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The US Government is Loaning Millions of Dollars To Jumpstart Urban Farming (businessinsider.com) 131

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.
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The US Government is Loaning Millions of Dollars To Jumpstart Urban Farming

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  • . . . 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. . .

    • . . . is an interesting, and potentially lucrative idea

      Urban farming is already extremely lucrative! Except, the crops grown are only rarely eaten, and more often smoked.

      German politicians are even trying it out on their own rooftops in Berlin, as can be seen in this Ice Bucket Challenge video:

      https://youtu.be/REOA3xXR8tI [youtu.be]

      Hmmm . . . now what is that plant next to German politician Cem Özdemir . . . ?

      "E-I, E-I, O, jawohl!" : http://www.ibm.com/support/kno... [ibm.com]

    • I suspect it takes a lot more than US$50K to start up.

      Government grants/loans should not cover 100% of the cost of a venture. They should only be used to "top up" private investors for projects that have beneficial externalities. The private investment serves to validate the project as economically valid, since people are much more careful when investing their own money.

      Anyway, I think "urban farming" is silly. If you grow food in the city, you avoid hauling that food into the city one time. But if you use the same space to house an urban worker that curre

    • by plopez ( 54068 )

      you don't need a warehouse, just a patch of land. A few acres would do for a start. For labor you can hire hands or go the co-op route.

  • Waste of money (Score:4, Interesting)

    by mingot ( 665080 ) on Tuesday December 27, 2016 @01:08PM (#53560823)

    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.

    • Cities are a terrible place to try to grow food.

      If we're talking traditional farming, then yes, you are correct. However, I feel the idea is to not just stick to traditional farming. I can see specifically engineered plants growing much better in a climate controlled warehouse environments than out in the pastures. The plants might be more engineered to use gray water from the city, be better at using the specific spectrum of light being used in the warehouse, can better use the higher level of CO2 in the city than a regular plant, etc... I will say

      • by plopez ( 54068 )

        we really don't need genetic engineering. There is plenty of under utilized land out there, see an aerial photo of Detroit as an example.

        Plants love CO2 already and there is some thinking that increased CO2 due to climate change would increase plant growth rate, with unknown side effects.

        You do not even need to engineer plants for indoor lighting as there are things called "grow lights" that have light spectrums optimized for plants.

        Plants already love grey water as it often contains phosphates and nitrogen

        • Plants already love grey water as it often contains phosphates and nitrogen from lawn runoff.

          Using uncontrolled water like that, especially if you're counting on it being contaminated with feed already, is a recipe for disaster. Some crops like tomatoes, cucumbers, zucchini/squash as examples really do not like nitrogen as they get into the fruiting stage. Too much and they'll remain in their vegetative growing state and just not bothering with the flowering and fruiting. You sometimes see that in orna

    • by Dunbal ( 464142 ) *
      All that money to figure out you don't get many bees or pollinators downtown on the 24th floor, so any fruiting plant is out.
      • by DamonHD ( 794830 )

        Actually bees can do well in cities, eg:

        http://www.urbanbees.co.uk/ [urbanbees.co.uk]

        Rgds

        Damon

        • by Dunbal ( 464142 ) *
          Not in my city. Not one single fruit from my plants, despite plenty of flowers. Of course I remember someone marketing urban apiaries too but I can imagine those would not survive the first lawsuit when a neighbor or window-cleaner gets stung.
          • Are you too lazy to pollinate the flowers by hand, or just ignorant?
            • by Dunbal ( 464142 ) *

              Are you too lazy to pollinate the flowers by hand, or just ignorant?

              I already have a job, sweetheart.

              • I already have a job, sweetheart.

                If you want to attract bees for free, plant things they like. Then they just show up and hit your other plants while they're in the neighborhood.

      • by plopez ( 54068 )

        Who said anything about orchards on the 24th floor?

      • All that money to figure out you don't get many bees or pollinators downtown on the 24th floor, so any fruiting plant is out.

        You can grow plenty of fruiting plants without pollinators. Tomatoes, peppers, eggplant, green beans, and peas are just fine.

    • Transportation is not a zero cost. Also, when you fully control the environment, that includes pests like insects and weeds...
    • by plopez ( 54068 )

      Citation detroit is moving in that direction. Industrial agriculture with heavy equipment is probably out, but more traditional agriculture focused on shallow rooted vegetables would be feasible. Orchards might even be feasible.

      Detroit is headed in that direction
      http://www.greeningofdetroit.c... [greeningofdetroit.com]

    • by tepples ( 727027 )

      So what place is good for both growing food and connecting to the Internet? US rural Internet access is often harshly capped, be it fixed cellular, satellite, or even DSL in parts of Iowa [slashdot.org].

    • Re:Waste of money (Score:5, Interesting)

      by drinkypoo ( 153816 ) <drink@hyperlogos.org> on Tuesday December 27, 2016 @01:57PM (#53561105) Homepage Journal

      Cities are a terrible place to try to grow food. Spend the money doing it where the results are worth the effort.

      That is what they're doing. When the salad mix industry was invented, it wasn't for consumers. It was for food service institutions. Pre-mixed salads didn't appear in stores until much, much later. The majority of what is being grown in the US in cities is greens. The greens are being grown hydroponically in/on vertical towers, which minimizes the use of space. Salad doesn't travel well, and there is typically a lot of waste. Producing it near the point of consumption addresses both of these issues and reduces the cost. Greens are probably the crop most viable in the city, so that's what you'd expect to see produced most, and that's actually what is happening.

      The people behind the modern farm-to-table movement didn't invent it because they wanted to be cool. They were trying to both cut costs and increase quality. Modern food production methods produce an inferior product in the name of convenience. Going back to local production and seasonal vegetables means eating better-quality food. But this is a way of having fresh greens year-round and in fact at a competitive price because so much of the packaging and transport is taken out of the equation.

      • by ejr ( 2998 )

        Also, there is an absurd amount of wasted space in urban environments, often the same areas that have convenient access only to "dollar stores" and gas stations.

        More growers locally means (ideally) more food available without having to spend hours on a bus. The next step is education. Many people quite honestly do not know the difference between cheezy poofs and actual food. They never have had easy access to actual food. It's different, so it is met with some trepidation. Here appealing to the elderly

    • by Anonymous Coward

      where would that be? where its traditionally farmed is a terrible place, which is why we pumped 20 BILLION into subsidies for it last year alone

    • No it is a succes story in reality: http://www.innovationquarter.n... [innovationquarter.nl]
  • by QuietLagoon ( 813062 ) on Tuesday December 27, 2016 @01:18PM (#53560887)
    It's time to take back farming from the huge corporate agricultural entities.
    • Someone needs to google the term "economies of scale".

      Urban farming will never be more than a niche hobby, unless you count weed.
      As that gets legalized, industrial scale farming efficiencies will drive that away too.

      • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

        by tepples ( 727027 )

        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.

      • Small restaurants and shops in cities don't need 'economies of scale'. They have economies of population density.

        The world is indeed more complex than Walmart.

      • by sjames ( 1099 )

        I will if you look up reliability. It may not be the most efficient source of food but you can't get laid off from it

    • It's time to take back farming from the huge corporate agricultural entities.

      How does urban farming fix this? I would think most real estate in big cities is going to be owned by corporate developers. I don't think people living on rent control are going to be the ones owning their small plot of farmland.

  • by jfdavis668 ( 1414919 ) on Tuesday December 27, 2016 @01:37PM (#53560987)
    When you are warehouse farming, do you put solar panels on the roof to supply power to the lights inside?
    • When you are warehouse farming, do you put solar panels on the roof to supply power to the lights inside?

      If you're lucky, you find a space whose roof is missing and you cover it over with that corrugated fiberglass stuff they normally roof greenhouses with. Then you only need supplemental light. However, you also can grow greens vertically. They don't need full sun exposure; in fact, in most places you can't grow them in the summer because they bolt.

      • If you're lucky, you find a space whose roof is missing and you cover it over with that corrugated fiberglass stuff they normally roof greenhouses with.

        You don't normally line a greenhouse roof with the corrugated plastic. It doesn't let enough light through compared to other methods and it also doesn't have the insulation factor.

        Most roofs are plastic sheeting, nice and clear, with UV blocking on the outside and IR reflection on the inner layer. You install it with two sheets, clip it all down, and then

  • Urban farming (Score:5, Informative)

    by ITRambo ( 1467509 ) on Tuesday December 27, 2016 @01:43PM (#53561007)
    Urban farming is normally called gardening. What are they trying to prove calling it farming?
    • by kwerle ( 39371 )

      I think gardening traditionally includes things like growing flowers and shrubberies.
      Farming is traditionally about growing food.

      They are specifically not funding aunt martha's rose hedge.

  • God damn it, where were you fucktards supposedly educated ?

    You're idiots.

    • by tepples ( 727027 )

      If "loaning" specifically means lending through a financial instrument called a loan, then all loaning is lending, but not all lending is loaning.

  • by tlambert ( 566799 ) on Tuesday December 27, 2016 @02:12PM (#53561211)

    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?

  • WTF? (Score:5, Informative)

    by Solandri ( 704621 ) on Tuesday December 27, 2016 @02:15PM (#53561237)
    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 [treehugger.com] 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 [agclassroom.org]. 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 [wikipedia.org] 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.
    • Note that the 1.1 people fed is to the basic survival level of nutrition with little waste and the 150 people today are largely obese with 30-40% of all food in the US going in the trash.

    • 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?

      You were doing pretty well up to here, but now you're being incredibly stupid...

      PV solar panels are FAR more efficient at converting solar radiance into usable energy than photosynthesis is. In addition

      • Harder and harder to make money growing pot indoors in CA. The sun is free. Harvest glut lasts all year.

    • The entire reason cities exist is because it's wasteful to have people separated by the amount of agricultural land needed to support them.

      Cities exist because people want to live near other people, and near goods and services, and there are efficiencies of scale which cause certain goods and services to only be available near population centers. If we didn't have such massive population centers, we would have different goods and services which fulfilled the corresponding needs in a more rural society. This is why cities wither and die when you move transportation corridors away from them, and why new cities form along transportation corridors

    • Your understanding of the wikipedia article on luminous efficacy is lacking. Luminous efficacy is relative to the spectral response of the human eye. The power efficiency of the LEDs is more relevant, but that information is rarely published.
  • "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...
  • by mlyle ( 148697 ) on Tuesday December 27, 2016 @03:46PM (#53561817)

    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.

  • The reason there are few if any urban farms is because city governments have regulated them out of existence.
  • Obama corruption (Score:4, Insightful)

    by ChrisMaple ( 607946 ) on Tuesday December 27, 2016 @08:16PM (#53563445)
    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?
  • 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

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