1 post tagged “farming”

I'm not a green advocate, and I'm certainly no environmentalist.  My car gets an average of 17mpg in the city (though I have hyper-miled it to 28mpg over a 3 hour drive just for experimentation) -- and I'd happily sacrifice fuel economy for performance.

However, I am environmentally conscious.  I think more people need to think in these terms, and make smart choices that are individually responsible.  A part of this is that with every environmentalist action, such as driving a Hybrid, there is a counter side.  The hidden cost of being green, such as the heavy material manufacture of batteries, that often times can be more damaging than the burning of fossil fuels.

As part of this idea of responsible and eyes-wide-open environmental awareness, I have noticed that a lot of new developments take an approach of bulldozing the entire building area; often times disrupting the soil in negative ways.  Then, after the buildings are all done, trees and greenery are planted to replace what was destroyed.  I'm not a civil engineer, but it seems goofy to me.  I know it is harder to build around the trees, but it certainly isn't impossible.  If you only cleared away the land that you needed, the ecosystem remains better in tact and thus healthier.  Maybe it's a 50% increase in cost, maybe not.  I couldn't find any real numbers on it, but it seems tragic that it happens.

After this thought, and reading some article that I cannot find about "sharecropping" in San Francisco, I think this is the way to go.

Let me pontificate:

I live on a not-quite 7000 square foot parcel of land.  Of that 7000 square feet, the buildings are approximately 2000 square feet of it.  Then the cement for the driveway and patios, I have probably close to 2000 square feet available.  I don't like lawns, and I certainly don't like maintenance.  I have severe hayfever and it is really prohibitive.  Even without the hayfever, I wouldn't enjoy the maintenance of landscaping.

Having a decent front lawn is all that is required, both in terms of my own goals and those of the HOA.  This leaves a fairly significant portion of the backyard available for "Other" usages.

It seems an admirable goal to have a community based garden and farming service that distributes the land requirements for farming.  I would pay for this service, and expect to have "credits" for the land available, and a portion of the produce from all the farms.  I don't, however, want to participate in the "hands on" -- as I would suspect many of my neighbors don't either.

My land could grow plenty more vegetables than my family could consume.  If my entire neighborhood of several hundred homes, all with some levels (varying from just 200 square feet upwards to 1000+) participated, and a crew of experienced farmers just went from location to location, it seems we could have successful "suburban" farming.

I have some reservations about it, but it seems like a good idea that I would love to see take off.  My concerns that I can't answer yet are:

• Rain water management/Irrigation -- I wouldn't want to deprive larger farms of valuable water.
• Harvest costs -- it seems it would be difficult to do a full harvest, but if you spread out each plot of land over one day, a single person could cover 365 plots (reasonably).  This seems a suitable scaling, but I don't know much about farming.
• Surplus delivery/accounting -- auditing this system and verifying everybody gets their fare share, the people doing the work get paid, and nobody "steals" would be very difficult but easily doable.