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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 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.
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.
Not really unrelated. Pot farms in urban warehouses are on the upswing.
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
Less than a few years ago.
It's moving outdoors in CA. Granting the laws haven't progressed to the point where interstate commerce is legal, that isn't stopping anyone.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
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.
If "loaning" specifically means lending through a financial instrument called a loan, then all loaning is lending, but not all lending is loaning.
1) make unproductive land useful.
2) build community
3) grow food with better nutritional value. See http://hortsci.ashspublication...
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
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.
Industrial farming looks to be destroying the food value of crops see http://hortsci.ashspublication...
It may make sense in terms of cost per nutrient value. More and more industrial grown food is becoming empty calories.
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
"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...
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.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
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.
It's moving outdoors in CA.
Yea... On other people's land... F'ing pot grow squatters, the new rural blight...
Bullshit.
Some in the national forests, but 99% on the grower's land. Much better than when it was illegal.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Because marijuana causes a bunch of social and medical problems, just like alcohol does (though not as bad).
Marijuana should be legal because the costs of prohibition are probably worse than the costs of marijuana. But once prohibition is gone, there's no reason to artificially make it even easier to ingest THC.
Some in the national forests, but 99% on the grower's land. Much better than when it was illegal.
We don't notice any difference. It' the same as when I was a kid in the 1970's... Camp on private land near public land, and run your grow operation. "Oh, we can't camp here? Ok, we'll move... No those aren't our abandoned cars. No, we didn't light that campfire." A week later, they're back. If you make too much trouble, they burn your house down.
Where are you claiming to see this?
They used to do that because the cops would steal their land. Now they are mostly growing on their own private land. All over CA.
There just isn't much money left in it. Market is massively glutted.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Rubbish! Wherever did you hear that? More people are growing "tomatoes," OK? TOMATOES!
What I understand is why people like you think anyone should care if you think something that brings them pleasure is ridiculous. I sincerely don't get it.
You know who tried doing more or less what you are mocking? One of my old MIT professors, Phil Morrison. He was the physicist who designed the explosive lenses used in the Trinity nuclear test and the Nagasaki bomb. He wrote about it in one of his popular science columns. He was especially delighted when neighbors asked whether they could harvest some of his leftover wheat, because that meant his experiment had reproduced a historical side effect of small-scale wheat domestic wheat production: gleaners.
Why would one of the most brilliant minds of the twentieth century waste his time growing wheat? Because he thought it would be interesting. If you don't understand that you're not a geek, you're a prig.
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Where are you claiming to see this?
Oh sure... Tell you where it's happening, and put my 85 year old parents at risk? Ummm... No.
They used to do that because the cops would steal their land.
Yea, and the DEA still can, which is why there are still F'ing pot squatters...
Making it up.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Some in the national forests, but 99% on the grower's land. Much better than when it was illegal.
Whether it's 1%, 10% or 100% is irrelevant. I live in Lake County which is now part of the increasingly inaccurately-named "Emerald Triangle", and we regularly have massive busts of tens of thousands of plants on public land. We regularly have people camping grows off the side of highways, in the BLM land, and on people's private property. Here, let me tell you a little tale about a man named Jose. Well, I don't know what his name was, but Jose and a shitload of his friends moved onto one of the local hot springs properties because they discovered that it had a massive roofed cistern that they could tap. And that's what they did, and they had about three thousand plants on this guy's land. At the time it was owned by just one man, this guy Elio who still lives there, he kept a little piece of it with his home on it. And what Elio did was call up the cops and tell them that there was a grow on his land, and would they please remove it? And they came and looked at it and said well, we'll get around to it eventually. So he told them he was going to load his pickup truck full and drive it down to city hall, and then they showed up the next day with dump trucks and a front loader to clean it up. See, the problem with a grow of only three thousand plants is that it's not big enough to deal with. It's literally not worth their trouble, because they're busy dealing with busts of ten or twenty thousand plants.
There is a super shitload of marijuana being grown in the Mendocino National Forest, among others. Hundreds of thousands if not millions of plants. They can only ever bust a percentage of the grows they know about, they just don't have time or funding to do anything else. However, California's marijuana legalization initiative will fix that. See, the funding from licensing production is to be used for enforcement! And they're not licensing nearly enough producers to meet demand, so California's "legalization" initiative is actually going to reduce patients' access to medication by reducing supply even as demand rises. We all know what that does to prices. The legitimate stuff will go through the roof, even though medical isn't taxed. And patients won't be able to compete with the recreational market, and their insurance programs aren't going to cover their medication because the feds just rammed home that even CBD is Schedule I.
The simple fact is that there is going to be just as much demand for illegally-grown Marijuana as ever before under these new "legalization" schemes, maybe more.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
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
He should keep his mouth shut Wickard v. Filburn means his growing of wheat was probably against Federal regulations and could result in a hefty fine or prison...
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
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
Making it up.
Yea... Yea... We've all heard about the "Disputes Progressive Narrative == Fake News" thing. It's not going to fly...
I'm actually quite libertarian on the pot issue itself, and there's a ~30% reduction in opioid prescriptions in states that have moved to legalize. That's a hard statistic that is really hard for even the bible thumpers to ignore...
I just don't want them on my family's land. Squatters are a threat.
Kudzu should be turned into goat and sheep meat.
Sounds to me as if federal prohibition is the problem.
It's the biggest problem, but state government seeing everything as a profit center is also a problem.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
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