Friday around midday, just before the rain started, I went to our new location to tend the chickens and to unload the feed so it didn’t get wet sitting in the back of our truck. I was there maybe an hour, then went home for lunch. Noah and I then returned to pick up harvest bins and wash them. When we left there to go to the gardens on Maize Road, there were several school buses on the road, so I estimate it was somewhere between 2:30 and 3:00.

I spent the afternoon installing a water line and some homemade pumps at the community garden, then spent the evening harvesting vegetables for my CSA members, working until after dark. I have a refrigerator for eggs at the same place where the chickens are, so on our way back home, we swung by to pick up the week’s eggs (and to see if the hens had laid any more while we were gone) so I’d have them for the farmers market the next morning.

As I pulled into the drive, I saw a paper taped to the fence. I got out of the truck and saw it was a notice from a Humane Society officer saying that I was being investigated for abandoning my animals. Officer Pfeiffer had written the time of the notice as 16:13 (that’s 4:13 p.m. for all you civilians), and said that if I didn’t call their office in 15 hours, they were going to steal my chickens and either adopt them out or kill them. Fifteen hours after 4:13 p.m. Friday, as you’ve already figured out if you bothered to count, is 7:13 a.m. Saturday. It was about 10:45 p.m. when I discovered the notice.

Now, I don’t know if the Humane Society operates 24 hours a day, but I do know that if you drop off a notice late Friday afternoon instructing someone to respond before the start of business the next day, you can probably count on not hearing back from them by that time. Also, while opinions on poultry management differ, chickens really only need to be fed once a day. Since I had already fed them, it was just a lucky coincidence that I happened to be going back there to pick up eggs. Were that not the case, I wouldn’t have found it until the following afternoon after the farmers market. I think a pretty strong argument could be made that this notice was served with the intent of my not discovering it before the deadline, and that’s just downright unethical.

I called back immediately, and of course, no answer. The notice didn’t say they needed to speak with me, only that I needed to respond within 15 hours to prove that I hadn’t abandoned my animals. I left my name and the address, told them I’m there once or twice a day, usually for a few hours a day, and hung up. The next morning while I was at the market, Mayda also called. No answer again, and Mayda left both her and my cell phone numbers.

After the market, when I went to tend the birds, I saw another notice, this time taped to the front door. It said that I needed to call back and leave a contact number so we could set up an appointment. I called back, and again, no answer. I said that as I had already contacted their office within the time limit, I didn’t see how there could be any further question about whether I had abandoned my animals. I asked that someone call me to explain what the problem was.

I got a call a couple hours later. The officer apologized for the second notice, saying that she hadn’t gotten Mayda’s message before posting it. She said that the complaint alleged both that I had abandoned the animals and that they were living in unsanitary conditions. On the face of it, that’s a ridiculous allegation. If I had abandoned them, they wouldn’t be living at all! Furthermore, I had demonstrated that I had not abandoned them, so that, I would think, should clearly expose the complainant as a crank. This was a bogus complaint, probably lodged by someone who was upset because I haven’t cut the grass for a while or something.

But rather than drop the matter and go after the accuser for making a false complaint, they’re saying I have to have an officer over to inspect the place. Apparently, the term “probable cause” is not within the vocabulary of the Humane Society.

Last time, years ago, when someone complained to the Humane Society that we had a “sick rooster,” they dropped in for a visit and Mayda showed them that we had no roosters, and that the hens were all healthy. That was the end of that, but then we started getting visits from the Health Department and Zoning. I really don’t need to go through this crap all over again. We’re LEGAL. The chickens are on a plot outside city limits that’s over an acre, not in a subdivision, and not prohibited by the township. Any further intrusion at this point is just malicious harassment.

I loaded four 55-gallon barrels and one 33-gallon barrel onto the back of the truck and filled them with water while I made some improvements to the hen house yesterday. (Note to self: that works about to over 2100 pounds of water, just about the limit of what our old F-250’s suspension will handle.) Once we got to the gardens, we set buckets on the ground next to the truck. I got up in the bed and pumped the water out by hand while Noah held the pump hose in the buckets and moved it to an empty bucket once one bucket was full.

On the way home, Noah got his first good look at fireworks as we watched the illegal skybursts over North Linden. A stop for gas and lollopops, and our workday was done a little after ten o’clock.

This isn’t the first such call I’ve received. I’m happy to help place little birds. The more small, backyard flocks, the better! But it kind of irks me that schools are encouraging children to hatch baby chickens that they have no way to care for, nor any intention of caring for. It seems irresponsible.

I think they’re also missing a great educational opportunity. The lesson shouldn’t end once the chicks are out of the shell. Children could learn nurturing and responsibility by caring for the birds. When the Girl Scouts first started out in Scotland (I think they called them Girl Guides back then), the girls raised money by selling eggs from hens they raised themselves. And toward the end of the year, the older children, say middle- or high-schoolers, could slaughter the birds for the cafeteria to cook up. It illustrates the full circle of life, teaches the kids useful, recession-proof skills they could use to feed themselves and/or earn a living, and teaches the importance of thinking ahead. Hatching is just the beginning.

…which means I didn’t get to till yesterday.

…which means I didn’t get to plant.

And now, it’s raining. A lot. Probably too much to till on Wednesday, which is fine, really, because I’m already booked for Wednesday. I was supposed to do some landscaping for someone yesterday, but rescheduled it for Wednesday so I could get some work done in the gardens.

And I did! The owner of the place where I have most of my gardens won’t let me fence the deer out of his yard, so I put a deer fence all the way around one of my plots. I just planted it maybe two or three weeks ago and I see raccoon tracks on the landscape fabric. Anyway, I got that fence up, mowed down the weeds on last year’s sweet corn patch and potato patch so I can till them up…and that’s it. Of course, I went to the feed store and tended the chickens and such, but I didn’t get nearly as much gardening done as I’d have liked.

It’s supposed to rain again Thursday. And Friday. Saturday, of course, I’ve got a market. And at some point, I need to mow the yard. I’d hope to garden Sunday, but I doubt it will be dry enough to till after raining all week.

This is why I shouldn’t start my veggie CSA in June. I’ve got stuff planted–spinach, kale, lettuce, arugula, bok choy, cabbage–and as soon as I can till some more, I’m going to plant beets, carrots, radishes, rutabegas, and potatoes, with winter squashes, beans, and cucumbers soon to follow. (Mayda planted some cukes here at the house, bless her heart.)

On the bright side, the stuff I’ve planted so far is all in beds covered with landscape fabric. It lets water through but keeps the weeds down. I learned the hard way that it’s better to burn holes in the fabric rather than just cutting x’s, because the flaps don’t stay open and the sprouts end up getting smothered. But I haven’t had any problems with weeds there yet. And once I get some money for drip tape, I’m going to lay it down under plastic for the tomatoes, peppers, eggplants, summer squashes, fennel, etc.

I think, while I’m stuck inside, I’ll plant herbs in containers.

I noticed that the place where I get sawdust also has a dumpster full of wood scraps, some of which looked like they’d be suitable as tomato stakes. I’ll have to ask the owner about them.

I also found a local purveyor of Caribbean food who gave me dinner in exchange for a couple bags of chicken feet!

My plan had been to make breasts and Italian sausage out of the next batch of birds, but since this batch is nearly sold out–I have about enough for tomorrow at Clintonville and for the CSA shares for the next few weeks–I might not. I could have them keep out some whole birds and make breasts and sausage from the rest, but then there might not be enough to meet the 80 pound minimum for making sausage. We’ll see. It’ll be a surprise. I’ll either have sausage in a couple weeks or I won’t.

Following is a comment I left there:

The very fact that this article had to say that a rooster is not necessary for hens to lay eggs shows why this measure didn’t pass. People are profoundly ignorant (not stupid–just needing to learn a lot more), and they’re mistaking that ignorance for sophistication. What I refer to as “urban sensibilities” and farmer/author Gene Logsdon has termed “Acorn Tree Syndrome” are crippling the advancement of appropriate technologies and sustainable agriculture.

Let’s look at a related example: clotheslines. Clothes dryers use an enormous amount of energy that is produced by burning oil that comes from countries that don’t like us, or by burning coal that comes from tearing down mountains and causing town-swallowing mudslides in Appalachia.

A lot of this energy usage could be eliminated by using clotheslines. Not everybody would want to, and I wouldn’t want to see a law requiring it. But if people WANT to do this responsible thing, something that moves our nation a step closer to energy independence, that gets them outdoors and makes their clothes smell fresh without allergenic fragrances, why should we prohibit them? Outlawing such a wholesome and useful activity requires a strong argument–some harm that’s worse than the benefit gained. And yet, many municipalities and homeowners associations prohibit clotheslines for no more compelling a reason than “Ew, it looks trashy. I don’t wanna see it.”

You’ll get over it. It looks weird to you because you’re not used to seeing it, but once you get past your classist programming that says it’s ugly, you won’t even notice. To paraphrase Thomas Jefferson, “What do I care whether my neighbor hangs out his clothes? It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg.”

Be it clotheslines, solar panels, vegetable gardens, rain barrels, a few chickens, or anything else where someone takes personal responsibility for the health of their environment, there’s a municipality somewhere that’s got a law against it. Chickens used to be common in cities–it’s why bantam breeds were developed, after all. It wasn’t until after WWII when young suburbanites decided that anything that wasn’t “modern” was embarrassing that they started passing laws against anything they saw as backward. That’s why so many suburbs built in that era don’t have sidewalks. Why walk if you can drive?

The economy isn’t getting any better and won’t for quite some time. If your city wants to be resilient and prosperous, it’s going to have to lose the snooty attitude and start allowing some practical lifestyle changes. You’ll have to start basing policies on empirical facts rather than prejudices.

Here’s a link to a research paper a woman in Montgomery, Ohio presented to her city council on the issue of chickens. It swayed their opinion from 5-0 against to 5-0 in favor: http://www.scribd.com/doc/16509728/Changing-Your-Citys-Chicken-Laws

http://frijolitofarm.com/blog/?p=101

If you want these chickens, contact Benisha Bruce at (740) 632-8284.

Essentially, Detroit is now a sprawling, sparsely populated city. It can’t afford police and fire services for the whole area without the tax base to support it, so it wants to concentrate the remaining population into a few neighborhoods. Some of the people don’t want to go. The city is talking about eminent domain to take these people’s homes away from them.

I have mixed feelings about this. I think shrinking is a good plan for Detroit, but I dislike heavy-handed authoritarianism, especially about something as severe as uprooting people from their homes and seizing something that’s such a major investment for most people. I’m cool with eminent domain for the abandoned houses, but I think the people still residing there should be given the option to stay with the understanding that services will no longer be provided to that area. Disincorporate those areas. Put them under county control. Rezone them as agricultural.

Moreover, give the residents first option to buy the surrounding properties, perhaps with the stipulation that they have to demolish or re-purpose unoccupied houses. If they want to further require that agriculture be practiced there, I suppose they could do that, too, though that might be pushing the envelope just a bit. Why should residents be penalized for hanging in there for so long? If they like living in a less populous place, why should they be forced to live in a densely populated neighborhood just because they used to live in one? It’s ridiculous for them to presume they can tell people where to live just because their treasury has shrunk.

Can you imagine Columbus ordering people in Westerville and Gahanna to move downtown and start paying Columbus taxes so the city can pay for the police budget next year? Maybe Detroit could start snatching people off the interstate highways and forcing them to live in these new communities. Really, what’s the difference? They’re talking about conscripting people to live in their new, smaller city, and coercing them into it with the threat of homelessness. “We’re gonna take your house now. You can come live downtown and pay taxes, or you can beat it.”

That really is what it comes down to, because fair market value–what a government is supposed to compensate a landowner when they exercise eminent domain–is not enough for them to buy a home anywhere else. Detroit will probably offer them a break on a house in the new dense parts of the city, maybe even an even swap. If they don’t take it, well, here’s your fifty bucks (or whatever a house in Detroit is worth these days–I’d heard they were going for as low as ten dollars in some auctions where lots were bundled together).

Let’s see if Detroit can manage to create an appropriately sized, well-designed city that incorporates agriculture without resorting to Machiavellian tactics.

Detroit wants to save itself by shrinking

By DAVID RUNK, Associated Press Writer David Runk, Associated Press Writer Mon Mar 8, 4:33 pm ET

DETROIT – Detroit, the very symbol of American industrial might for most of the 20th century, is drawing up a radical renewal plan that calls for turning large swaths of this now-blighted, rusted-out city back into the fields and farmland that existed before the automobile.

Operating on a scale never before attempted in this country, the city would demolish houses in some of the most desolate sections of Detroit and move residents into stronger neighborhoods. Roughly a quarter of the 139-square-mile city could go from urban to semi-rural.

Near downtown, fruit trees and vegetable farms would replace neighborhoods that are an eerie landscape of empty buildings and vacant lots. Suburban commuters heading into the city center might pass through what looks like the countryside to get there. Surviving neighborhoods in the birthplace of the auto industry would become pockets in expanses of green.

Detroit officials first raised the idea in the 1990s, when blight was spreading. Now, with the recession plunging the city deeper into ruin, a decision on how to move forward is approaching. Mayor Dave Bing, who took office last year, is expected to unveil some details in his state-of-the-city address this month.

“Things that were unthinkable are now becoming thinkable,” said James W. Hughes, dean of the School of Planning and Public Policy at Rutgers University, who is among the urban experts watching the experiment with interest. “There is now a realization that past glories are never going to be recaptured. Some people probably don’t accept that, but that is the reality.”

The meaning of what is afoot is now settling in across the city.

“People are afraid,” said Deborah L. Younger, past executive director of a group called Detroit Local Initiatives Support Corporation that is working to revitalize five areas of the city. “When you read that neighborhoods may no longer exist, that sends fear.”

Though the will to downsize has arrived, the way to do it is unclear and fraught with problems.

Politically explosive decisions must be made about which neighborhoods should be bulldozed and which improved. Hundreds of millions of federal dollars will be needed to buy land, raze buildings and relocate residents, since this financially desperate city does not have the means to do it on its own. It isn’t known how many people in the mostly black, blue-collar city might be uprooted, but it could be thousands. Some won’t go willingly.

“I like the way things are right here,” said David Hardin, 60, whose bungalow is one of three occupied homes on a block with dozens of empty lots near what is commonly known as City Airport. He has lived there since 1976, when every home on the street was occupied, and said he enjoys the peace and quiet.

For much of the 20th century, Detroit was an industrial powerhouse — the city that put the nation on wheels. Factory workers lived in neighborhoods of simple single- and two-story homes and walked to work. But then the plants began to close one by one. The riots of 1967 accelerated an exodus of whites to the suburbs, and many middle-class blacks followed.

Now, a city of nearly 2 million in the 1950s has declined to less than half that number. On some blocks, only one or two occupied houses remain, surrounded by trash-strewn lots and vacant, burned-out homes. Scavengers have stripped anything of value from empty buildings. According to one recent estimate, Detroit has 33,500 empty houses and 91,000 vacant residential lots.

Several other declining industrial cities, such as Youngstown, Ohio, have also accepted downsizing. Since 2005, Youngstown has been tearing down a few hundred houses a year. But Detroit’s plans dwarf that effort. The approximately 40 square miles of vacant property in Detroit is larger than the entire city of Youngstown.

Faced with a $300 million budget deficit and a dwindling tax base, Bing argues that the city can’t continue to pay for police patrols, fire protection and other services for all areas.

The current plan would demolish about 10,000 houses and empty buildings in three years and pump new investment into stronger neighborhoods. In the neighborhoods that would be cleared, the city would offer to relocate residents or buy them out. The city could use tax foreclosure to claim abandoned property and invoke eminent domain for those who refuse to leave, much as cities now do for freeway projects.

The mayor has begun lobbying Washington for support, and in January Detroit was awarded $40.8 million for renewal work. The federally funded Detroit Housing Commission supports Bing’s plan.

“It takes a true partnership, because we don’t want to invest in a neighborhood that the city is not going to invest in,” said Eugene E. Jones, executive director of the commission.

It is not known who might get the cleared land, but with prospects for recruiting industry slim, planners are considering agricultural uses. The city might offer larger tracts for sale or lease, or turn over smaller pieces to community organizations to use.

Maggie DeSantis, a board member of Community Development Advocates of Detroit, said she worries that shutting down neighborhoods without having new uses ready is a “recipe for disaster” that will invite crime and illegal dumping. The group recently proposed such things as the creation of suburban-style neighborhoods and nature parks.

Residents like Hardin want to keep their neighborhoods and eliminate the blight.

“We just try to keep it up,” he said. “I’ve been doing it since I got it, so I don’t look at nobody trying to help me do anything.”

For others, Bing’s plans could represent a way out.

Willie Mae Pickens has lived in her near east-side home since the 1960s and has watched as friends and neighbors left. Her house is the only one standing on her side of the street.

“They can buy it today. Any day,” said Pickens, 87, referring to city officials. “I’ll get whatever they’ll give me for it, because I want to leave.”

(This version corrects that Younger is past executive director of group, since she left it last week. It also corrects that renewal work money was granted in January, instead of last month.)

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20100308/ap_on_bi_ge/us_downsizing_detroit

For the time being, let’s set aside the issue of geophysicist M. King Hubbert’s “Peak Oil” theory that postulates that for a given geographical area, oil production follows a bell-shaped curve, and that after that area reaches peak production, efforts to extract oil are both increasingly expensive and decreasingly fruitful, thereby driving the price of oil to the point that it’s no longer profitable to drill. Some of you who slept through Earth Science in Junior High may think that the Earth is like a giant cherry cordial filled with more petroleum than humanity could ever find a use for, while others—the so-called “abiotic oil” theorists—believe that oil just happens, and that the millions of years’ worth of accumulated organic matter from the Carboniferous Period had nothing to do with it. Or, like many, perhaps you’ve simply never given the issue any thought, and you automatically dismiss any topic that makes you uneasy. To all of you, discussion of fossil fuel depletion sounds like the sort of thing brought up by people in tinfoil hats ranting about alien abductions and secret societies, so you tune out. For now, then, we’ll set aside concerns of fossil fuel depletion, despite it being an even greater certainty in the scientific community than global climate change. Instead, let’s talk about something there’s no denying: the economy.

For about the past 30 years, the trend in the United States has been to have our goods manufactured overseas for consumption here. We used to make things here and use them here, or make them here and export them to other countries. And to be sure, that still happens to some extent. By and large, though, almost everything we buy comes from somewhere else. Most of what we count as “wealth” here in the US is in the realm of finance: paper traded on speculation for other paper. Generally speaking, when statistics are released about the Gross Domestic Product of America, it’s not a measure of how many natural resources we’re harvesting or how many goods and services we’re producing. It’s principally a measure of how well the people on Wall Street are making out.

Finance is nothing to be dismissed out of hand, of course. It was a stock market crash that caused the Great Depression in the 1930s. Many people now have lost their retirement investments because of failures in the finance industry. Those imaginary numbers have real-life consequences for the people invested in them, and for everyone else who relies on credit or on other companies that rely on credit—which is to say, just about everybody. When banks stop loaning money, businesses can’t operate. When businesses close, people are out of work. When everyone’s out of work, nobody has money. Without money, most people can’t get what they need to get by. It’s a big deal.

Big a deal as it is, though, it’s not the whole picture, as measures of American GDP would have us believe. By giving so much business to developing nations, we’ve enabled them to become much wealthier. China now owns much of the US debt and is developing at breakneck speed. Last year, China, not the United States, was the top buyer of new automobiles. India has a much more solid manufacturing base than we do. Money is pouring out of America and into these other countries.

Consider how America’s tax dollars are spent. Right now, the US has the largest, most sophisticated military in the world. We’re fighting two wars at once, have troops stationed in over a hundred countries, and spend more on defense than all our enemies combined. Even so, defense is not our largest expenditure. Interest on the national debt is. Let that sink in for a moment. Estimates vary, but I’ve heard that the US government owes between $4,000 and $10,000 for each man, woman, and child in the country, and that debt is growing every day. Some people who keep an eye on such matters have suggested that we’ve reached the point of loaning money to ourselves, simply printing more money and letting the inflation that causes be balanced out by our deflating economy.

It’s only a matter of time before America defaults on its debts or, more likely, our foreign creditors withdraw their support in favor more attractive investments elsewhere. Would you invest in a country that doesn’t make anything and whose currency is declining in value? Debt becomes a very unattractive investment once it’s clear that it’s never going to be paid off.

For a more accurate measure than GDP gives us, look at state and municipal governments. Some states—California foremost among them—are essentially bankrupt. Many public service workers have had to take pay cuts. Police officers and fire fighters in some areas have jobs only because federal bailouts kept them from getting laid off. Why is this happening? The treasuries are running dry because these governments don’t have as much of a tax base as they used to. Businesses are shutting down and workers are earning less and spending less, and therefore paying less in taxes. Short of a Roosevelt-style work program (funded by yet more deficit spending), we have nothing in place to allow us to reverse this downward spiral because American companies have moved our industries to other countries.

“Okay, so you think we’re headed for a depression. What’s that got to do with putting farms in the city? We still had farms in the country in the last Depression.”

Our food system today has almost nothing in common with that of America before 1945. In 1920, over 20% of the American work force were farmers. Something like 40% of all Americans lived on farms. Today, it’s more like 2% living on farms and about one percent actually working as farmers. Farms then tended to be smaller affairs. They mostly grew food, ate some of it themselves, and sold most of the rest locally. Then the Green Revolution came after World War II. A lot of farm kids moved to the cities and suburbs to work in factories. Huge machines allowed one farmer to work hundreds of acres growing grains for the commodities market.

One of the inherent fragilities of this newer system is that it depends on oil. Petroleum runs the machines and provides the raw materials for the fertilizers and other chemicals necessary to make industrial farming work. As Cuba found out the hard way when the collapse of the Soviet Union cut off their supply of oil, relying on Green Revolution techniques to feed your people means that when there’s no more oil, there’s no more food.

“Hang on! You’re talking about oil. You said this wasn’t about oil. It’s about the economy.”

America is a net importer of oil. We produce a little, but nothing like we did in the middle of the 20th Century. We’re way past our peak. We have to import most of our oil now, just like Cuba did. And increasingly, we rely on our oil coming from countries that don’t like us. More importantly, though, we have to buy that oil. No money and no credit? No oil for you! Once the funds run dry, so does the pump.

Do you think that we’ll just take that oil by force? Remember—tanks, planes, and armored personnel carriers all run on oil. Our military strength is actually pretty pitiful if the enemy has a ready supply of oil and we don’t. That means we can’t very well just go take more if we run out. Even if we found ourselves in a situation where the American government was willing to invest its last reserves of oil in a military campaign to go seize someone else’s oil, what are we using to power our tractors and factory farms back home in the mean time? Being broke means you can’t rely on expensive food production methods anymore.

This brings us back to the issue of cities. Many more people live in cities now than ever before. This lifestyle, done the way we’re doing it now, is possible only because of cheap energy. Food is shipped in, goods are shipped in, even the electricity often comes from somewhere else. In many cases, life in cities would be impossible without air conditioning or water piped in from many miles away. All of this depends on cheap energy.

“So we’ll use coal! We have mountains of it!”

What powers the coal diggers? How do you run a coal mine without money? If you could supply enough coal to make energy as cheap as it is right now with all the imported oil, how long do you really think it would last, considering both our rate of consumption and the fact that our population of consumers is growing exponentially? If we only used it at our present rate, estimates are that there’s enough coal in America to last over a thousand years, but when you factor in rates of growth, about 70 years is the most generous, realistic estimate. That means we carry on the same as we are now, and in 70 years, there’s no more coal. Ever.

“So what about solar? And wind?”

We’ve burned through about a hundred-million years’ worth of stored sunlight in about three hundred years. Do you really think the sunlight that falls on Earth in one year is going to provide a whole year’s worth of power at our present rate of consumption? Moreover, trying to switch our entire power grid and transportation infrastructure over to renewable sources would require a massive investment of energy and materials—resources we just don’t have in abundance anymore. Maybe we could’ve done it back in the 1970’s, but it’s just too late to do it now and still expect to have the same sort of lifestyle under the new system.

Do you get it yet? The American empire is about to fade off into the sunset. It happens to all empires eventually. They spread out bigger and bigger, eating up the resources of all their subordinate territories, getting fat and unproductive, and then the supply lines get overstretched. Every great civilization that grows eventually overshoots the resources that sustain it. It happened to Mesopotamia, it happened to Egypt, it happened to the Maya, it happened to the Anasazi, it happened to Rome, it happened to Spain, it happened to England, and now it’s happening to us…and there is no silver bullet that just makes everything all better and provides our country an eternal lifestyle of Cadillac Escalades transporting us to malls with massive parking lots for a weekend dose of shopping therapy. We can nose down and throttle up like the ground doesn’t exist—what we’ve been doing–or we can level out and try for a gentle crash landing that we can survive.

One of the first steps is to make sure people will have food. There’s a saying that the best security is a well-fed neighbor; food riots that have occurred in other countries in the past couple years suggest there’s some wisdom in this statement. If we can no longer rely on industrial farms in California to load up trucks full of food to ship to the rest of the country, though, how will we eat? The answer is obvious: grow the food where the eaters are. These days, most of the eaters are concentrated in cities, so that’s where we need to grow the food.

“But that’s just not practical. You need thousands of acres to grow enough food for everybody!”

That’s right, but we don’t need those thousands of acres to all be in one place like they are now. That’s what we need to get away from. If everyone who has space to do so is growing a garden or keeping small livestock, small farms surrounding a city can pick up the slack. Consider the following from author Sharon Astyk:

“In 1943, for example, the city of Baltimore had more than 14,000 community gardens, producing enough food to meet all the produce needs of the city.  In 1944, all the victory gardens in the US produced the same amount of produce as all the vegetable farms in the US put together.  In the 19th century, urban Paris was exporting food from 3600 acres of intensively farmed land that produce more vegetables than the city could consume.

“Underestimating the power of urban agriculture is one of the deepest flaws in reasoning.  Most nations of the global south produce substantial portions of meat and vegetables within city limits – Hong Kong and Singapore, for example, both produce more than 20% of their meat and vegetables within the city limits.  In 2002 with more than 6 million people, Hong Kong was producing 33% of their produce, 14% of the pigs, 36% of the chickens and 20% of the farmed fish eaten in the city limits…”

She goes on to say that much of the feed for this livestock comes from tons of food waste from right inside the city.

Interestingly, eating locally grown food is both the necessary result of, and part of the solution to, a collapsed economy. Figures vary from state to state, but chances are that there are billions of dollars pouring out of your state because you and your neighbors are buying food that was produced somewhere else. In his 2010 State of the State Address, Ohio Governor Ted Strickland recognized the need to stop this fiscal hemorrhage, citing that Ohioans spend 43 billion dollars annually on food, and only about 3% of it comes from Ohio farms. By localizing food production, you keep that money in your community. Local commerce increases, jobs get created, and the overall standard of living rises. Michael Schuman, author of The Small-Mart Revolution: How Local Businesses Are BeatingThe Global Competition, explains the phenomenon in this two-hour lecture at Carnegie Mellon University. (Skip the first 13:30. It’s just one guy introducing another guy who then introduces the guest lecturer.)

Cuba has served as our guinea pig in the field of relocalizing and urbanizing food production. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, and with it, the Cuban economy and their import-dependent industrial food system, the country rebuilt their agriculture from scratch. Factories started gardens for their workers’ lunches. Households grew vegetables wherever they had space. Community gardens, hydroponic operations, and “organoponicos”–raised beds filled with vermicompost created from garbage and animal manure–were all put in place to grow food in the cities. There were still shortages, though, so in a last-ditch effort, the communist nation relented and allowed private farmers to start selling their crops for profit.

The plan worked…too well, according to the Cuban government. The farmers were so successful that they became relatively wealthy. People in other professions started abandoning their jobs to grow food to sell. When the government then tried to shut down these private market gardeners, the public resisted. They enjoyed having easy access to fresh, high quality food, even if it was more expensive than the stuff in the state food stores. Last I heard, the government had changed the program so that the farmers have to give a portion of their crop to the government, and they have to reach a quota before they can sell the surplus.

I mentioned earlier that most people these days live in cities. We need to have farms in the cities not just because that’s where the eaters are, but because that’s where the labor is as well. If we try going back to growing our food without petroleum, we’re going to need a lot more farmers than we presently have. Before the tractor came into widespread use, nearly 40% of Americans were farmers. Some advances in intensive agriculture have been made since then, but we’re still going to need a lot more than one percent of the populace to grow food.

Presently, most urbanites have no experience with how their food is produced. This has led to an epidemic ignorance that farmer and author Gene Logsdon has termed “Acorn Tree Syndrome,” so named after a teacher friend of his discovered that the majority of his students didn’t know what kind of tree produces acorns. If city dwellers are this ignorant about nature now, how can we expect them to suddenly bootstrap their way into new careers as farmers when it becomes necessary? We can’t, and it’s for that reason that we need urban farmers in cities today, if for no other reason than to act as an educational resource so city folks can learn where food comes from and how to produce it themselves.

And finally, having all these new farmers move from the cities to the countryside would be a waste. It would put them in a logistically inferior location, obviously, but it would also allow a lot of urban infrastructure to sit vacant. Why build a new house in the country for a farmer if he already has one in the city and can do his job without relocating? If the farmer is going to be employing several people who live in the city, why stick his farm out where it will necessitate a long commute? By keeping the farm in the city, you take advantage of pre-existing roads, utilities, buildings, processing plants, markets, and a labor pool. Really, in this age of urbanity, we shouldn’t even be farming in the country until we’ve run out of room to do so in the cities.