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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.
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.
Not really unrelated. Pot farms in urban warehouses are on the upswing.
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
Urban farming is normally called gardening. What are they trying to prove calling it farming?
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.
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.
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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