"Farms — complete with livestock, vegetables and fruit trees — are serving as the latest suburban amenity."

"It's called development-supported agriculture, a more intimate version of community-supported agriculture — a farm-share program commonly known as CSA."

In planning a new neighborhood, a developer includes some form of food production — a farm, community garden, orchard, livestock operation, edible park — that is meant to draw in new buyers, increase values and stitch neighbors together.

What about the noises and the smell?!

"We think of it as the best thing in the world... and they think of it as toxic and nasty and disgusting."

We = organic farmers. They = U.S. Food and Drug Administration.

It = shit.

"The 50 Greatest Breakthroughs Since the Wheel."

"The Atlantic recently assembled a panel of 12 scientists, entrepreneurs, engineers, historians of technology, and others to assess the innovations that have done the most to shape the nature of modern life."

I was interested to see nitrogen fixation at #11, because it's something I've got to tell you I had never thought much about that at all until last week when I was reading this excellent New Yorker article by Elizabeth Kolbert, "Head Count, Fertilizer, fertility, and the clashes over population growth," which begins with this topic:

Early in the history of agriculture, people realized — without, obviously, understanding the chemistry behind this insight—that when usable nitrogen ran low fields turned barren. Eight thousand years ago, farmers in the Middle East were already planting legumes, whose roots harbor nitrogen-fixing bacteria, in rotation with cereal crops, such as wheat. Later, Cato the Elder recommended that Romans “save carefully goat, sheep, cattle, and all other dung.” Bird shit is an excellent source of nitrogen, and in the early nineteenth century, when Europeans learned that there were mountains of the stuff on remote islands off Peru, the discovery inspired a guano rush; by the eighteen-fifties, Britain was importing four hundred million pounds of bird poop a year, and the United States a hundred and seventy million pounds....

By [Fritz] Haber’s day, the appetite for crop-friendly nitrogen was so huge that scientists had turned their attention skyward. Nitrogen is the most common element in the earth’s atmosphere.... but almost all of it is floating around in the intractable form of N2. When... Haber showed how to bust up N2 to produce ammonia — NH3 — he basically solved the problem. No more guano would be needed. Haber had, it was said, figured out how to turn air into bread.

"Is this the best way we can grow our big orchards?/Is this the best way we can grow our good fruit?"

"To fall like dry leaves to rot on my topsoil and be called by no name except deportees?"

Rains destroy lettuce crop...

... at Meadhouse:

"China is pushing ahead with a sweeping plan to move 250 million rural residents into newly constructed towns and cities over the next dozen years..."

"The government, often by fiat, is replacing small rural homes with high-rises, paving over vast swaths of farmland and drastically altering the lives of rural dwellers...."

Across China, bulldozers are leveling villages that date to long-ago dynasties. Towers now sprout skyward from dusty plains and verdant hillsides....

Instead of creating wealth, urbanization could result in a permanent underclass in big Chinese cities and the destruction of a rural culture and religion....

“For old people like us, there’s nothing to do anymore,” said He Shifang, 45, a farmer from the city of Ankang in Shaanxi Province who was relocated from her family’s farm in the mountains. “Up in the mountains we worked all the time. We had pigs and chickens. Here we just sit around and people play mah-jongg.”

"Reading Brooks’s laments about Snowden and 'the fraying of the social fabric,' I found myself thinking about Norman Rockwell..."

"... if not in the same way Brooks might. (In 2008, after what he saw as a rhetorical triumph by Sarah Palin, Brooks wrote, 'Somewhere in heaven Norman Rockwell is smiling.') The image that came to mind was one of the panels from Rockwell’s 'Four Freedoms' series: the one on freedom of speech, in which a man stands up at what looks like a town meeting. He might be about twenty-nine. He is wearing a work jacket, so maybe he’s a high-school drop-out. There are better dressed people in the hall. And they are listening to him."

Writes Amy Davidson in The New Yorker, with the sentimentality that Rockwell haters loathe about Rockwell. Here's the referenced Rockwell painting:



I was going to snark that there's no way that guy is 29, but then I asked Meade, "How old does this guy look," and he said, "29." And, "That's what guys who work on the farm look like when they're 29."

Then I tried my other idea: "How do we know he's not a communist, dressed that way to trick the naively idealistic Norman-Rockwell-loving folks of that small town? He's dressed like a folksinger. He could be Pete Seeger." And Meade said: "You can tell by that greasy dirt on his jacket. That guy does real work."

We talked about the difference between this idealized farmer — with his real dirt, in a real place, with real people — and Edward Snowden — who operated within computer networks and evanesced into Asia. But it's 2013, and maybe that Rockwell character does need to be a man detached from the American soil, floating out there in unmediated space. And yet — as Meade said — "He's Tea Party."

"[T]he earliest farmers expended way more calories in growing food than they did in hunting and gathering it."

So, why do it?

These societies had seen the value of owning stuff – they were already recognizing "private property rights," [said says Samuel Bowles, the director of the Behavioral Sciences Program at the Santa Fe Institute in New Mexico]. That's a big transition from nomadic cultures, which by and large don't recognize individual property. All resources, even in modern day hunter-gatherers, are shared with everyone in the community....

[And t]he early farmers had one advantage over their nomadic cousins: Raising kids is much less work when one isn't constantly on the move. And so, they could and did have more children.

NYT exposé of the Pigford settlement "shows that it became a runaway train, driven by racial politics, pressure from influential members of Congress..."

"... and law firms that stand to gain more than $130 million in fees. In the past five years, it has grown to encompass a second group of African-Americans as well as Hispanic, female and Native American farmers. In all, more than 90,000 people have filed claims. The total cost could top $4.4 billion."

From the start, the claims process prompted allegations of widespread fraud and criticism that its very design encouraged people to lie: because relatively few records remained to verify accusations, claimants were not required to present documentary evidence that they had been unfairly treated or had even tried to farm. Agriculture Department reviewers found reams of suspicious claims, from nursery-school-age children and pockets of urban dwellers, sometimes in the same handwriting with nearly identical accounts of discrimination....

As a senator, Barack Obama supported expanding compensation for black farmers, and then as president he pressed for $1.15 billion to pay those new claims. Other groups quickly escalated their demands for similar treatment. In a letter to the White House in September 2009, Senator Robert Menendez of New Jersey, a leading Hispanic Democrat, threatened to mount a campaign “outside the Beltway” if Hispanic farmers were not compensated....

Read the whole thing.

ADDED: This is what we need big media for: "The Times’s examination was based on thousands of pages of court and confidential government documents, as well as interviews with dozens of claimants, lawyers, former and current government officials and others involved in the cases over the past 14 years. Many officials spoke on the condition of anonymity, citing rules against disclosing internal government deliberations and, in a few cases, the desire not to be drawn into a racially charged controversy." Thanks for this work.

IN THE COMMENTS: I am criticized for thanking the NYT. They should have been all over this story long ago. Why weren't they? And, another way to look at that question is: Why are they at it now?

"Across the country, the business of growing pot is fast becoming mainstream."

Says the Wall Street Journal:

But it turns out that trying to make a profit in this business is harder than expected. When grown and sold legally, marijuana can be an expensive proposition, with high startup costs, a host of operational headaches and state regulations that a beet farmer could never imagine. In Colorado, for example, managers must submit to background checks that include revealing tattoos. The state also requires cameras in every room that has plants; Mr. Klug relies on 48 of them....

When grown and sold legally?! Why is the Wall Street Journal writing that? You can't grow and sell marijuana legally. This is all a crime under federal law.

Prices for pot, meanwhile, have plummeted, in large part because of growing competition. And bank financing is out of the question: Federal law doesn't allow these businesses, and agents sometimes raid growers even in states where it is legal.

Doesn't allow? You mean: Makes it a felony. Growing marijuana is a criminal enterprise. And there are no "states where it is legal." It is illegal in all of the states under federal law. The states are in the United States — haven't you heard?!

... Pink House Blooms is a $3 million-a-year business, with 2,000 plants in a converted warehouse in an industrial part of Denver... To get started on this scale, [Elliott] Klug says he sank more than $3 million — some of it borrowed from family — into the operation. He says Pink House Blooms is profitable, with demand up 30% some months....

His advice for anyone who wants to become rich by legally dealing pot: "Start with lots of money."

Shouldn't that be: Start by not worrying about what "legally" means? This man is attracting attention, getting his name and these big numbers in print in the WSJ, which presumably loves to profile the risk-takers of business.

Last December, President Barack Obama said his administration had "bigger fish to fry" than going after recreational users. 

Nice for the recreational users to know they aren't big enough, but what solace is that for the man trying to become rich by dealing pot? He is trying to be the big fish. He's trying to get rich in a market that anyone who refuses to commit crimes cannot enter. What a terrible situation! And yet the prices are already plummeting, we're told, because of all the competition. Klug's hope of getting rich is premised on the illegality.

"So far, few traditional farmers lining up to grow marijuana in Washington state, Colorado."

WaPo reports:

Marijuana remains illegal under federal law....

The Justice Department has not said whether it will try to block the two states from implementing their new laws, passed late last year.....

In addition, marijuana is a crop that can’t be insured, and federal drug law bars banks from knowingly serving the industry....

Both states are in the process of developing rules for a legal marijuana industry....

How can state rules possibly make the industry legal? They can only make chaos that might conceivably move Congress to change the federal law. I don't see that coming any time soon. The Justice Department might say something encouraging, but will the next President's Justice Department stick with whatever position Eric Holder embraces?

Even if you felt sure you wouldn't be prosecuted, would you want to sign up on an official list as someone who is conspicuously committing an ongoing felony? Would you switch from a legal crop and expose yourself like that? And even if some farmers would go ahead and violate the criminal law — presumably because the upside profits are high — does the inability to buy crop insurance and use banks wreck the whole idea?

Dozens of marijuana experts, who have been growing plants for medical use or in secret for illegal use, are educating state officials about the potential for the crop. Probably 95 percent of those people choose to grow their plants indoors, despite higher costs, to control light and temperature, improve quality and increase yields....

Indoor crops generally allow for up to three harvests per season, compared to just one harvest for an outdoor crop, and allow for easier security measures. 

So "traditional farmers" have an entirely separate reason for not responding to the new program. You can't be growing marijuana amber-waves-of-grain-on-the-fruited-plain style. This stuff will be grown in big warehouses, pulling in loads of electricity for intense lighting and heavily guarded with guns! guns! guns!

Oh, but here's a little old lady, "Gail Besemer, who grows flowers and vegetables near Deming, Wash., [who] has expressed interest in a producers’ license."

Besemer already has three hoop houses, which are essentially temporary greenhouses, but could see expanding her business slightly to grow marijuana for a local clientele in northwest Washington.

Slightly! Flowers! Grandma!

However, “I’m concerned about druggies invading my property — ne’er-do-wells invading my property to steal, to get free dope,” she said. “Security would be an issue.”

Where do you get off with that contempt for the consumers of the product you want to grow? Seems to me, these are your people. Don't insult them.

“My family is not particularly excited about me being interested in this. But if someone has an integrated farm, growing a number of different crops, I would think it would be a high profit plant,” she said. “Taxation and security might get in the way of profits, and it might end not being so profitable.”

Yeah, you'd better think about it, lady. There's a reason it's a high profit plant. If it weren't for all these problems, any idiot could grow his own in his house. Take away the obstacles, and it's not a business at all. Which removes half of the attraction for the government, since there won't be anything to tax if there isn't a big rules-heavy structure burdening business. This isn't a game for the little old lady with her flowers and hoop houses. But that's the screwy, sentimental anecdote The Washington Post ties to plant in our brain.

"Humans need straight lines, nature doesn't. Indecisive river and orderly farmers, central Asia."

Tweeting photos from space.