via City Farmer
Urban Gardening in Bottle Caps.
Jeez those Japanese are inventive. How great would those boring old double paned lameos, just taking up space in your house (sheesh), look with bean sprouts pushing up out of bottle caps.
What a great reuse idea. What if these were biodegradable and could just be stuck in the dirt instead of the recycling bin?
Farmland Stocks – Investors seeing farmland as safer bet than stocks – Los Angeles Times.
Just this past week the notion struck me to invest in some acreage, hand it over to some farmer friends and see what grows out of it. Not that I think I’ll make a mint of the profits, maybe just some free mint; it just feels like a safe, sustainable and healthy way to think about the future. Granted, I do love to get my hands dirty and sweat like a hog, so having land at the ready where I can fulfill these desires would be a double incentive. Also, I could build a small house amid rows of chard and collards.
Just as I pondered this new investment strategy, I read the above linked story about folks shifting their stock portfolios toward agricultural land instead of brick and mortar corporations.
I guess this all ties into the whole “Where does my food come from” need felt by so many paranoid city folk who are tired of conference calls and concrete walks, desperate for anything that appears authentic:
For some, there is a sense of romanticism and relief at the idea of putting money into something as tangible as dirt.
Well, according to this report from the LA Times last fall, I better get on it. Certainly before all them Yankee stock-brokerin’ types catch wind of how fair our farming winters are here in Georgia: there’s nothing worse than a pin-striped fat cat stealing tomatoes off the vine.
Which brings me to an important point, a dividing one, among the good food/organic food/slow food movement: where does capitalism end, where does community begin?
“If people are willing to pay more for organic food, why can’t you make money by doing the right thing?”
The bottom line to organic farming, and agriculture in general, is so steep that it gets easy to play to the elite, the wealthy, the $30-dollar-a-plate crowd, to earn as much profit as possible on your work. And there is nothing wrong with that. But good food needs to focus on every citizen. I think if I invested in some land, I’d just want some tax breaks, if any, and make sure the food got to the people who deserve it: the house painters, the drywallers, the chicken plant folks, and the salesmen slinging junk out at La Pulga (flea market).
I think these savvy, profit driven business people look at the 12 percent increase in food prices expected this year and are strategically shifting their funds to capitalize on the inflation.
No matter what other people’s motives are, I’m going to check my books, see if I have any spare change (pennies buy acres, right?) and buy up some farm land.
Immigration Case Backlog Still Growing in FY 2011.
Wow. Please permit me to geek out for a moment, journalistic-wise. I just found an amazing tool from Syracuse University that tracks all kinds of indepth government data, analyzes it, and throws it upon the web for all to see.
Transactional Service Access Clearinghouse, or TRAC for short, is a Syracuse Univ. project. It’s about $60 a month to access most of their data, but the amount of free stuff is mountainous.They’ve a site for the DEA, for Homeland Security, for the ATF and the IRS. Find out where the backlogs are debilitating and the cover-ups are numerous.
Enjoy.
