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  • From: Paul Cross <charybda@newmex.com>
  • To: permaculture@lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: Re: [permaculture] Urban Farming
  • Date: Fri, 25 Apr 2014 10:15:39 -0600

I certainly find there's a useful distinction between market farming in urban areas and personal gardening to help feed your household. Market urban farming is working in a monetized system. Growing some of your own food and sharing the surplus perhaps does not need to enter into the stricter realms of cost accounting.

Still, if you're buying an urban home or suburban home and you choose a larger lot with good aspects so you can grow food, you are probably paying more than you would for a similar home that has hardly any yard space around it. Toby figures since it's home food production, it's outside the accounting realm. You gotta live somewhere, and maybe it doesn't add that much onto your 30-year mortgage to live on a bigger lot. I'm a banker's son, so I figure it costs something. Yet when it comes to sourcing good food, I really don't care very much what it costs me. I value good food.

Richard's initial post was an example of what journalists call burying the lead. The real essence of his post was about cooperating with like minded people, working toward more local food production, shifting a little of one's consumption away from industrial agriculture, educating people how to do this, and sharing the surplus food. All that is great stuff that I can get behind. But he led off his post with being tired of food prices in stores rising greater than the rate inflation, prompting my post.

As he gets going in his project, I bet he will get a lot more excited at the relationships he builds with people, the food, and the plot of earth he tends, and not get all that excited about how much money he's saving, if saving any at all.

Paul






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