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The US Government is Loaning Millions of Dollars To Jumpstart Urban Farming (businessinsider.com)
An anonymous reader writes: Every year, the US Department of Agriculture devotes millions of dollars to farmers in rural areas. The government is increasingly starting to offer assistance to urban farms, too. In 2016, the USDA funded a dozen urban farms, the highest number in history, Val Dolicini, the administrator for the USDA Farm Services Agency, tells Business Insider. In 2017, he expects the USDA to funnel even more money toward farms on rooftops, in greenhouses, and in warehouses. USDA Microloans, a program that offers funding up to $50,000, is specifically geared toward urban farmers. Established in 2013, the program has awarded 23,000 loans worth $518 million to farms in California, Connecticut, and Massachusetts. Though it is open to all farmers, urban farmers often apply for it because it offers the money on a smaller scale than other programs. Seventy percent (or about 16,100 of those loans) have gone to new farmers, many of them in cities.
is on the upswing.
. . . is an interesting, and potentially lucrative idea, I suspect it takes a lot more than US$50K to start up. This appears, at least from the article, to be somewhere in the grey area between hobby and small business. . .
Cities are a terrible place to try to grow food. Spend the money doing it where the results are worth the effort. This is almost as bad as solar panels street surfaces.
We have plenty of rural farming. If we wanted to make farming more productive overall, we could do so there without the capital investment required to do urban farming. The main thing that urban farming does is give hipsters in Park Slope better and fresher luxury vegetables. I'm sure these are in fact tasty, but it's hardly a needy group that needs subsidizing...
This is about making farming an attractive proposition to the next generation of potential farmers. (I am somewhat optimistic: my grandparents sold their farm to a returning Iraq vet who wants to get into the business.) The knowledge and skills of the agricultural sector are being lost an alarming rate and without new farmers we're doomed.
Also: the USDA is super excited about the return of farmer's markets. They are an important, one might say even vital, interchange between urban and rural economies.
http://www.salon.com/2010/03/1...
In the John Waters-esque sector of northwest Baltimore — equal parts kitschy, sketchy, artsy and weird — Gerry Mak and Sarah Magida sauntered through a small ethnic market stocked with Japanese eggplant, mint chutney and fresh turmeric. After gathering ingredients for that evening’s dinner, they walked to the cash register and awaited their moments of truth.
“I have $80 bucks left!” Magida said. “I’m so happy!”
“I have $12,” Mak said with a frown.
The two friends weren’t tabulating the cash in their wallets but what remained of the monthly allotment on their Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program debit cards, the official new term for what are still known colloquially as food stamps.
Magida, a 30-year-old art school graduate, had been installing museum exhibits for a living until the recession caused arts funding — and her usual gigs — to dry up. She applied for food stamps last summer, and since then she’s used her $150 in monthly benefits for things like fresh produce, raw honey and fresh-squeezed juices from markets near her house in the neighborhood of Hampden, and soy meat alternatives and gourmet ice cream from a Whole Foods a few miles away.
“I’m eating better than I ever have before,” she told me. “Even with food stamps, it’s not like I’m living large, but it helps.”
Mak, 31, grew up in Westchester, graduated from the University of Chicago and toiled in publishing in New York during his 20s before moving to Baltimore last year with a meager part-time blogging job and prospects for little else. About half of his friends in Baltimore have been getting food stamps since the economy toppled, so he decided to give it a try; to his delight, he qualified for $200 a month.
“I’m sort of a foodie, and I’m not going to do the ‘living off ramen’ thing,” he said, fondly remembering a recent meal he’d prepared of roasted rabbit with butter, tarragon and sweet potatoes.
It's time to take back farming from the huge corporate agricultural entities.
That's not the right word. There aren't any rooftops in the world too large to be called "gardens".
What a fucking waste of money
When you are warehouse farming, do you put solar panels on the roof to supply power to the lights inside?
Urban farming is normally called gardening. What are they trying to prove calling it farming?
God damn it, where were you fucktards supposedly educated ?
You're idiots.
Julie Bass was threatened with jail for growing a victory garden.
> There aren't any rooftops in the world too large to be called "gardens".
Maybe a few. Boeing's Everett Factory has a 99 acre roof (building several 767 airliners at once requires a fair bit of room). Tesla's factory will 125 acres, and the Talsmeer Flower Auction is a tad larger. Down the list at #16, an Amazon warehouse is 22 acres - still small farm.
So there are about 20 or so roofs in the world big enough to be a farm.
At least they didn't say the gov't is 'borrowing' money to urban farmers.
If "loaning" specifically means lending through a financial instrument called a loan, then all loaning is lending, but not all lending is loaning.
loan - transitive verb : lend
"The verb loan is one of the words English settlers brought to America and continued to use after it had died out in Britain. Its use was soon noticed by British visitors and somewhat later by the New England literati, who considered it a bit provincial. It was flatly declared wrong in 1870 by a popular commentator, who based his objection on etymology. A later scholar showed that the commentator was ignorant of Old English and thus unsound in his objection, but by then it was too late, as the condemnation had been picked up by many other commentators."
The "next generation of farmers" aren't urban.
They are the factory farming companies who take over for the current generation of factory farming companies.
So where do I spend my rooftop?
Do I spend it on solar, or do I spend it on farming?
Is this going to be the next federal spending Solyndra?
The entire reason cities exist is because it's wasteful to have people separated by the amount of agricultural land needed to support them. A family of 4 needs about 2 acres (0.8 hectares) of land to grow the food needed to sustain them. Cities leveraged advances in transportation tech and a trade economy to decouple the food production from living spaces. The maximum size of a city is basically determined by the efficiency of the food transport and distribution network - the better those are, the larger the radius of land surrounding the city that can be used to feed its occupants.
Backyard and rooftop gardens are a good (and fun) way to supplement your diet with a few items which might be difficult or expensive to obtain at the grocery store. But they don't come anywhere close to putting a dent in self-sustainability. Given the premium that is placed on space is in cities, there's probably a much better use for that land area than for growing crops. The idea that you can feed yourself by planting a garden in your backyard is a delusion perpetuated by people who've never crunched the actual numbers. The entire reason the unit of an "acre" exists is because that was the amount of crop fields a single person could typically work in a day back when most everyone was living on a subsistence diet.
In other words, even if you had enough land area to actually be able to grow enough in your backyard garden to feed yourself, (1) it would be your full-time job, and (2) you would pretty much be on a starvation-level diet. For all the flak agri-business gets, they've done a remarkable job improving farming efficiency. During pre-industrial times, each farmer grew enough food to feed 1.1 people. Today, a single farmer produces enough food to feed 150 people (2.1 million farmers vs 319 million population).
Some of the things described in TFA are just plain stupid. Growing plants in shipping containers with light from LEDs? So rather than grow the plants on a farm so 100% of the sunlight reaches the plants, you're going to use 16% efficient solar panels to generate electricity to power 10% efficient LEDs so only 1.6% of the sunlight reaches the plants? Are you insane? Cannabis grow labs have to do this to evade law enforcement (in places where it's illegal), but there is no logical reason to do this for food crops.
"Funded a dozen urban farms" "Funding up to 50,000" 50,000*12=600,000 Not millions. Then it goes on to say it's specifically geared to urban farms and has put out 23,000 loans worth $518 million. If it's only given loans to 12 urban farms out of a total of 23,000 I wouldn't say it's geared to urban farms, nor does that $518 million number have anything to do with urban farms...
So what is the hold up in genetically modfying Kudzu - either for human consumpton as food, or as a large leaf THC producer?
As food, it has an amazing growth rate.
As the other, it has an amazing growth rate.
I remember reading that Hops plants can be grafted onto Marijuana roots to produce THC active Hops.....
Solar farm
Population density and machines mean various kinds of pollution which you don't really want getting concentrated in your food (solvents and plasticizers from trash, medications, oil from runoff, lead from water in municipal water systems, and tailpipe emissions and particulates from everywhere).
On the other hand, it's probably great for disaster preparedness and robustness of the supply chain if a few percent of a city's nutrient needs can come from rooftop gardens, and people find farming enjoyable. And food grown in small batches rather than industrially is super yummy.
So, I'm not sure of the net impact of this. I hope in 20 years the increase in urban farming is seen as something good, rather than another way that we concentrated lead into poor peoples' bodies.
What an epic waste of tax payer dollars.
Organic, local source, feels good to hipster me, fuck facts and figures.
Just because you grew a kale and a half an ounce of weed in the last 12 months does not qualify you as a farmer or anything vaguely close. That's not even close to feeding yourself, let alone anyone else in your family or neighborhood.
The countryside has already seized power.
The reason there are few if any urban farms is because city governments have regulated them out of existence.
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
Democrats run the cities. This is just Obama sending another pile of money to his political supporters.
Does anybody think that when these ventures fail, the money will ever get back to the government from his supporter's pockets?
Contribute to civilization: ari.aynrand.org/donate
In northern USA from mid-October thru mid-April, propane for heat and electricity for lights easily cost more than the veggies sell for. For 7 out of 12 months you lose money because you import energy. For the other 5 months you lose money trying to compete with open fields who get free water and sunlight, and don't pay property taxes. If you're growing to eat yourself instead of for income then its free food and a fun hobby.
Leaving real farms to grow the industrial foods we all love so much (Barf). There is a nice niche market for leafy greens that are directly consumed by humans grown aeroponically, not hydroponically. Hydroponics require much heavy amount of nutrient solution. The weight prevents going vertical. LED lighting and the membrane technology are the key points to built on with aeroponics. Check out www.aerofarms.com
Leaving real farms to grow the industrial foods we all love so much (Barf). There is a nice niche market for leafy greens that are directly consumed by humans grown aeroponically. Not hydroponically. Too heavy, too bulky for the amount of nutrient solution. LED lighting and the membrane technology are the key points to built on. Check out www.aerofarms.com
In the horse era, they developed the French intensive method and urban growers produced enough to have a surplus to sell outside the city.