Slashdot Mirror
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.
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.
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"
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"?
Same here (but 10 acres, mostly oat hay). This is more like performance art than farming.
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.
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.
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."
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.
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....
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.
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.