Comments on: Bad Seed Farm in Kansas City Brings Urban Farming to the Next Level: Legislation

By: Janet Majure

Janet Majure — Thu, 10 Sep 2009 18:02:30 +0000

Thanks for this update, Paula.

By: pcrossfield

pcrossfield — Tue, 08 Sep 2009 15:40:06 +0000

Please do! I look forward to hearing more as the story progresses.

By: Katherine Kelly

Katherine Kelly — Tue, 08 Sep 2009 15:38:20 +0000

Paula, thanks for the well-written article on this issue. Kansas City, MO really has been generally supportive of urban agriculture, so bumping up against code limitations was unexpected. We’re getting good responses from city councilpeople on addressing the current grey areas, and I’m hopeful we’ll come up with code rewrites that are helpful for the farmers and for the other residents! we’ll keep you posted-

By: Bill McCann

Bill McCann — Sat, 05 Sep 2009 19:30:41 +0000

Thanks for the great article on urban farms, and also for all of your many other works. I live in the Central Valley of Ca., and operate a small custom meat processing facility. Most of my life has been lived in a pretty rural enviornment, and what a change I have seen over the years. It used to be when you went to a farm you would see a nice vegetable garden behind the house, and if you looked in the shop you would find a good number of tools and impliments that were made right there on site. A familar refrain was that of: “If you can make it here; why go to town to buy it”. When you go to a farm now; the garden is gone and replaced by a place to park the RV, and boat, and the shop is full of store bought tools that don’t get near the use that the hand made ones did.
One of the most common questions that I hear about my business is: “I guess that you must do a lot of business with these ranchers around here”. The answer to that is no! The ranchers usually buy there beef at Costco with the money they get from selling their calf and cows to a big Midwest feedlot. They are not interested in eating beef that they produce when they can go to the store and buy a NY steak for less than they would pay for one that they produced themselves. “Why grow or make when you can buy” seems to be the new mantra. Thanks again, and keep up the great work.

By: sally oakley

sally oakley — Sat, 05 Sep 2009 11:49:20 +0000

i love this story. there will always be those who rise up and say no!

By: Jason

Jason — Fri, 04 Sep 2009 21:37:32 +0000

It is exactly this disconnect — that people see cheap, store-bought food as somehow making homegrown food irrelevant and an oddity — that keeps people from creating healthier lives and communities. There is a sense of “why bother” attached to home-growing — largely because the real effort and cost behind store-bought food is hidden: Why should I grow something if I can buy it at the store?

What needs to happen is a shift away from a cheap relationship with food toward a situation where one asks, If I can grow it at home, why would I buy it at the store?