Excellent work. You have clearly and effectively demonstrated the value of urban farming.

Particularly interesting to my own project is your acknowledgment that “urban populations have the potential to feed only a small percentage of most urban populations,” and that their real value in terms of the health of urban communities is in “offering health education and exposure to nutritious dietary options.”

The next part of the model that we need to work on, therefore, is coming up with ways to get enough produce from local-regional rural areas into those urban communities to make up the shortfall in urban farming supply.

However, even if we find ways to create a distribution infrastructure that can accomplish this, we also need to acknowledge that the purchase of this food by people with limited means will need to be subsidized with pubic money, especially purchases of local-regional meat, poultry, and fish which are currently exempted from food subsidy programs. There is no sense working on the infrastructure if the people it is intended to serve cannot afford the food that the infrastructure makes it possible to bring in.

The policy angles for grounding such a position are numerous, the most compelling, from a budgetary standpoint, being public health. A subsidy enabling the purchase of a few hundred pounds per year of fresh, nutritious produce, including meat, poultry, and fish is a hell of a lot cheaper than paying for the health costs associated with widespread obesity. One can wish that the culture of our political community would develop to the point where it was unnecessary to ground policy in ways that make of human beings such objectified abstractions, but I am not holding my breath.

Keep up the good work. It seems to me that you are boring right into the core of the thing.