April, 2003

I've long had an idea. One that needs a small amount of capital and a large amount of work. One that, it seems to me, is long past any technical problems, yet way short of someone actually doing it.

The idea is to grow vegetables close to the people who eat them. Breakthrough Idea, huh? As a huge and continuing side benefit, we can cut costs and rid ourselves of all (or most) of those pesky insecticides and preservatives that make lettuce have a very strange aftertaste. Transport, the need of trucking from California to the supermarkets gave us aftertaste lettuce. Ditto for tennis ball tomatoes, lovely-looking but pretty much inedible with skin a quarter inch thick. Tomatoes are meant to be garden grown and picked ripe.

That's no small complaint. A homegrown garden tomato is a thing of joy forever. Most of us have nearly forgotten what backyard asparagus, sweet corn, cucumbers, lettuce, peas, beans and tomatoes taste like.

Trust me, they're great. If you don't believe me, check with grandma.

So, my idea is that some smart farmer, who's been squeezed out, bought off or otherwise separated from his land is going to start farming in the city. He's going to stop complaining about being industrialized off his land and farm under industrial roofs. If you can't beat ‘em, join ‘em. After all, cities are where the hungry people are. Industrial Farmer is going to leave his ageing tractor, all those rusty cultivators and his seed drill behind. Just abandon ‘em to whatever developer connived with the bank to cut him loose from nature's work. Gonna start farming under lights, right smack-dab in the city and take his vacations in the country. Gonna do the hydroponic thing---grow lights, water and a forty-hour week for a change.

He'll probably miss them to start with, but corn borer and potato blight, drought and hail storms he won't miss the least little bit and he'll just have to content himself with getting up at 8am instead of 4am. No more winters fretting over last year and worrying about next---hydroponic gardens grow the year ‘round. He'll no longer have the comfort of those long, boozy winters, fixing a broken harrow with frozen fingers and watching Oprah. Might not miss that either. Who knows?

But where to establish these Hanging Gardens of Babylon?

No problem. Every medium to huge-sized city I've ever been in has an inventory of no-longer-used industrial buildings that worry the City Fathers sick when they make their semi annual speech to the Rotary Club. "Deteriorating neighborhoods," they lament. "Shrinking industrial base," they moan, gazing out across a roomful of businessmen, mostly guys trading information technology, who wouldn't know an industrial base from home plate at Wrigley Field.

But they're right, these worried politicians. There's a bunch of buildings out there, all going to hell. Good, solid brick buildings with the windows busted out of them. Too many of course, and in the wrong neighborhoods for tear-downs to make way for shopping malls. Our cities are already malled out, but no one's growing food within a thousand miles of most of them. Except in summer, during that brief period when city-folk charm themselves at the Saturday farmer's market. SUV's lined up in the school parking lot, these new age hunter-gatherers get a brief taste of the way things were, the way they could be again, even when the snow flies.

Why not have the best of both worlds and grow these delicacies year ‘round under lights, within a mile or two of the supermarkets and restaurants that desperately need them all year? A continual harvest from waist-high growing benches, accomplished for a living wage by agricultural workers with pension plans and health insurance. Preservative-free, additive-free, pesticide-free, fungicide-free designer vegetables grown where they're consumed, from picking to supermarket in the same day.

The buildings are there. The technology is there. The market is there. Just add water and way less capital than it takes to build another Wal-Mart.

Get out of the Archives and read what Jim's writing today