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I grew up in the rural American midwest. Your roads, electricity, and communications were subsidized by urban/suburban America. http://www.google.com/search?q=

I grew up in the rural American midwest. Your roads, electricity, and communications were subsidized by urban/suburban America. http://www.google.com/search?q=rural+electricity+subsidies http://www.google.com/search?q=rural+electricity+subsidies What did urban/suburban America get in return for its investment? My next door neighbor and childhood best friend lived on a 40 cow dairy operation That dairy farm was subsidized (apart from the previously-mentioned rural subsidies) by urban/suburban America. http://www.google.com/search?q=farm+subsidies+billion http://www.google.com/search?q=farm+subsidies+billion Grain/hay/straw-fed cows can be raised in urban areas. They don't need to be raised in rural areas. Food doesn't come from big glass boxes and isn't grown on trucks. That is correct. Food comes from automated factories. http://www.google.com/search?q=dairy+operations+automated http://www.google.com/search?q=dairy+operations+automated End rant. Why were you ranting?

HeyLaughingBoy 18y ago
What urban America got for its subsidy was the food you claim can be raised in urban areas and the transportation infrastructure to move materials where needed. Yeah, we'll just level midtown Manhattan to raise 100 acres of corn. It'd be cheaper to just eat dollar bills. What's literally possible and what's economically and logistically feasible are not necessarily the same.
- gravitycop 18y ago
  What urban America got for its subsidy was the food you claim can be raised in urban areas It is not just me making the claim: http://www.juliansimon.com/writings/Ultimate_Resource/TCHAR06.txt http://www.juliansimon.com/writings/Ultimate_Resource/TCHAR0... At the current efficiency of PhytoFarm, the entire present population of the world can be supplied from a square area about 140 miles on a side - about the area of Massachusetts and Vermont combined, and less than a tenth of Texas. This represents only about a thousandth as much land as is needed for agriculture at present (give or take a factor of four; for illustrative purposes greater exactitude is unnecessary). And if for some reason that seems like too much space, you can immediately cut the land space by a factor of ten: just build food factories ten stories high, which should present no more problems that a ten-story office building. You could economize even more and build a hundred stories high, like the Empire State Building or the Sears Tower. Then the surface area needed would be no more than the space within the corporate limits of Austin, Texas, to pick the first alphabetically among the many U.S. cities large enough. PhytyoFarm techniques could feed a hundred times the world's present population - say 500 billion people - with factory buildings a hundred stories high, on one percent of present farmland. To put it differently, if you raise your bed to triple bunk-bed height, you can grow enough food on the two levels between the floor and your bed to supply your nutritional needs.
  - iigs 18y ago
    FWIW, they appear to be talking about something pretty different than cheeseburger and soda ingredients in the linked article, and I think this is where the problem is -- the subsidies to the midwest are ensuring the lifestyle of (sub-)urban people as well. For better or worse, telling Americans that they're not going to be able to eat meat at every meal is, for the time being, a non-starter. The article is really interesting. I guess if the question is "would it be cheaper to raise the food in the sun and drive it into town or use that energy to raise it in a building" it's possible the answer would be the latter, particularly if we're talking specifically about ensuring caloric and nutritional production, not specific foods. Furthermore, there are other points on the continuum that may also work well, such as the large grocery store that has a huge garden inside for fresh ingredients. I guess the proof is in the pudding. There must be a reason why foods are processed in rural areas and only transported into towns in high calorie form (HFCS, beef, concentrated juices). I suspect subsidies contribute, of course. However, there's too much variability in opportunities to explain it all, in my opinion.
    - gravitycop 18y ago
      they appear to be talking about something pretty different than cheeseburger and soda ingredients in the linked article It is a book chapter (6, of The Ultimate Resource II). Have you read the book?: http://www.juliansimon.com/writings/Ultimate_Resource http://www.juliansimon.com/writings/Ultimate_Resource
    - gravitycop 18y ago
      I guess the proof is in the pudding. The proof of the pudding is in the eating. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_proof_of_the_pudding_is_in_the_eating http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_proof_of_the_pudding_is_in_...
    - gravitycop 18y ago
      the subsidies to the midwest are ensuring the lifestyle of (sub-)urban people as well. Not if it costs more to produce food in rural areas than to produce the same food in urban areas. telling Americans that they're not going to be able to eat meat at every meal is [...] a non-starter. The statement of HeyLaughingBoy that I was responding to was: "Yeah, we'll just level midtown Manhattan to raise 100 acres of corn." What I had been referring to in my original comment was the raising of "dairy cows" in urban areas. If one could grow corn in a 100 story building, what would stop one from running an automated "Grain/hay/straw-fed" dairy cow operation, or automated beef or veal-calf operations, in a 100 story building?
- gravitycop 18y ago
  What's literally possible and what's economically and logistically feasible are not necessarily the same. Would it be less expensive to grow food in Manhattan, or in rural America?

HeyLaughingBoy 18y ago

What urban America got for its subsidy was the food you claim can be raised in urban areas and the transportation infrastructure to move materials where needed. Yeah, we'll just level midtown Manhattan to raise 100 acres of corn. It'd be cheaper to just eat dollar bills. What's literally possible and what's economically and logistically feasible are not necessarily the same.

gravitycop 18y ago
What urban America got for its subsidy was the food you claim can be raised in urban areas It is not just me making the claim: http://www.juliansimon.com/writings/Ultimate_Resource/TCHAR06.txt http://www.juliansimon.com/writings/Ultimate_Resource/TCHAR0... At the current efficiency of PhytoFarm, the entire present population of the world can be supplied from a square area about 140 miles on a side - about the area of Massachusetts and Vermont combined, and less than a tenth of Texas. This represents only about a thousandth as much land as is needed for agriculture at present (give or take a factor of four; for illustrative purposes greater exactitude is unnecessary). And if for some reason that seems like too much space, you can immediately cut the land space by a factor of ten: just build food factories ten stories high, which should present no more problems that a ten-story office building. You could economize even more and build a hundred stories high, like the Empire State Building or the Sears Tower. Then the surface area needed would be no more than the space within the corporate limits of Austin, Texas, to pick the first alphabetically among the many U.S. cities large enough. PhytyoFarm techniques could feed a hundred times the world's present population - say 500 billion people - with factory buildings a hundred stories high, on one percent of present farmland. To put it differently, if you raise your bed to triple bunk-bed height, you can grow enough food on the two levels between the floor and your bed to supply your nutritional needs.
- iigs 18y ago
  FWIW, they appear to be talking about something pretty different than cheeseburger and soda ingredients in the linked article, and I think this is where the problem is -- the subsidies to the midwest are ensuring the lifestyle of (sub-)urban people as well. For better or worse, telling Americans that they're not going to be able to eat meat at every meal is, for the time being, a non-starter. The article is really interesting. I guess if the question is "would it be cheaper to raise the food in the sun and drive it into town or use that energy to raise it in a building" it's possible the answer would be the latter, particularly if we're talking specifically about ensuring caloric and nutritional production, not specific foods. Furthermore, there are other points on the continuum that may also work well, such as the large grocery store that has a huge garden inside for fresh ingredients. I guess the proof is in the pudding. There must be a reason why foods are processed in rural areas and only transported into towns in high calorie form (HFCS, beef, concentrated juices). I suspect subsidies contribute, of course. However, there's too much variability in opportunities to explain it all, in my opinion.
  - gravitycop 18y ago
    they appear to be talking about something pretty different than cheeseburger and soda ingredients in the linked article It is a book chapter (6, of The Ultimate Resource II). Have you read the book?: http://www.juliansimon.com/writings/Ultimate_Resource http://www.juliansimon.com/writings/Ultimate_Resource
  - gravitycop 18y ago
    I guess the proof is in the pudding. The proof of the pudding is in the eating. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_proof_of_the_pudding_is_in_the_eating http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_proof_of_the_pudding_is_in_...
  - gravitycop 18y ago
    the subsidies to the midwest are ensuring the lifestyle of (sub-)urban people as well. Not if it costs more to produce food in rural areas than to produce the same food in urban areas. telling Americans that they're not going to be able to eat meat at every meal is [...] a non-starter. The statement of HeyLaughingBoy that I was responding to was: "Yeah, we'll just level midtown Manhattan to raise 100 acres of corn." What I had been referring to in my original comment was the raising of "dairy cows" in urban areas. If one could grow corn in a 100 story building, what would stop one from running an automated "Grain/hay/straw-fed" dairy cow operation, or automated beef or veal-calf operations, in a 100 story building?
gravitycop 18y ago
What's literally possible and what's economically and logistically feasible are not necessarily the same. Would it be less expensive to grow food in Manhattan, or in rural America?