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.
Re:In unrelated news, pot farming (Score:4, Insightful)
Not really unrelated. Pot farms in urban warehouses are on the upswing.
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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.
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It's moving outdoors in CA.
Yea... On other people's land... F'ing pot grow squatters, the new rural blight...
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Bullshit.
Some in the national forests, but 99% on the grower's land. Much better than when it was illegal.
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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.
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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.
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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...
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Making it up.
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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.
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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 s
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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.
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While warehouse-based factory farming. . . (Score:2)
. . . 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. . .
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. . . 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]
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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
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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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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.
Mod parent up on accord of both comments.
Outside of, perhaps, Detroit, "urban farming" doesn't make sense as a purely economic policy. If you want to keep people out of trouble, or increase vegetation in the area, or improve agricultural skillsets, fine. But "localvores" are eating locally because they're willing and able to pay for inefficiently-grown food by choice. If you need food in the area, you can get it there cheaper by transporting it from somewhere it's cheaper to grow it. Period.
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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)
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.
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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
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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
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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
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Actually bees can do well in cities, eg:
http://www.urbanbees.co.uk/ [urbanbees.co.uk]
Rgds
Damon
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Are you too lazy to pollinate the flowers by hand, or just ignorant?
I already have a job, sweetheart.
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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.
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Who said anything about orchards on the 24th floor?
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You can grow plenty of fruiting plants without pollinators. Tomatoes, peppers, eggplant, green beans, and peas are just fine.
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Grow a victory garden, go to jail (Score:2)
Julie Bass was threatened with jail for growing a victory garden [wealthdaily.com].
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In the case of Julie Bass's vegetable garden, Oak Park did end up dropping the charges [huffingtonpost.com].
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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]
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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)
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.
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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
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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
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Are those hipsters on foodstamps? Could be... (Score:4, Interesting)
http://www.salon.com/2010/03/1... [salon.com]
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.
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And some people wonder how Trump managed to win and the Republicans kept hold of the House. Stories where people on food stamps brag about eating better than most people who do work for a living don't help to change sentiments.
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There food budgets are $150 and $200/month.
That's lower than most people who work for a living.
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It's probably about what I spend on groceries, but I eat out a good bit too.
I'm definitely not thrifty, but I'm hardly spendy (on food) either.
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Oh, it's terrible that poor people get to eat good food. Especially people you don't like.
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1) make unproductive land useful.
2) build community
3) grow food with better nutritional value. See http://hortsci.ashspublication... [ashspublications.org]
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Industrial farming looks to be destroying the food value of crops see http://hortsci.ashspublication... [ashspublications.org]
It may make sense in terms of cost per nutrient value. More and more industrial grown food is becoming empty calories.
Re:To what end exactly? (Score:4, Insightful)
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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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
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The "next generation of farmers" aren't urban. (Score:3)
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.
It's time (Score:3)
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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.
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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.
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So until the U.S. Congress figures out how to crack down on telcos taking rural Internet subsidies and pocketing them
Or you know, let people do the job themselves [bbc.com].
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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.
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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
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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.
Boeing's 99-acre roof, Tesla 125 acre (Score:2)
> 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.
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Tesla's factory will 125 acres
It may just be wild speculation, but I think Tesla may be covering it's roof with something other than plants.
Solar farm (Score:2)
Solar farm
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They should put a green roof under the solar roof, which should be traditional rather than their fancy new tiles. And then they can grow shade-grown coffee there. Get a jolt with your jolt! Recharge where you recharge!
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Solar powered warehouse farming? (Score:3)
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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.
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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)
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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.
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Google Search shows over 12 million results for the phrase "vegetable garden" [google.com].
Another guess is that "farming" has a connotation of energy-rich grains and soy as opposed to micronutrient-rich vegetables.
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LOAN is a NOUN, lend is the verb you should use. (Score:1)
God damn it, where were you fucktards supposedly educated ?
You're idiots.
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If "loaning" specifically means lending through a financial instrument called a loan, then all loaning is lending, but not all lending is loaning.
So where do I spend my rooftop? (Score:3)
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)
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.
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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.
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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
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Harder and harder to make money growing pot indoors in CA. The sun is free. Harvest glut lasts all year.
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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
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Misleading article (Score:1)
I worry a bit about the safety of this (Score:3)
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.
Gov solution to a problem created by government (Score:3)
Obama corruption (Score:4, Insightful)
Does anybody think that when these ventures fail, the money will ever get back to the government from his supporter's pockets?
It's not about pot. (Score:1)
It's not about pot. (Score:1)
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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.
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