Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
Quit splitting hairs. What do you think farmland is for?
People are always lamenting the loss of farmland to suburbs.
No. The post did not say food shortage, so it can't be an example of that. It's not splitting hairs, it's not the same thing. I mentioned earlier that I care about having nearby farmland even though losing it would have little or no effect on the food supply. Importing from elsewhere is also a possiblity so loss of farmland does not necessarily equal food shortage.
I was referring to this thread, not dragging up old threads from months ago, you can always find an example somewhere in the thread. But if you want to drag up old threads, there have been other times when you claimed posters were complaining about farmland being lost when they didn't say that. See bolded point #2:
No. The post did not say food shortage, so it can't be an example of that. It's not splitting hairs, it's not the same thing. I mentioned earlier that I care about having nearby farmland even though losing it would have little or no effect on the food supply. Importing from elsewhere is also a possiblity so loss of farmland does not necessarily equal food shortage.
I was referring to this thread, not dragging up old threads from months ago, you can always find an example somewhere in the thread. But if you want to drag up old threads, there have been other times when you claimed posters were complaining about farmland being lost when they didn't say that. See bolded point #2:
As to wburg's response, it's one of my favorite posts of the forum.
Well, you dragged up two old threads from months ago, one from 9 months ago! Just sayin'!
ETA: Do forgive me for having lived in "Big Ag" country, where this topic of destruction of prime farmland came up over and over. Presumably, prime farmland is used to grow crops, which in turn become food. I realize that's quite a stretch, but it is what it is.
I don't think it matters if you grow food in your front or your back yard. We have a garden, and some years we have enough food to "put up" quite a bit, some years not.
Here in NoVa there are some folks who grow veggies in their front yards, but IIUC in many places HOA's insist on lawns, and there is also some social pressure for lawns.
Well, I'm not sure obesity really is epidemic. There are 11 countries, all first world, several English-speaking, three in the western hemisphere that have obesity rates above average in first world countries.
I don't see why having a bunch of other obese countries then makes it fine for the US. Plus, we're at top with 30.6% and with a six percent jump to second place Mexico at 24.2% while pretty much all countries after that kind of slowly go down without that big of a jump. You could kind of grapple a bit with what would qualify as an epidemic, but I don't see a line of argument where if there are other countries are going through the same then it is no longer an epidemic. Besides, we have a pretty big lead. There is probably a big pun in there to be made. What would you need for this to qualify as an epidemic? If you don't want to qualify it as an epidemic, that's fine. It's whatever your definition of that word you want. I'm just saying people in the states are noticeably fat compared to other countries I've been in. You can judge that as a good or bad thing however you like.
It is sort of funny though and maybe this kind of large proportions of overweight and obese will just be the new normal and maybe what we evaluate as possibly having certain health consequences simply just be taken as part of being alive and not a real medical condition. Maybe there will be a sea change of what we view as attractive as we become much more used to have so many overweight and obese people. I will say though it's definitely something that's been noticed not just here but abroad, too. I am remember in my teens going to Taiwan and there was still a stereotype of Americans (and Australians as well) as being very fit and very sporty (not just into sports but really active in them and also into anything physical). In fairly recent years, the stereotype has definitely shifted into Americans and Aussies have what I've heard put as a "(car) tire of oil" around people. It is regarded as a negative thing there, but maybe this would be a globalized cultural shift since obesity rates are on the rise just about everywhere now though the US definitely leads the pack and by a pretty significant margin.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Katiana
If you want to prove that suburbs are taking up farmland and creating a food shortage in this country, by all means do the research.
No, I'm not interested in that. I was just curious about the study itself since it could be informative about historical land use practices, but unfortunately it was not. Suburbs do take up former farmland as I've seen throughout southern california, but that doesn't mean there isn't enough or that more can't or isn't be made or that we even need that much farmland if our cost and resource inputs for our yields have changed significantly (which they have). I'm also curious about how farmland, suburbs, cities, and natural preserves have all shifted in the previous decades (especially if you had something that was going back into the Great Depression. Unfortunately that source doesn't strike me as reliable in the least given what else is on the site.
Anyhow, window farms and rooftop farms. Those are pretty neat. There's also a funny guerrilla gardening thing (their term not mine) going in Philadelphia and probably in other places where small patches of soil anywhere are discreetly seeded and tended to all around the city, especially University City it seems. I remember walking through University City and seeing an avocado tree on a random patch of land and was completely confused. I know there are some hardy varieties of Avocado, that Philly because of its semi-coastal location gets a bit more moderate winters than the interior, and that the urban heat island effect does keep things warmer in urban locations overall, but I still don't quite understand how it have survived winters without having to be put indoors. My guess is that someone just planted an already fruiting tree in the hopes it would survive and it had yet to make it through its first winter, but if not, wow.
Last edited by OyCrumbler; 01-14-2013 at 04:51 PM..
Anyhow, window farms and rooftop farms. Those are pretty neat. There's also a funny guerrilla gardening thing (their term not mine) going in Philadelphia and probably in other places where small patches of soil anywhere are discreetly seeded and tended to all around the city, especially University City it seems. I remember walking through University City and seeing an avocado tree on a random patch of land and was completely confused. I know there are some hardy varieties of Avocado, that Philly because of its semi-coastal location gets a bit more moderate winters than the interior, and that the urban heat island effect does keep things warmer in urban locations overall, but I still don't quite understand how it have survived winters without having to be put indoors. My guess is that someone just planted an already fruiting tree in the hopes it would survive and it had yet to make it through its first winter, but if not, wow.
I actually grew up near a dairy farm that eventually closed. They turned it into a park, BTW. I don't know that suburban development can be called the cause of the collapse of small farms anyway. The mass agriculture industry shut them down because they couldn't compete in volume or price or the particular change in consumer taste for uniform product. And that's a separate issue altogether.
Whatever the case, the fact fact fact is vegetable and fruit gardening is done extensively in suburbs to the benefit of their households and neighborhoods--a lived and breathed personal testament that can't be contradicted. And extending fruit and vegetable gardening to front yards is as I've said personally not a problem.
This idea has been around for quite some time. Rosalind Creasy wrote a book in 1982 called Edible Landscaping. She proposed planting edibles throughout the yard instead of ornamental plants.
Please register to post and access all features of our very popular forum. It is free and quick. Over $68,000 in prizes has already been given out to active posters on our forum. Additional giveaways are planned.
Detailed information about all U.S. cities, counties, and zip codes on our site: City-data.com.
Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
