience could most easily get in on is aquaponics, which is producing huge yields in some cases and holds a lot of promise for the local food movement.
Aquaponics is a system you can use indoors or outdoors, on large or small scales. It is a closed loop wherein ponds full of fish, usually tilapia, have their water pumped through hydroponic grow beds full of food-growing plants. The all-important third ingredient is a bacteria which converts the ammonia of the fish waste into nitrates which nourish the plants. The water goes back to the fish clean and livable. Once the bacteria are established and in balance to keep this conversion going, the only investment this needs are the energy to keep the pumps going, stable temperatures, and fish food.
Because the density of available nutrients is quite high, the plants can be so too. Their roots mostly just need to grow straight down, so typical planting distances don't apply. The fish too get a cleaner environment, and the usual equations for how many fish per gallon of water can be exceeded. A stabilized, intelligently planted aquaponics system can grow a lot of food - this site (http://portablefarms.com/2013/part-one-sizing-your-aquaponics-system/) claims that 25 to 30 square feet of grow bed is enough to completely meet one adult's supply for table vegetables, and given that you keep the water quality high, the tilapia will make for very tasty protein too.
Because the water is in a closed loop system, very little of it is lost, and aquaponics is radically less demanding of water than traditional agriculture. Because you can grow this stuff indoors, chemical pesticides are neither needed nor desirable, for your sake and the fishes'.
Leafy green plants are the easiest to grow in this way, root vegetables some of the hardest. Tweaks on this system do keep expanding the options, however, like microgreens, wherein you harvest plants in the first two weeks after they've sprouted for a nutrient density four to forty times that of typical mature vegetables. So the question is, how could we make this the most easy thing to get started, so that people with little experience and limited time can skip the refrigerator and east straight from their greenhouse?
Done rightly, this system can shake up food supply as surely as 3D printers are going to shake up industry.
You might think that southwest Florida would have plenty of water - it's right next to the ocean.
But you can't grow crops on seawater and they are under more or less permanent water restrictions.
It is, however, one of the places where they grow things like early-season tomatoes commercially, and for some years now drip irrigation has been used to maximize the effectiveness of available water.
If high value veggies can produce ~30x the output of a corn crop, the people paying the $100 a month might be getting their money's worth.
450-odd families on 20 acres isn't a 1/4 acre garden for each family - it's a 0.01 acre garden for each family. Again, if they can make ~30x as much value as a corn crop, it might be worth the price.
Otherwise, it's just HOA dues paid to give them a warm fuzzy.
Note that my parents were from farm families, and we had truck gardens in the backyard growing up, so I've a bit more of a clue than these people seem to have - we grew most of our own vegetables most of the time. But not in a 20x20 foot garden. Nor did we manage to raise free-range chickens in that same area, while also growing our veggies.
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
I've been scanning the comments looking for anybody asking about water usage. If they're really trying to tout their "conservation community" in freaking ARIZONA, they ought to be putting the water issue front and center.
Before you move to the farm or the golf course, be aware that certain individuals have genetic predisposition to elevated risk of developing Parkinson's Disease from exposure to common pesticides. 11 different "safe" pesticides were associated with 2- to 6-fold increases in PD risk. Neurology February 4, 2014 vol. 82 no. 5 419-426
It's like arguing the merits of 16th century catholicism to a reddit atheist: it can't work
A reddit atheist would probably ask if these farming communities are hell-bent on converting all the other farmers under the threat of burning them at stake. I mean, every religion "works", for certain values of "works", but that's a fairly limited view of the problem. Just as limited as the scope of your "analogy" is. These farms also "work" but they're apparently not for everyone. Even if urbanization is nice for some things, we've screwed up agriculture badly in this respect. (I'd love to have a greenhouse, though.)
Ezekiel 23:20
Back in the 60's and early 70's, I remember all these communes popping up all over the place. A bunch of hippies would get together (none of whom knew the first thing about farming, of course) and decide they were going to form a community and "live off the land." So they would go buy (or squat) some small piss-poor farm somewhere and start growing their glorified vegetable garden. And pretty soon they would realize that farming was actual hard work (guess they thought they could just plant, sit around smoking weed all day for months, and then harvest at the end). And pretty soon after that they would realize that farming takes a LOT of acreage per person to actually be sustainable. So then the inevitable squabbling and calling back home to mom and dad for bread would begin. And by the end of the first winter, the commune was no more.
Kids, learn from the mistakes of your elders. Don't be a hippie.
SJW's don't eliminate discrimination. They just expropriate it for themselves.
The notion of true Sustainability without massive acreage is timeless.
Yeah, it's also bullshit. Real farming is HARD FUCKING WORK. Believe me, I know. True sustenance farming is even harder. Sure, it's easy enough to grow a vegetable garden for fun. But when you're growing to survive it takes a lot of acreage per person, especially if you're growing on marginal land or weak soil. Even the most experienced of sustenance farmers usually have to supplement their diet with hunting/fishing and food bought from side work. A lot of sustenance farmers have starved to death on the frontier because of a single crop failure or drought (yes kids, people used to starve to death right here in the good old USA).
It also doesn't help that a lot of the hippies who dream of this stuff these days would balk at the idea of using GMO crops, pesticides, raising livestock for milk and slaughter, or hunting/fishing. Real sustenance living doesn't give a fuck about your ideals. Get milk and meat or starve.
SJW's don't eliminate discrimination. They just expropriate it for themselves.
I'd bet it gets pretty close to meeting the demand of the community. Unfortunately, the typical American diet is heavy on staples (wheat, corn, potatoes, rice) & meats while being light on fresh vegetables (what this farm seeks to provide). You could probably supply 454 families with more artichokes than they could use with just an acre....
"Agritopia, outside Phoenix, has sixteen acres of certified organic farmland, with row crops (artichokes to zucchini), fruit trees (citrus, nectarine, peach, apple, olive and date) and livestock (chickens and sheep)."
And not one of those is supposed to grow in the desert. They're wasting an unbelievable amount of water and ruining the environment just so they can feel all warm and fuzzy being eco-hippie douchebags. Good job.
Suburbia has issues in which self raised crops really can help. In the cities locally grown food can do all sorts of good things. Often the food must be grown indoors and the production can be amazing. But in addition to the huge bennefits that one might get in the suburbs in the cities things like control of violence can relate to farming. When each neighborhood has a distinct boundary and limited entrance and exit points things like gang activity tend to fall off completely. Locals begin to know who belongs and who is a stranger. Psychological stress is reduced. Drive by shootings vanish as the neighborhood can be completely sealed off at the drop of a hat. Pollution is reduced as far less transportation is involved in supplying food. Even things like the heat island effect can be reduced by incorporating food production within an urban area. Jobs that are created can be filled by local people reducing the illegal immigration issues. Indoor fish farming can supply healthy and tasty protein for the public. The list is endless. We should have been doing this for decades. We can even produce wind and solar energy for the community from the buildings used for vertical farming. And you can bet your last penny that just like auto companies are trying to keep Tesla from doing something new the powers that be will do all that they can to cripple new designs and implementations of local farming communities.
15+ years ago, Pittsford, New York (a suburb of Rochester) decided it would remain a mixed community of farms and suburban homes. The town voted for a bond issue and used the proceeds to buy the development rights from the existing inter-mixed farm owners. They are now forever farms. Some of these farms raise commodities, e.g., beans, some raise produce, e.g., sweet corn, raspberries. As people drive about town, they pass by suburban home groups, then farms, then more homes, then more farms. It has been a win for everyone.
You can't compare industrial farming economics to a local community polyculture farm. It's a completely different game. I would argue the local CSA model is far more sustainable than industrial ag, and this is a clear example.
Industrial Ag requires thousands of acres of subsidized monocrop, big machinery, expensive seed (thanks to Monsanto), expensive fertilizer, transportation, and low-wage farmers and crop pickers to make a profit. It's an industry supported by big ag corporations and (thanks to their lobby efforts) government to maximize profit for the few at the top of the chain. The farmers and crop pickers are the last in line, as far as the revenue stream.
A CSA puts money in the farmers and crop workers first, works within and supports the local community. That's why it works, that's why it's sustainable, and expect to see more of them because the local food movement has legs, not because it's a fad, but because it is rooted in a sustainable design model.
It's 160 acres. "Sixteen of Agritopia’s 160 acres are certified organic farmland, with row crops (artichokes to zucchini), fruit trees (citrus, nectarine, peach, apple, olive and date) and livestock (chickens and sheep)." Someone needs to work on their reading comprehension.
I produce about 80% of my families food by value, and about 50% by calories.
Based on what I have read that's not possible. The "usual" figure is that 1 person requires 1 acre, under optimal conditions. (Or 1 person requires 0.5 hectares).
If "family" = 3 people, and you are providing 50% of their calories, then you are feeding 1.5 people on that 1/4 acre. That would be 6 times more efficient than the "optimal" farm. Also, if it is possible to do this, it would require outside sources of water and fertilizer.
We mostly buy bulk cheap stuff like rice, soybeans, flour, and soybean oil, and get everything else from the backyard.
Then that is where you are getting most of your calories.
What you seem not to realize is that these communities are for hipsters, not hippies. Serenbe, for instance, is full of half-million-dollar 1500 ft^2 homes way out in the middle of fucking nowhere, in a metro area where even other hipster neighborhoods in-town have similar houses at half the price. They're not going to do (most of) the farming themselves; they're going to hire some schmuck to do it for them. And there's no way hippies could afford to live there.
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
The "usual" figure is that 1 person requires 1 acre, under optimal conditions.
Nope. There are plenty of places where productivity is much higher than that. Bangladesh has 150 million people, but no where near 150 million acres of farmland. Yet they feed themselves. They accomplish this by growing year round, using intensive farming, and eating little meat. One acre per person may be typical for America, but that is based on plenty of corn fed beef.
What is the average time commitment on your garden? I've always wanted to do something similar, but I've never believed I had the time for it.
It requires a quite a bit of time in the spring, while preparing the ground and planting, but not much during the rest of the year. But all this work does not have to be your labor. There is an exemption to the 13th Amendment, which outlawed slavery and indentured servitude: You can still coerce unpaid labor from other people, provided they are your direct descendents, and under the age of 18. You can even use extremely cruel and unusual methods to extract this labor, including turning off the TV, and even unplugging the router, until the tomatoes are picked, sliced, and in the mason jars.
When each neighborhood has a distinct boundary and limited entrance and exit points things like gang activity tend to fall off completely.
Cul-de-sacs, chokepoint streets that feed onto a sidewalkless artery, and other phenomena associated with suburban "street hierarchy" subdivisions are a fire hazard. They tend to be less friendly to pedestrians and cyclists, and it takes longer for emergency first responders to get in and out.
Why? Aquaponics is easily the most water-conservative method for growing crops in any climate.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve your problem, you're not using enough of it. --AC
And the aerial photos are even less impressive. Agritopia is a nice idea, but the actual subdivision seems to have the same or even less green space than most other urban or suburban subdivisions.
The bottom line is this is a tech website. It would be foolish to believe anyone here knows what they are talking about in this subject matter.
Right, because someone who has experience in all the intracacies of something like an MVC architecture is certainly incapable of understanding how to stick a seed in the ground and give it water and sun until it produces food.
Someone flopped a steamer in the gene pool.
LOL, thank you!!
That, I think, is the best post on Slashdot for the year, the rest of us all might as well pack it up till next year, this one wins hands down!!
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
But, being a closed loop system, any contaminants (such as nitrites, which is toxic to plants) produced are retained and tend to build up in the system. And ask anyone who keeps fish tanks how much work it is to keep a fish tank clean and balanced, even if you have a well established bacteria and plant system.
That's the claim, but there's been a lot of claims (running back to the 60's) out of the alternative farming community of things like this that would "surely shake up the food supply". They've pretty much all turned out to be unsustainable, or expensive, or fail to scale beyond the homestead/DIY level, or some combination of the three. The jury is still out on aquaponics.
Or just do what this gut in the TED talk does: https://www.youtube.com/watch?... Fight desertification AND grow good food. The guy in the TED talk points out that this works well in terrible conditions.
Peace is easy to achieve, just surrender. Liberty is much harder get/keep.
Assuming the 454 families are pure carnivores, that's true.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
You are completely misrepresenting the point. It is not claimed or supposed to be cheaper than Big Ag. Read the summary - the stated appeal is: "access to open space, verdant fields and fresh food...To be able to walk down the street with my kids and get fresh, healthy food is amazing." Where did you pull "cheaper" out of that? This one-track mindset is so pervasive we have become blinded to it.
The 1 year term describes the subsistence as indefinate, as it includes all the growing seasons \ harvests. If you only need to feed 1 person for a few months out of the year, the allocation would shift.
There is no "1 year term" in what he posted. He posted "per year".
A 1 year term would not describe something something over an "indefinate" amount of time, it would describe it over a definite amount of time - 1 year.
A "per year" term is indefinite - and irrelevant since the amount of land required doesn't increase or decrease over time (provided you have enough to rotate your crops, fallow, etc. as appropriate, and a single acre is plenty of space to manage that for a single person). The only way "per year" even means anything is if you're referring to the yield as in "how long can I live off of this". Farming up X years worth of food for stockpiling in a bomb shelter or some shit, for example. But you wouldn't do that for subsistence farming (eat as needed and sell/trade any excess) or any long-term farming (if X > 1 you better be selling your excess or you're just wasting it as it spoils).
"Per year" would only make sense if it were a one-time harvest of a specific crop or if you planned to not farm the land afterward / were preparing for a bad harvest in the future. In either case the "per year" term is redundant as you can simply reduce the acreage requirement by the same factor.
If you could get 3 years worth of stockpiled grain for a person out of an acre of land in a single harvest of an annual crop, you would just say the requirement per person was 1/3 acre per person, not 1 acre per person per 3 years, every year.
If you need to feed 1 person for a few months, then you would be talking about specific seasons and crops - you wouldn't mention "per year" at all.
The entire development is 160 acres. The farmland is only 16 acres of the entire development. You also misquoted the summary, since it doesn't even say that Agritopia is 160 acres of total land.
In a fish tank with plants, nitrites are dead simple to keep in check - and that's in a very small body of water, whereas this type of system would have a much larger volume, and be much easier to manage. Bacteria consume nitrite and convert it into nitrate. This process is relatively short, and once the bacterial colony is established, it can accommodate relatively large increases in ammonia input (like a dead, decaying fish) fairly quickly. Plants (and algae) consume nitrates extremely quickly. Anyone who has trouble handling nitrites in their fish tank is clueless, since the bacterial growth process happens entirely on its' own once they're present in the water.
I know this because I've had many fish tanks, the most recent of which was a saltwater reef. Dealing with nitrates in a reef is "hard", in the sense that you need something to consume them, as most corals don't deal with even nitrates (the end product, not the middlemen nitrites which are deadly in minuscule quantities) well, and some have trouble with algae growth near/on them. Once you have a separate tank with plants or algae, it's next to impossible to fuck up that aspect of the system.
The big problem that people have comes from commercial filter design and recommendations (far too small for the tank size), which largely don't contain enough surface area (Penguin Biowheels are one of the few power filters that even have a design specifically for surface area, and it's still not sufficient) to process the waste their fish create in the first place, then they overfeed and make the problem worse, then they add fish before the colonies are settled, and then they wonder why fish keep dying but add another one anyway, and then they don't do large enough water changes to remove the nitrates (on typical systems, there's no plants/algae there specifically to consume it). Done by someone with even a moderate amount of knowledge and experience, which you'd expect from the early implementations, it's a great idea.
But, being a closed loop system, any contaminants (such as nitrites, which is toxic to plants) produced are retained and tend to build up in the system. And ask anyone who keeps fish tanks how much work it is to keep a fish tank clean and balanced, even if you have a well established bacteria and plant system.
That's exactly why you should research this. A definitive aspect of aquaponics is that it includes a combination of nitrosomonas and nitrobacter bacteria which successfully convert ammonia and nitrites into nitrates which the plants consume. This means that the system takes a bit of time to ramp up to bring the fish, bacteria, and plants into balance, but once it is going, it is very low maintenance. There's a significant difference between this and the typical aquarium.
This kind of closed loop is definitely going to shake up agriculture in some form, not only because of its much smaller water consumption and higher density, but because the current state of agriculture is extremely oil-dependent for both its machinery and its fertilizer and pesticide production. Reducing that dependency is going to matter a great deal.
I have - that's exactly why I made the statements I did. (Despite constant attempts by the biased and/or the less well educated, "research" still doesn't mean "drunk the kool-aide".) Somewhere in my disaster area of an office are the sketches and calculations for a variety of differently sized aquaponics systems, all the way from "science fair" level mockups to some preliminary thinking on an industrial scale system. (Yes, I got the exact contaminant wrong, I was posting with a massive head cold, sue me.)
Aquaponics isn't a closed loop - it's very much open and constantly bleeding in the form of evaporation and harvested plant and animal material. To make up for this, it requires constant inputs in the form of fish food (and you might do some research on where that food comes from), make up water (to replace that lost from evaporation as well as what vanishes from the system in the harvested material), and energy (for the pumps, and for heating in colder climates). TANSTAAFL. Like so many other "alternative" farming methods, aquaponics works on the small scale precisely because that massive industrial infrastructure exists - and equally like so many others, it's not at all clear that it scales well to industrial sizes while retaining the purported benefits.
http://robohub.org/tag/agricul...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A...
http://www.ieee-ras.org/agricu...
Indoors agricultural is also rising, given cheaper energy costs for LED lighting and more consistent results in controlled environments...
Yes, hunting/gatherering in a large home range is easier than pre-modern century farming styles, which seem to have only increased because of increasing population densities and tribes pushes to marginal lands or smaller lands.
http://www.primitivism.com/ori...
Anyway, I applaud the trend in the original article. Of course, living next to a farm can pose health challenges (like from contaminated ground water) depending on what pesticides, herbicides, fungicides, and fertilizers are used (even "organic" ones).
If you look at the "Biosphere II" project, or similar intensive agricultural projects (as in the book "Survival Gardening") it looks like a few people per acre can be supported with intensive methods in favorable climates, especially if you grow a lot of beans and return sterilized human manure to the land..
http://www.permies.com/t/12422...
"It is realistic to suppose that the absolute minimum of arable land to support one person is a mere 0.07 of a hectare -- and this assumes a largely vegetarian diet, no land degradation or water shortages, virtually no post-harvest waste, and farmers who know precisely when and how to plant, fertilize, irrigate, etc. [FAO, 1993] "
Intensive agriculture is knowledge intensive though, even if robots might mean it would not be so labor intensive. But no doubt eventually we will see plug-in (or cold fusion-powered) containers that have seeds and lights and robots in them and just output food given water and some other inputs. But it won't be as picturesque as a diversified semi-hobby organic farm. But it might not be as unsightly as, say, parts of Iowa where much of year the devastated industrialized farmland looks like a moonscape, and the soil is essentially only used to prop up the plants, only ~10% of calories per acre is created compared to intensive practices, and most of the result is fed to animals where ~90% of the calories are wasted relative to human consumption (so, only ~1% efficient overall compared to intensive cultivation of vegetarian foods, in round numbers).
Info on sustainable farming practices:
"Towards holistic agriculture: a scientific approach" by R. W. Widdowson"
http://books.google.com/books/...
And: http://remineralize.org/
And on economics:
http://www.juliansimon.com/wri...
"Of course an increase in consumption imposes costs in the short
run. But in the long run, population pressure reduces costs as
well as improves the food supply in accord with the general theory,
which I'll repeat again: More people, and increased income, cause
problems of increased scarcity of resources in the short run.
Heightened scarcity causes prices to rise. The higher prices
present opportunity, and prompt inventors and entrepreneurs to
search for solutions. Many fail, at cost to themselves. But in a
free society, solutions are eventually found. And in the long run
the new developments leave us better off than if the problems had
not arisen. That is, prices end up lower than before the increased
scarcity occurred, which is the long-run history of food supply.
Some people wonder whether we can be sure that food production
will increase, and whether it would be "safer" to
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
Yet they feed themselves.
Apparently not:
A quick web search claims that Bangladesh has "one of the highest undernutrition rates in the world." Wikipedia agrees with "Though they may own a small plot of land and some livestock and generally have enough to eat, their diets lack nutritional value", and also claims that "Foreign assistance and commercial imports fill the gap".
One acre per person may be typical for America, but that is based on plenty of corn fed beef.
The one acre-per-person figures I saw were specifically excluding meat.
There's a significant difference between this and the typical aquarium.
Pretty much just surface area, since this system would be designed to ensure the bacterial load, while home aquariums typically do not. Any real aquarist (i.e. not people with a betta or goldfish in a tiny bowl) is relying on nitrosomas and nitrobacter to a massive extent, and even "aquarium specialists" at a place like Petco will be able to describe this process to you (albeit without being able to name the bacteria).