Submitted via IRC for takyon
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: 4, Insightful) by MostCynical on Saturday December 29 2018, @08:51AM (28 children)
home grown vegetables taste better thn anything bought in a store - even good grocery stores.
The watering and weeding are massively disproportionate to the yield.
Keeping local wild rabbits and birds from eating any of the stuff is also difficult.
But the quality and taste of home grown organic (no, not paying for "certification") vegetables is *almost* worth it.
Cost? When you buy soil, make planter boxes, and buy seedlings: also excessive..
"I guess once you start doubting, there's no end to it." -Batou, Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Saturday December 29 2018, @09:34AM (19 children)
Watering, true. I don't get it why weeding is massively disproportionate.
No need to buy seedlings (unless you want to diversify), you can raise them yourself from seeds.
On the run, in my case, watering is the main cost.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2) by MostCynical on Saturday December 29 2018, @09:40AM (10 children)
S.O.'s laziness/desire for instant gratification, crossed with being time-poor means seedlings appear after trips to nursery.. Weeding is excessive, as I have to it all, as rest of family gets bored after a few minutes..
Watering, at least, is automatic.
"I guess once you start doubting, there's no end to it." -Batou, Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Saturday December 29 2018, @09:59AM (9 children)
Automatic as it may be, for the last 3-4 years the cost of water alone is higher than the cost of the produce that I'm obtaining from the veggie patch (about 80-90sqm in raised beds. Grass clippings make a fertilizer good enough between crops, I haven't bought manure or extra soil since I established the patch about 10 years ago).
It still worth it for the taste.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 5, Insightful) by VLM on Saturday December 29 2018, @03:00PM (3 children)
I can't speak for anyone but its possible OP was being sarcastic; being east of the Mississippi I get near four feet of rain per year and I only actively water my container garden because it drains too well or there's a short term drought (two weeks or so). Fairly common to skip many watering days due to rain.
This will never work in Las Vegas or CA in general, but bad places to live are just bad places to live. Kinda like don't move to the UP of Michigan if you don't like snow, don't live in a desert if you like to garden anything other than psychedelic cactus (which might be fun?)
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Saturday December 29 2018, @08:53PM (2 children)
Australia's weather patterns vary considerable in space/time (OP lives downunder too).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 3, Funny) by gawdonblue on Saturday December 29 2018, @09:18PM (1 child)
Australia - that's in Texas, right?
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Saturday December 29 2018, @10:02PM
West Texas to be more precise
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2) by tibman on Saturday December 29 2018, @05:53PM (4 children)
Water is free if you have a rain barrels. My county sells barrels and conversion kits for 25$. Less water going into draining ditches is better for everyone.
SN won't survive on lurkers alone. Write comments.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 29 2018, @06:50PM (1 child)
And that's probably illegal to do that. Here in Seattle, the city bought the water rights to most of the city, so if you're located in one of those areas, you're both free and encouraged to collect as much rain that falls on your property as possible. Due to most of the water immediately running off into the ocean, the water rights must not have been very expensive. It's also a bit of a benefit in that it helps those times when we get 5" of rain in a single day.
But, in most of the country, it's not legal to collect rainwater as you don't own the rights to it. I don't think it's a commonly enforced law when it comes to people's houses, but it isn't legal.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 29 2018, @11:42PM
That's not even uniform in the USA. It's mostly true in western states but it's not necessarily true in the east.
There's a whole history this, related to how pioneers came in and then were in conflict with later settlers who violated their early norms ... complex topic.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Saturday December 29 2018, @08:46PM (1 child)
I have rail water tanks, I just don't have enough rain.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Saturday December 29 2018, @08:49PM
s/rail/rain/g
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 29 2018, @09:54AM (7 children)
Compare manual work bent 90° or on your knees vs. a huge tractor that drags 69' wide cultivator at 6-10 mph autonomously, by GPS. It does not make sense to grow anything on small fields, unless you just want to.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by c0lo on Saturday December 29 2018, @10:08AM (6 children)
Why should I bend to 90° when 30° is enough? (grin)
Raise beds means I get to spare at least my knees.
In any case, some produce don't need tractors - have a Toshiba lettuce [qz.com] grown in former clean rooms. Haven't tasted it tough.
And yes, one can't self sustain oneself from hobby gardening - that's clearly a choice.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2) by takyon on Saturday December 29 2018, @04:36PM (5 children)
Humanity has had subsistence farmers for thousands of years. Today, we have ways of massively increasing yields, while reducing and automating the work. Maybe a hobbyist can sustain themselves with a shipping container sized garden. Of course, that might cost them $100k and they need some land to stick it on. But it could be a better investment than buying a boat.
Fast forward 20 years and the hobbyists could be even better off. Imagine a container that had a plexiglass roof with an automatically retractable cover, and sensors to let in a fixed amount of sunlight. The outside of the container could be covered in flexible solar panels to power internal LED grow lights. You could have little robots inside capable of harvesting the produce at exactly the right moment. Sensors could determine the health of each plant and when a tomato, cabbage, whatever will not benefit from remaining unpicked. Aquaculture (fish) could be integrated into the system to provide nutrients. Etc. I can't guarantee this arrangement would provide the dietary variety you need, but excess produce could be sold, traded, or preserved/canned.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 29 2018, @04:47PM (2 children)
Bad news: the problem with cost is very real in the scenario you describe. You can get jaw-dropping levels of production if you use layered aeroponics, with solar panels feeding carefully placed, tuned LED grow lights, with doped water sprays and calibrated environmental controls, CO2 injection and drone-based maintenance.
Of course, by then you'd damn well better be harvesting gold nuggets, or it's just not worth it.
This is the problem with farming: it's a terribly capital-intensive industry, producing commodities, with wildly varying price structures based on unforeseeable events. Your cyberpunk farmtronic proposal will turn a profit possibly once a decade, and the rest of the time bleed money like a drunkard in Vegas.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Saturday December 29 2018, @05:00PM
No problem, just hand out some tax breaks and call them victory gardens!
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Saturday December 29 2018, @09:52PM
Depends on the crops and weather conditions
In Australia growing lettuce, kale, herbs in shipping containers [abc.net.au] is a reality. The investment is jaw-dropping ($200-300K for a 40ft module), but one has some advantages:
- no weeding or using pesticides, sterile crops (or go bust) at harvest with no need for washing
- the "farms" can be placed very close to highly urbanized area - there are the eateries and restaurants with a predictable volume so you can plan for capacity
- no (chilled) storage space necessary, practically no transport cost
- very fresh produce makes a premium produce - the affluence of people working in the business district means you can put a modicum premium on the price.
In the linked:
The retail price for a lettuce head in supermarket is around $2 - 2.5. At this price, my guts feel a ROI in 7-10 years (if ever; power prices is a killer in Australia) - quite far from being a highly attractive business proposition.
However, in highly urbanized areas, like Hong Kong or Japan, it may make business sense.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 29 2018, @05:44PM
What would you want a fixed amount of sunlight for? AFAIK there aren't many crops that are so dependent on daylight-length that this is necessary, and it would be cheaper just to go full-growlight for those. For temperature regulation, a purely mechanical system using pneumatic pistons to open/close a vent depending on the temperature is cheap and efficient (completely passively, dependent only on temp changing internal pressure).
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Saturday December 29 2018, @10:17PM
You mean something more like Modular Farms [modularfarms.com.au]?
'Cause, no, if you don't stack the crop vertically, all you have is a(n automated) glass-house - you already are in the "diminishing returns" zone relatively to normal glass-houses. And if you go with vertical farming, a retractable roof won't get you enough light. Plus, the roof/wall surface won't get you enough PV surface to power all the LEDs you need to use.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2) by Gaaark on Saturday December 29 2018, @12:00PM (1 child)
Do you do Square Foot Gardening?
I find my garden is REALLY more productive than my wife's, who does traditional row gardening, and it keeps the weeding down once the veggies get growing.
AND I'm going to have some really nice asparagus this summer from what I saw this fall. Will just have to squish more bugs again.
Gonna eat some, can some, pickle some, freeze some......mmmmmmm.....
--- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. ---Gaaark 2.0 ---
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 30 2018, @01:45AM
Gross. I'm glad I won't be eating at your place!
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Runaway1956 on Saturday December 29 2018, @12:55PM (2 children)
Given a commercial or semi-commercial concern, that has invested in greenhouses. I wonder what weeding would be like inside the greenhouse. Here, on my property, there are thousands of years worth of wild seeds accumulated in the soil. Turn up a bit of soil, and you've exposed seeds that have been lying under the surface for years, decades, or even centuries. All it needs is the proper mix of moisture, sunlight, and temperature, and it sprouts. There is simply no way to ever remove all of those seeds, just waiting for something to trigger it. And, every single year, wild seeds are spread across the property again, blown in from they neighbor's yard, as well as from miles away. (Ever wonder how far a dandelion seed might travel, when a gust of wind picks it up?)
In a greenhouse, I would suppose that you might start with dirt brought in from a *more* sterile location. I've heard that Washington state has areas where the "topsoil" might be fifty feet deep. I suppose that few seeds that far below the surface remain viable, so that would be a great starter. Once the dirt is inside of the greenhouse, you can prevent the annual accumulation of seeds blown in from wherever.
Does anyone here have any experience to back up that speculation? Given a greenhouse a hundred feet long, and fifty feet wide, maybe you would only get a couple hundred weeds to pull, vs the tens or hundreds of thousands that I get in my garden, roughly the same size. The only way around all of that weeding, is a very liberal application of mulch. The problem with mulch is, it can get very costly, negating any financial benefit to a garden.
Of course, "green mulch" is probably the best way to go, although I never did it. Get some winter crop, such as hairy vetch, and plant it in the autumn. It grows up, and covers the ground pretty thickly, preventing any seeds from sprouting in the spring, and/or starves any seedlings of sunlight. Then, at planting time, you make just enough of a hole in the covering vetch to plant seeds individually, or perhaps cut a line in the vetch, into which you sprinkle your seeds. It sounds good, in theory.
What I've always seen, in practice, is tilling everything, plant the seeds, then fight those weeds until your crops are tall enough to smother the competition. It's a HELLACIOUS amount of work!!
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 29 2018, @04:50PM
I have some of the experience you describe.
The smart start for greenhouses is basically to pave them, or at least cover the base with a weed barrier, then do your actual planting in something like hot composted sewage solids.
Plants grow like hell, and basically no weeding, give or take introduced seeds.
There are other problems with pathogen management in what amounts to a fungus's wet dream, but that's a different story.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 30 2018, @01:31AM
"In a greenhouse, I would suppose that you might start with dirt brought in from a *more* sterile location. "
duh... of course. There is no weeding in a greenhouse. Plants are gown in trays on tables.
My parent ran one in the midwest until the cost of LP gas to keep it heated skyrocketed in the 70's
One of my jobs was to 'cook the dirt' at the start of the growing season.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Saturday December 29 2018, @02:45PM (1 child)
Rapidly becomes a labor vs capital thing. My planters are made of cedar and stainless steel fasteners and I slap deck finish on them every five years and they look new. Supposedly untreated cedar touching bare dirt will last a century in my climate; not sure if I believe it.
I have an extra expense of my planters are really a decorative shell for 5-gallon buckets with holes in bottom. Then big gravel, then landscape cloth sheets holding dirt. The planter (and overhanging cloth) protects the pails from sunlight so they'll last forever. I don't care if the pails are organic or not, but they were new food grade when I bought them and any water that touches them is by definition draining out and after two decades they've outgassed anything they're gonna outgas.
The only problems I have are my neighbor's tree has grown from a sapling to a giant and it blocks my best growing area (I can move the planter, but then its in an annoying location) and the dirt drains too well to the point that I "need" to water the plants daily.
Of course its more fun than work to water the plants.
I grow mint and turn it into mint juleps and mint junk food (ice cream, etc) and basil for basil butter and pesto and bell peppers for general snacking. Once in awhile for no apparent reason the bugs will decimate one species for a season. Weird. Oh well.
To some extent its like a journalistic expose on the topic of puppy mills not being profitable so no one should buy dogs planning to open 100 million puppy mills therefore no one should own dogs. I'm pretty happy at a very small scale.
Also there are scaling issues where basil and mint are incredibly expensive such that I'm running a net profit in the first year, although I could never container garden wheat or other grains and be competitive with industrial scale farms.... or could I? Hmm maybe next spring I do whatever needs to be done to grow one single corn plant in a bucket...
Containers are where its at. I'm strong enough that the bucket weighs nothing so I can work in extreme comfort and as things grow and shade each other its trivial to move stuff. Also once you get multiple planters you can shuffle the containers between them as you see fit, whereas transplanting dirt plants is much harder.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 29 2018, @04:41PM
You'll need at least 2 corn plants, unless you're close (~mile or so IIRC) to someone growing some.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 29 2018, @04:31PM
My mom built planter boxes with removeable fences and wooden sides that extended 2 feet below the soil surface - we don't have rabbit problems (I occassionally run over a baby with the lawnmower but don't see them otherwise), but deer and groundhogs are common. For most families, composting/vermiculture isn't going to produce a lot of soil, but many municipalities give away compost (a truckload from a neighboring city's composting operation filled up 2 1x3 meter boxes nicely). Weeding is largely a waste of time after you get transplants/seeds in the soil, and watering is mostly plug-in and forget with a cheap timer on the hose and a couple hours of work building and burying a grid of irrigation hoses in the boxes.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 29 2018, @09:28AM (9 children)
Farming is done the way it is because it's efficient to do it that way and the measure of this is how much money they make. If this keeps up, you might be forced to conclude that capitalism is actually a good economic system, even compared to the powerhouse "stuff hippies think ought to be true" economic system.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Saturday December 29 2018, @09:46AM
Good for some. At least tasteless for others, especially when it comes to vegetables.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 5, Touché) by Phoenix666 on Saturday December 29 2018, @11:28AM (7 children)
You mean, "stuff proven to be true by the entirety of humanity for the entirety of its history prior to the last couple centuries of capitalism?" It actually is possible for humans to grow the food they need without the mighty engine of capitalism to do it for them, or else we would never have made it to the point of inventing capitalism.
Now, it's true that a small farmer or gardener can't match the economies of scale of traditional methods, but we have arrived at an age where new technologies are available to the everyman. That's the new avenue urban farmers are exploring.
Meanwhile, i'll take the five tasty lettuces colo grows over the mountains of tasteless and nutritionless iceberg lettuce your factory farm churns out.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 3, Touché) by Gaaark on Saturday December 29 2018, @12:05PM
Especially when the lettuce you buy end up being garbage due to E. coli contamination.
--- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. ---Gaaark 2.0 ---
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Runaway1956 on Saturday December 29 2018, @01:00PM (5 children)
I agree with you - humanity can feed itself without the monster commercial farms that we have today. But, there seems to be a question whether humanity can support all those cities with tens of millions of residents in them.
New Jersey and Long Island once fed New York City. Thanks to urban sprawl, there are more stomachs to fill, and less land to fill them with.
If mankind is going to support those cities, we really need to re-think the way we do things. The way capitalism runs agriculture may very well fail us one day. And, there is no going back to the simpler times, if all those people are to survive.
(Score: 3, Informative) by VLM on Saturday December 29 2018, @02:54PM (4 children)
Hmm what do we get out of them? Is the juice worth the squeeze? If we just cut off immigration like a civilized country, then overpopulation kinda takes care of itself.
Also see "urban food deserts" there's entire unhealthy subcultures who eat nothing but hyper-processed grains, twinkies and pizza rolls type of stuff. They'd have no idea what to do with a nice fresh bell pepper.
The healthier paleo / low carb types do consume massive quantities of vegetables but are a small healthy minority among a very fat and unhealthy general population that subsists entirely on fattening processed grain carbs.
At some point the low production rate of urban bell peppers would collide with the extremely low demand from primarily sick fat city slickers and I think it quite realistic a city could grow all the healthy food it wants to eat (... which is a tiny fraction of the food it should eat)
I can't possibly grow all the lettuce I "need" in a shitty little urban hellhole apartment, but if most urbanites never eat vegetables other than on an expensive frozen pizza, perhaps, then on a larger scale it might very well work.
I live in a nice suburban neighborhood and do paleo / low carb; our family likely eats more raw carrots than the rest of the entire subdivision block; and this is a "nice" neighborhood not some urban slum.
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Saturday December 29 2018, @04:33PM (2 children)
Ever tried to feed a bell pepper to a pig? If they won't eat them, I won't either.
I'm only half kidding - pigs won't eat those peppers, and I don't much like them. Best thing to do with a bell pepper, is to stuff it with ground beef and seasonings - it tastes good then! Good in a western omelette, if the cook doesn't get carried away with them.
But, you're right - without the sunny climes south of our Mexican border, we wouldn't have lettuce year around like we do. I wonder if you could grow lettuce in a green house, under grow lights? Probably never been tried, because we already have the Mexican supply, and it's so cheap. Of course, I'm not a big salad eater anyway. Lettuce for four to six months each year would suit me fine. Cabbage keeps well, I can get by with a bit of cole slaw, a little boiled cabbage, maybe some fried cabbage - lettuce isn't essential.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 29 2018, @09:46PM (1 child)
> Best thing to do with a bell pepper, is to stuff it with ground beef and seasonings...
One of my favorite quick snacks, start with about a third of a good sized sweet/bell pepper, washed and de-seeded, fill with a thick layer (perhaps 1cm thick) of crunchy organic peanut butter (just ground peanuts, nothing else). Don't knock it until you've tried it, to me the flavors are synergistic, not predicted by either ingredient alone.
(Score: 1) by Ethanol-fueled on Sunday December 30 2018, @02:33AM
I could see how that would have a similar flavor and texture profile to eating peanut butter with fresh apple, which ain't bad, but Runaway is right -- the best thing you can do to a bell-pepper is stuff it with meat filling.
(Score: -1, Troll) by fakefuck39 on Sunday December 30 2018, @12:33AM
low carb is healthy for fatasses. the rest of us, you know - the people living in the cities, work out, so healthy for healthy people is low fat - we need the carbs for energy. that "shitty urban apartment" you talk about is in a skyscraper. I can walk to get groceries, I can walk to the opera, and the top restaurants in the state.
I can also walk to work - the neighboring skyscraper, 89th floor, without going outside. The jobs here in this urban slum of yours you see, pay almost twice as much as the ones outside of this "slum." Idiots like you live in the suburbs because you can't afford the city, so you spend an hour, twice a day, driving or taking the train back and forth from your suburbs. I sit at home all day, and only go in for the meetings. You are stuck at the office - because you don't have the highly paid skills to afford living next door.
We eat plenty of carrots. What "you get out of" as you so put it "the urban slums" - is money. You don't want my money for your produce - well I never asked you. Don't feel like having a farm and selling me the carrots in my skyscraper or the world-famous chef running the 100k revenue per day restaurant across the street? No one needs your farm or your carrots. Plenty of others willing to sell to where there is demand.
You grow your carrots, because clearly you can't run the banks, the phone systems, manage global companies. You're a fatass living in the middle of nowhere, with only generic skills - while you were learning to grow carrots, I was doing calculus. What you don't seem to want is farming subsidies, where they take taxes - which come out of the cities, and give it to you in a flat check. Yet you complain. Fucking useless loser. Go eat your carrots.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Saturday December 29 2018, @10:39AM
They've been in business for something like twenty-five years. The last I saw of their "garden" really it was a small farm, on the North end of town. The farmland to the West and North of Santa Cruz on the Monterey Bay and Pacific Coasts mostly grows Brussels Sprouts.
There is a certain dignity to manual labor that is largely denied to the homeless. Any work of any sort however meaningless gives one a sense of fulfillment.
Consider Kurt Vonnegut's novel "Player Piano"; I think it was his first. It takes place in a world where they only workers are engineers and their managers and is set in and near a thinly-veiled fictional representation of the General Electric Research Lab in Schenectady New York.
One of the engineers is tooling along the road when he blows a gasket. Some men are nearby digging ditches that they later fill in again. One of them quite proudly fashions a gasket from his leather belt with his knife. But for a moment that man has a _job_.
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 29 2018, @11:52AM
That's a long solved problem!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hollywood_accounting [wikipedia.org]
(Score: 1) by fustakrakich on Saturday December 29 2018, @05:15PM (4 children)
Capital expenditures do not relate to human effort, which is really the only thing that matters.
La politica e i criminali sono la stessa cosa..
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 29 2018, @11:13PM (3 children)
Capital expenditures represent an expenditure of stored value, which is most definitely related to human effort. 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.
Either way, an analysis that only considers human effort is doomed to be flawed. Examples left as an exercise for the reader, or their buddies in Econ 201.
(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..
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 30 2018, @07:01PM
Curtis Stone [youtube.com] has an exceptional channel on urban farming, including crop selection, financials etc. Dude is really impressive.
Chinese farmers garden with "night soil", (yes, it is what you think it is). I've thought this might be appropriate for orchards that produce highly acidic fruits. Lemons in the south, Granny Smith apples in the north. Human pathogens don't survive in high acidity. That is why beer is prefered over water in Europe. It has approximately the same PH as the human vagina. (also perhaps a contributing factor to its popularity)
There are a lot of farming systems that suit automation if done at scale. It is just that very few are done at scale. I attribute this to the fact that banks have taken over the food industry. Not enough agro engineering is going on because subsidies are keeping ROI for next gen tech low. Of course just wait... Banks have been buying up agro land in the midwest, and since Glass Steigal was repealed we can expect them to crash the food commodites markets. It's inevitable. We can only hope that instead of wussing out like in 2008, citizens take a more assertive role in asset recovery during this next cycle of wallstreets economic terrorism.So urban farming isn't just about profit, is also about emergency preparedness.
In the U.S. I think the scaling problem of urban farms is more a social acceptance thing rather than anything else. There are financial models that work. Getting past the crusty bitches in the HOA's may be the biggest problem. My guess is if you want to go down this road, first step is to set up a beer garden in your yard and invite them all over in ones and twos to chat them up about how "Wouldn't it be nice if you didn't have to pay somebody to mow your dumbass patch of useless nitrogen polluting grass?". Perhaps not in those exact words. :-)
Make a working financial model, get the votes, and do the business.