Ernie wrote: ↑Fri Mar 22, 2024 12:44 pm
Please keep partisan comments/debates out of this thread - avoid comments that reflect negatively on either right-leaning or left leaning political persuasions or characters. Please keep this thread focused on the topic.
The topic you created is to review an article you found written by "Politico" which actually means "Politician". Nearly every paragraph in your article referenced some politician from either party. Next time, use an article from "Mother Earth News" or something focused on just agriculture, and not how agriculture relates to politics if you want to keep politics out of the thread.
Here is what I think after reading your article, without any political comments, and I hope I have written in a way that allows us to have a good conversation.
How a young person gets into farming without land and capital is nearly impossible, even if it were given to him. And it takes a LOT of money to start up a new farm. But what a new farmer lacks the most is the generational knowledge of his ancestors.
My grandparents were farmers, but my parents lived in the city. I am 66 years young, and been farming for 40 plus years. To answer the questions of what works in farming, I still have to ask my neighbor, whose family has farmed for generations.
Generational farms create things like a "landrace" plant, a type of corn that has been grown on their farm for decades. Each year they select the best ears of corn for seedstock for the next year. The corn is perfectly adapted for their area, and that is one reason why they are successful where a newcomer would fail.
Compare raising tested landrace corn that to new farmer that buys GMO seed from a catalogue. If they try to harvest seedstock, they will find there is a "terminator gene" in the GMO corn that keeps it from producing for more than one year, so they will have to buy more seed every year.
Some of the GMO corn is creating its own BT (bacterium thuringiensis) as a "GMO bug spray" produced by the corn itself. This is really nasty stuff, and nobody should ever plant it or eat it, but a new farmer might fall into this trap.
Urban farming makes a lot of sense, except...
Where do you find the mulch for the plants, or the potting soil, or fresh water for irrigation that does not come out of a tap with so much chlorine that it kills your plants?
Yes, you can mulch newspapers, but not the comics as they have chemicals in the color print that causes problems. You can mulch cardboard, but it has glue inside that will end up in your crops.
I think an urban garden that is 100% organic is nearly impossible. Instead of shipping in the mulch from the country, you would be better off growing the vegetables in the country and shipping the vegetables in, and leaving the mulch in the country where it belongs.
There are some successful urban farms on small lots, but only in areas where the Codes Enforcement is friendly, and the neighbors don't mind the various smells. I don't know. I don't see many of them, and if it were a really good idea, there would be more people doing it.
I did set up my own Aquaponics garden, and that might work in an urban garden. I used the Media Bed and Nutrient Film Technique, and it grew a lot of vegetables on a small space. I raised bluegill instead of tilapia.
The worst part of the article is the idea of taxing everyone to give a subsidy to some new farmer that has never done it before. This is not going to work. But it will employ a lot of people to oversee the grant money and to write new regulations on how these farms are run. The regulatory part will work very well, and it will also require even more tax money and subsidies to improve these new inexperienced farms and farmers, as these new farmers probably won't be successful the first few times. But with more money and more new farmers to get in on the gravy train, I am sure it would. It just needs a little more money. It will always need more money.
There are two kinds of farmers, and people for that matter. One is entirely independent and can be successful if left alone, without being regulated to death.
The other type of farmer is often a hopeless failure at farming, but believes that everyone should assist them in their ventures, and demands tax money to help them achieve the same success as those that are successful and independent. Otherwise, they say farming is not "fair."
Where is Darwin when you need him?
There is a very famous person that did not work a job until they were 40 years old. They tried to become a carpenter, and found that they could not drive a nail in straight. Nobody wanted to employ him. So he became very good at preaching "income redistribution", and has run for president several times.
That is the same problem when you try to attract new people to farming by giving them grant money. People that really should not farm will try to farm, and will cost everyone a lot of money. Then they will preach to you why it is not fair, or even "racist", if you don't give them more money.
Yes, keep politics out of farming.
So what are your thoughts on the article?
Take care,
John