Vertical Farming
Food Chain Radio Show #1252
Michael Olson, Author & Urban Farming Agriculturalist
Vertical Farming for the City
Guest: Guy Elitzur, CEO of Israel’s Vertical Field Company
This from MetroFarm: The Guide to Growing for Profit In or Near the City, For the City, by yours truly, Michael Olson…
Michael Olson Food Chain Radio – Vertical Farming
“They came to America to take advantage of a new frontier. Land, plentiful and cheap, was incentive to grow. And grow they did. In a very few short years the immigrants cultivated the wide open spaces out of existence, and then moved into the city.
“Land is not cheap anymore. Indeed, space sells for a premium and immigrants are an endangered species. Nevertheless, there still exists a frontier of vacant lots, scrub-covered hillsides, greenbelts, floodplains and other small parcels of unused or little-used land near population centers. That land is a frontier filled with incentive to grow.”
The question is, how can one profitably farm small parcels of land when most all of American agriculture is tuned to farming commodity crops on large parcels of land?
Secretary of Agriculture F.H. King found the answer 120 years ago when he visited the farmers of rural China. This, from his book Farmers of Forty Centuries:
“The man walking down the row with his manure pails swinging from his shoulder informed us on his return that in his household there were twenty to be fed: that from this garden of half an acre of land he usually sold a product bringing in $400.”
Consider the accomplishment of that farmer of 40 centuries: with a one-half farm he fed a family of 20 people and generated what today would be $14,000 in cash income. Ladies and gentlemen… a half acre is like the back yard!
Clearly, the answer to the question of how to farm small parcels of land in or near the city, for the city, lies in the efficient use of space, and who better to direct us to how to use space efficiently than those who do not have a lot of space….
And so today we take you to where there really is very little space, and that would be the nation of Israel, to ask a man who has a different way of looking at space:
Leave a comment below: Do you see incentive in farming for the city?
Nationally syndicated Food Chain Radio airs live Saturday mornings 9-10AM Pacific.
