"If every neighborhood had its own vertical farm, how many fewer semis would be choking up the metro area?"
In my area - Southern Ontario -- farmland is cheap and plentiful, a lot of it turning to brush or "hobby" farms (which usually means farms that don't really produce). In my area just outside of the metro area, everyone's property, with long growing seasons and excellent soil -- are in the measure of acres, and only grow decorative plants.
We recently as a family started considering the notion of mixing up life and moving somewhere else in Canada -- 100+ acre farms in PEI, NB, and Nova Scotia can be had for under $100,000. Many are now considered vacant land having been abandoned as farmsteads.
Whenever these sorts of articles talk about the "solution" to locally grown or a food crisis, I compare these two facts and something is not meshing.
In your considerations, what did you have planned to do if you did end up buying a farmstead? Pick up farming or livestock, or just live on the countryside with a big ranch available without animals but otherwise live and work like you do now presumably in a city, or a combination?
I've been really interested in the idea of moving out of the city for some time but I don't know many people who've done so. They usually just moved to a smaller city (i.e. a village) without any real farmland, but a decent backyard. (something pretty rare here in Amsterdam).
Professionally I can essentially work anywhere with a high speed connection, and my wife is in healthcare and can work anywhere near even a somewhat built up area. We would like to do low-intensity farming, have some chickens (primarily for eggs), ideally have some woodlands, and so on. My wife really wants to try keeping bees, and the honey products from that.
I'd love to have enough land to have a small nanny-suite house, a bunkie off in the woods somewhere, etc. With connectivity (which is starting to appear in even really rural areas via wireless options), I really have to imagine that more of an exodus out of urban areas will happen by the people who want the more remote living and had only moved to urban areas out of proximity needs.
He's not a super techie, he has a few websites and it's not always super professionally structured, but check it out. He's basically a dude who got into farming later in life, first did an apprenticeship, and then started his own community supported agriculture (CSA) business.
His initial focus was chickens which you mentioned wanting to do. It's looks like it's pretty easy for him. He orders chicks online, they have enough food in their bellies to survive the trip in the mail (sounds crazy but apparently it's a normal thing). He has a heat lamp and a basic food/water installation. He designed his own pens for the older chicken for which he has a blueprint online for free, they're actually very neat. And then he has to do the butchering which is the worst part, but he has about 60 customers for his CSA who paid him upfront for the season (I think about 20 weeks), and he delivers one whole chicken to them per week, so about 50 per week, and he actually has a very high chicken price at about $25 or so. Anyway so all these people basically paid him in advance, so he starts with $30k and can make the investments he needs to. (seller discretionary cashflow is about $8k per year).
I can easily see how producing 1 chicken per week for your family, plus eggs, is a piece of cake. He's now also moving into other things, eggs, crops, hogs and vineyards and his own brewery. You can see some of his financial plans for 2015 here: http://www.farmmarketingsolutions.com/about/income-reports/2...
The cool thing is he's trying to be 100% transparent. Very interesting insight into small-scale farming. Providing for yourself is pretty easy, not trivial but very very doable. Providing for a CSA also looks like a very decent business, it's hard work but you can compete because people pay a premium for this stuff. On a larger scale I'm skeptical, selling wholesale really sucks and it just doesn't seem to be worth it unless you automate it (which seems only economical when you get economies of scale, i.e. a large scale) largely, or go big on certification and find a bio/eco/sustainability/local niche that wholesalers are seeing increased demand for themselves, too. Anyway I know that's not really your goal here but I thought I'd share the link :) All the best
That is a fantastic blog, thank you very much. I love reading stuff like that.
I have the luxury, of sorts, that the farm doesn't really need to support anyone financially (the primary income still coming from `traditional' sources), and ultimately just having a selection of foods available for my own immediate and extended family would be awesome. I've done the home vegetable garden thing for years, and would really like to take it to the next level. One of the next things about a lot of crops is that minimal effort often gets you 70% to the best outcome, so while a dedicated farmer carefully tends everything to fully optimize, I find the bounty and selection of just a variety of lazily planted tomato plants incredible.
In my area - Southern Ontario -- farmland is cheap and plentiful, a lot of it turning to brush or "hobby" farms (which usually means farms that don't really produce). In my area just outside of the metro area, everyone's property, with long growing seasons and excellent soil -- are in the measure of acres, and only grow decorative plants.
We recently as a family started considering the notion of mixing up life and moving somewhere else in Canada -- 100+ acre farms in PEI, NB, and Nova Scotia can be had for under $100,000. Many are now considered vacant land having been abandoned as farmsteads.
Whenever these sorts of articles talk about the "solution" to locally grown or a food crisis, I compare these two facts and something is not meshing.