Urban Farming - they won't feed us all but they teach us an important lesson

I had an argument once about the value of community gardens as a way of providing local food and his comment was that they were stupid because community gardens would not be able to feed everyone in the city.

I didn't bother going any further with it as I realized he simply didn't get the point.

This article from Grist helps make the point much better than I could:

Urban farms won't feed us, but they just might teach us.

The article goes through different arguments about the profitability of urban farms but the key point is the good that urban farms do beyond food.

"The biggest reason to support urban ag is the number of people it touches, rather than the number of people it feeds."

Forbidden Food

Well, apparently scientists are figuring out what parents know.  If you say to children they can don't something, they will only want to do it more.

Research now indicates that this applies to keeping desirable foods away from children as reported in the New York Times (http://nyti.ms/1hiqSjX).

The original reference:

Rolllins BY, Loken E, Savage JS, Birch LL.  Effects of restriction on children's intake differ by child temperament, food reinforcement and parent's chronic use of restriction.  (2014) Appetite 73: 31-39.

Happy City, Does it Exist?

I recently finished reading Happy City by Charles Montgomery.

In the book, he describes some of the elements that help make a city more livable for all its residents.  In the beginning of the book, he tells the story of a woman who had a child in a daycare near where she lived.  However, she worked 60 miles away, which would take her over an hour to drive.

One day she got a call that her child was sick and that she should come pick him up.  She was very upset and had to fight through the traffic for an hour to get back to her son.  This is not what makes a happy city.

Now some people argue that happy is subjective and defining it is difficult.  The author admits this is true but researchers have found the best way to assess happiness is not by objective measures or metrics but by simply asking people.  Self-assessment has come forth as the best indicator of whether people are happy or not.

Montgomery approaches the issue from a planning perspective and believes that the dispersal seen in North America does not work.  Also, the zoning laws that prevent mixed use developments also don't work.

Cities need to provide people choice, whether they want to drive a car or take transit.

With more and more of the world's population moving into cities, the old method of low density homes just won't work and developing more density is a reality.

Clean Energy Investments Increase in Canada

Good to see that more money is being invested into alternative energy.  Hopefully this industry will begin to see subsidies similar in scale that the oil and gas industry does.


From the ISIS Research Centre, Sauder School of Business
April 10, 2014

Canada's Clean Energy Investments Surge

By Justin Bull

Canada received $6.5 billion in clean energy investments in 2013, according to a new report released by the Pew Charitable Trusts. This represents a 45 percent increase from 2012 — the highest rate of growth in the Americas and the second-highest in the G20.

Outside of Canada, only two other nations – Japan and the United Kingdom – saw increases in clean energy investments in 2013. Other countries, notably the United States and Brazil, experienced large declines, with respective investment levels dropping by 55 percent and 9 percent during the same period.

Wind remained the biggest source of investment in Canada: $3.6 billion nationwide, for some 1.5 gigawatts of new wind capacity installed in 2013. Big investments in Ontario and Alberta led the way, with South Kent and Blackspring Ridge projects generating a combined 570 megawatts.

Solar attracted $2.5 billion in investments for 500MW of new power generation. This represents a doubling of 2012’s investment levels, and reflects the steady decline in the price of photovoltaic panels that helps make solar projects economically viable, even in the absence of supportive policies.

The report, titled "Who’s Winning the Clean Energy Race?" (full version available for download here) maintains that government policy is central to Canada’s clean energy future. At the federal level, the latest budget has expanded the clean energy generation equipment that qualifies for accelerated capital cost allowances.

But the report also suggests that it is provincial, not federal, policy that is the real driver of clean energy investments in Canada. Pending changes to the controversial Green Energy Act in Ontario were seen as perhaps the biggest motivator of investors. In that province, feed-in-tariffs – long-term contracts offered to renewable energy producers – are poised for reform. This motivated investors to speed-up project deployment in order to secure future incentives.

Value of ecosystem services

Have be working my way through a book by Raj Patel titled The Value of Nothing, How to reshape market society and redefine democracy

The book discusses how many of the items we purchase are underpriced because they do not account for ecosystems services and subsidies.  This is his observations on agriculture:

China's failure to value water is one example of the failure of almost every country to value the nature world in the production of goods for the market.  Ecosystem services such as pollination, water filtration, erosion control, soil fertility and regulation of water and climate systems are valuable, however, it's possible to hazard a price on quite how much they're worth.  Returning to food, one New Zealand study estimated that the total economic value of ecosystem services in organic agriculture systems in New Zealand ranged from $1,610 USD to $19,420 USD per hectare annually, compared to conventional costs ranging from $1,270 USD to $14,470 USD per hectare annually.  The value of ecosystem services in organic fields ranged from $460 USD to $5,240 USD per hectare annually versus $550 USD to $1,240 USD in conventional fields.  In other words, farming systems that pay attention to sustainability put more back into the earth than systems using conventional industrial techniques - but they aren't rewarded for it.  Thgis is why food grown through industrial agriculture, which doesn't pay the full price of its ecological misbehavior, appears cheaper at the supermarket checkout.  What the hidden costs show is that this is not cheap food: It's cheat food.  What is true for food is no less true for every other consumer item.  Sustainably produced goods and services appear to cost more, because their cheaper equivalents are cutting corneres in the short run but generating long-run costs that we'll all have to bear.