I envy the folks who are able to do this. If I had the means, I'd probably have already fled back to the country.
I can't help but think that it is unsustainable though. Supporting a large, rural population is less efficient than urbs or even suburbs.
Global warming, increasing global competition... I can't help but think the people fleeing the cities will be forced back by incentives and economics in a decade.
> Supporting a large, rural population is less efficient than urbs or even suburbs.
Whenever I see statement like this, it makes me wonder if you know where your food comes from. Because for the most part, the rural populations are supporting the cities. If the supply chains in this country were to fail, it is not the rural communities who would be scrounging for food and water. We'd be just fine.
I don't know how it is in the US, but in Germany at least a quarter of the population lives in "rural" parts of the country, but only a single digit percentage actually works in agriculture.
The US Department of Agriculture estimates that 10.9% of the
population is employed in agriculture, food and related industries. More than half (6.4% of pop.) of those are employed in food service (i.e., waitstaff at restaurants). Only 1.3% of the population are actually employed on farms.
Imagine the support infrastructure farmers and family need (schools, medical, stores, some entertainment maybe). And then all the infrastructure those workers need.
It’s not like every farmer is happy living in a tent alone, traveling offroad only to deliver their crops and buy seeds in the city. They like some form of community.
It may be “inefficient” but if you want to be efficient, everyone will starve.
But... the comment isn't about where the food comes from or who would suffer from a supply chain collapse, it's about efficiency. I think the point was that cities are efficient because gestures vaguely towards economies of scale. It's easier to distribute goods (or services) to a highly-concentrated mass of people than to multiple disjoint locations.
I’m very confident I had a significantly smaller carbon footprint when I was in New York than compared to my time in Dallas. Even though I lived a much more vibrant life.
You'd be right. Dense cities have much lower carbon footprints than sprawling, suburban areas.[0] You can plug it into this map to compare any place you'd like.[1]
The definition of rural is not agriculture, it's non-urban, with urban being defined by population size (and linked strongly to density).
To avoid arguing semantics, supporting a large population in low-density is less efficient than in high-density.
Yet while there is climate change we're seeing urban sprawl of low-density communities continue.
Meanwhile, they're pushing out the original farmers due to price increases, more than anything, the food argument doesn't hold up.
By the way, plenty of suburbia is just as bad or much worse than similarly low-density rural areas. Living spaces should aspire to be walkable, that requires some level of density.
This seems like a statement about one thing (the unsustainability of cities like los angeles compared with cities like new york) being used to try and support increasing densification everywhere. Agriculture-integrated communities that close a lot of input loops will unquestionably be more efficient than cities that leave them open.
Being sold on the idea of using machines and chemical inputs for everything is the reason most farmers can't make ends meet. There are other paradigms of agriculture that are much more efficient; unfortunately farmers are bending over backwards to feed the folks in the city who want very specific things, and don't care about the consequences.
No, most farmers can't make ends meet because food is a commodity, because it benefits from economies of scale, and because their competition is highly optimized mega-farms with large warchests.
Without the machines and chemical inputs, roughly half of the world's population would starve in a few months. They significantly increase yields, and reduce required labour, at the cost of... Problems that future people will have to deal with.
The specific thing city people want is the same thing that all people want. Cheap food. There is zero reason to turn this into a culture war, when it's basic economics. Most people can't afford paying $7 for a gallon of milk, or $30 got a chicken.
Certain cultivars of fruits and vegetables are commodities; there are others that aren't, until the market for them grows beyond a certain size. Look at the price history for Honeycrisp apples for an example. Farmers choose to grow commodity cultivars because they're easier to sell in standardized markets. Of course, you could also sell in un-standardized markets, which is how a lot of producers pay their bills without growing on thousands of acres.
If we tried to grow crops in the mainstream agricultural style, but just subtracted machines and pesticides, maybe half the world's population would starve. If the places people lived were integrated with diversified, guilded orchard silvopasture, there would be a surplus of food without machines or pesticides, those people would just have to go pick it themselves.
People obviously don't just want cheap food, given the success of Whole Foods.
The culture war comes in when people act like there's only one way of farming, and one way of integrating farming and the rest of society. Y'all are firing the first shots, don't be surprised when people shoot back.
I'm well aware of all this, my parents run a small profitable hobby farm selling $25 chickens and eggs for $8/dozen to wealthy patrons. A friend of mine does microgreens in her back yard for local restaurants in a small resort town. Four of my great-grandparents were kolhoz farmers.
It doesn't scale, though, and you're going to get bread riots if you tried to.
> If the places people lived were integrated with diversified, guilded orchard silvopasture, there would be a surplus of food without machines or pesticides, those people would just have to go pick it themselves.
Nobody has the time and energy to go do that and pay their bills. Farm work is really friggin' hard.
It doesn't scale to New York city. It could easily scale to suburban areas and small/mid-size towns.
People "pick" their stuff at the grocery store. If you have a few acres of diversified permaculture within a mile of your house, it's not that different to walk a trail through a food forest and forage for everything you need. I guarantee it'd be cheaper and higher quality than the grocery store too. Animal products would cost more, but they're artificially cheap in a very unsustainable way now, so that's fine IMO.
Permaculture does a great job of reducing the labor involved in farming. Harvest is still a lot of work because of the sheer quantity of it you have to do if you're taking things to market, but if people are coming to you and harvesting themselves for a discount on food, I think that makes it workable for everyone.
> People obviously don't just want cheap food, given the success of Whole Foods.
Whole Foods is only able to exist in a tiny portion of markets consisting of the top quintiles of income and wealth. A simple search on Maps shows it’s not available for 80%+ of people in a city.
And even then, it had to sell to Amazon because it wasn’t doing so hot. Most Americans can’t afford anything but cheap, or one level up from cheap food.
>Farmland owned by city banks. Can we just stop with this BS?
The idea that the city banks are going to come operate (or, in fact, even own) the rural farmland is BS.
If the pandemic hasn't demonstrated to you how fragile the global supply chain is, I'm not sure what to tell you. People have been unsupported by cities for a lot longer than 5000 years.
The resiliency of the global supply chain this past year has actually blown my mind. The worst US consumers saw was, what, paper towel and toilet paper shortages for a couple months?
The tragedy of New York, in my opinion. Upstate has such an outsize political influence compared to New York and surrounding areas. It makes no sense. What's sad is we have bought into the romanticism of the rural. We don't even challenge our lack of political power.
Upstate exists because New York exists. New York doesn't need the people upstate to survive. "Oh yeah but upstate is the source of drinking water for New York," someone told me proudly. As if the humans upstate had any contribution to the water cycle. If anything, the people upstate are polluting New York's water supply.
To add insult to injury, all these upstate politicians get to decide how much of the taxes collected in New York and surrounding areas are spent in New York and surrounding areas. Everything from CUNY to the MTA.
Yes, some people do need to work on farms so that everyone can eat. Improvements in agriculture technology over the last 5000 years mean farms require much less human labor than in the past. So today, we don't need a "large, rural population".
I really hope the switch to electric transportation and to biking (whenever/wherever possible) will make big cities better to live. And that remote work in suburbs will incentive communities to re-create many smaller and more human-like down-towns.
I can't help but think that it is unsustainable though. Supporting a large, rural population is less efficient than urbs or even suburbs.
Global warming, increasing global competition... I can't help but think the people fleeing the cities will be forced back by incentives and economics in a decade.