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Urban farms could be incredibly efficient—but aren't yet
In some ways, hyper-local food is a counterculture movement, focused on growing herbs and vegetables in the same dense urban environments where they will be eaten. It trades the huge efficiencies of modern agriculture for large savings in transportation and storage costs. But is urban farming environmentally friendly?
According to researchers at Australia's University of New England, the answer is pretty complex. Within their somewhat limited group of gardeners, urban agriculture is far more productive for the amount of land used but isn't especially efficient with labor and materials use. But the materials issue could be solved, and the labor inefficiency may be a product of the fact that most urban farmers are hobbyists and are doing it for fun.
The researchers—Robert McDougalla, Paul Kristiansena, and Romina Rader—defined urban agriculture as taking place within a kilometer of a densely built environment. Working in the Sydney area, they were able to find 13 urban farmers who were willing to keep detailed logs of their activity for an entire year. Labor and materials costs were tracked, as was the value of the produce it helped create. The energetic costs of the materials and labor were also calculated in order to assess the sustainability of urban farming.
The plots cultivated by these farmers were quite small, with the median only a bit over 10 square meters. Yet they were extremely productive, with a mean of just under six kilograms of produce for each of those square meters. That's about twice as productive as a typical Australian vegetable farm, although the output range of the urban farms was huge—everything from slightly below large farm productivity to five times as productive.
For the vast majority of crops, however, the urban farms weren't especially effective. They required far more labor than traditional farms, and, as a result, the total value of the inputs into the crop exceeded the income from selling it. In other words, the urban farmers were losing money, at least by traditional accounting measures.
PNAS, 2018. DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1809707115 (About DOIs).
(Score: 1) by fustakrakich on Saturday December 29 2018, @11:31PM (2 children)
A marxist would tell you that it only represents human effort, because of the labour theory of value, but most other people can recognise that there's more than one thing that goes into a definition of value.
You didn't name a single one... In fact, you said nothing of substance
La politica e i criminali sono la stessa cosa..
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 30 2018, @04:33AM (1 child)
Oh, for fuck's sake ...
Fine, whatever, in small words for the we-failed-econ-101 crowd:
Value is relative to context, and personal judgement. This is why people disagree about turning up (or down) the thermostat (value of heating and cooling at a given temperature), why people will trade their time to make coffee for other people who value the coffee more than their money, why people will trade gold for wheat. Sand in a desert is generally an annoyance, or unworthy of remark at best. Sand in a sandbag for someone being shot at, or trying to deal with flooding, can be extremely valuable.
If the only thing that rendered something valuable were how much someone had worked on it, no trade could ever be a win-win, because someone would always be losing compared to the other, or it would be a dead heat. Even kids in a playground deal with this intuitively.
Moreover, to take the labour theory of value at face value, it deems a children's pillow fort that took them fifteen minutes to assemble equally valuable to a farmer's fifteen minutes of weeding, if not more so because of the labour embedded in the pillows. This doesn't even pass the laugh test, and yet it's fashionable to wave the hammer and sickle and rant about the exploitation of the proletariat by a process of extraction of value.
There you are, genius. That's the substance that you couldn't possibly assemble with both hands, a flashlight and a map.
Furrfu!
Oh wait, sorry, I forgot, communism was so fucking cool 100 years ago after the russian revolution, and everyone was impressed, but everything old is new again. Please, don't stop the rocket surgeons from rediscovering Trotsky. I mean, it's that or marijuana, amirite, comrade Broski? Take another hit of this shit wrapped in Marx, it'll make you cool.
(Score: 1) by fustakrakich on Sunday December 30 2018, @05:53AM
Value is relative to context...
Yeah? So? You're still not making a case. In an economic system, human effort is the only valid criterion. Your head is just full of bureaucratic managerial cruft to featherbed the front office.
La politica e i criminali sono la stessa cosa..