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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.
Not really unrelated. Pot farms in urban warehouses are on the upswing.
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
On Slashdot, one common answer to "We can't get good Internet out in the country" has been "Then move." So until the U.S. Congress figures out how to crack down on telcos taking rural Internet subsidies and pocketing them, urban farming will remain the only way people can grow food while retaining practical access to information services that have become a necessity over the past two decades.
Oh, it's terrible that poor people get to eat good food. Especially people you don't like.
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Well, I don't think anyone thinks Brooklyn is going to replace Idaho for potatoes or the Central Valley for Broccoli, but I can think of several reasons to add urban farming as a supplement to the great food-growing regions.
The first is to cater to local tastes. You see this particularly in cities that have large immigrant communities, many members of which have agricultural experience. Urban gardening is quite valuable in giving them access to familiar foods and to ease their transition into the United States. Extending that to a slightly larger market (say local restaurants) can help introduce new foods into the mainstream, and this is a great service to the traditional farmer.
We tend to forget that many crops we take for granted were once exotics -- like tomatoes. Peanuts were an exotic food that was explicitly pushed to give cotton farmers an alternative crop during the boll weevil crisis in the 1900s, and now we see them as part of our national and regional heritages.
As Thomas Jefferson said, "The greatest service which can be rendered any country is to add a useful plant to its culture." The way to do that is on a small scale near lots of people.
Another good reason is to provide access to crops that don't ship well. People who live far from where peaches grow literally have no idea what they're missing. You've never eat a real peach until you've had to do it leaning over the sink. Same goes for tomatoes, which are bred to ship well and are picked green, fake "ripened" with ethanol gas (a plant hormone). The result is boring bulk matter for your boring salad. A vine-ripe heirloom tomato is something to be enthusiastic about, but there's no way you're going to get it from Mexico to New York City. But I don't think having good locally grown tomatoes will hurt the market for supermarket tomatoes which are available year-round.
Do I think we'll be getting much sweet potatoes or wheat from urban farms? No. These are crops that are already widely popular and ship and store well. So urban farming won't supplant rural farming, or even offset it much. That doesn't mean it's not useful.
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1. food deserts are by and large a myth
2. if there is a food desert, using that space to sell food (grown elsewhere) 365 days a year is a better solution than spending 360 days farming for 5 days of produce.
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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?
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