Local Farms making a difference
This is really exciting to me. It is yesterday's "Legislator's Tour of Urban Agriculture" that our city farm forager David Rand helped facilitate. David Rand works both for the City and for Green City Market. The tour was taken by about 35 legislators from the state and local levels. They visited three different Urban Farms around the City of Chicago.
Dave said "The goals were to promote the new legislation that was recently passed by the Governor "The Illinois Local Food, Farms and Jobs Act", to prove that real food can be grown in dense, urban areas, and that it ultimately serves the community by promoting health, creating jobs, and enhancing the local economy (and environment). "
Here is a video of their tour made public by WTTW.
WTTW - Urban Farms
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3 Comments
Lucid Realty said:
I don't get this. These farms are inefficient and subscale. The cost of production is higher than the stuff found in grocery stores. So it consumes more resources. How is this a good thing?
Rich Hawley said:
I would ask LucidRealty to define "inefficient" and "subscale". The video noted that the lot had stood vacant for 30 years. Now it is a productive resource for the community. How is this a bad thing?
In addressing the production costs, I would ask LucidRealty to consider the thoughts of Michael Pollan. In a NYT op-ed last year he noted, "It must be recognized that the current food system — characterized by monocultures of corn and soy in the field and cheap calories of fat, sugar and feedlot meat on the table — is not simply the product of the free market. Rather, it is the product of a specific set of government policies that sponsored a shift from solar (and human) energy on the farm to fossil-fuel energy. "
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/12/magazine/12policy-t.html
Small farmers have certain advantages. For example, they can be more flexible. Sarah noted in an earlier article that she was able to have a farmer plant luxury pie pumpkins for her.
http://www.chicagonow.com/blogs/prairie-chefs/2009/09/delicious-deluxe-pie-pumpkins.html
That type of service is simply impossible for large foodservice companies.
In the final analysis there are many niches in the economy and a role for many types of operations.
Lucid Realty said:
I define efficiency in terms of the cost of production. I wouldn't be surprised if poor decisions have been made in the development of the current agricultural system because the government is in there meddling with it all the time. Every time the government meddles resources get mis-allocated - which is why I get really nervous when I hear that the government has decided to promote something like urban farming.
However, these urban farms have to be labor intensive and I'm sure their output costs are much higher than the industrial farms. Now, to the extent that they can produce niche foods that are in demand that's great. But the government needs to get out of agriculture.
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