nother article i came across recently…

Cornell University recently did a study to determine whether New York state could feed itself. The research is described in two articles published in 2006 and 2008 by the journal Renewable Agriculture and Food Systems. If all agricultural land were in use, and food distribution were optimized to minimize the total distance that food travels, New York state could, the researchers found, have 34 percent of its food needs met from within its boundaries. This is not encouraging news to those who live in New York City. New York once relied on New Jersey, still known as the Garden State, instead of having food shipped from across the country. But New Jersey farms have largely given way to soulless housing developments. Farming communities upstate, their downtowns boarded up and desolate, have been gutted by industrial farming.

http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/20090906_food_is_power_and_the_powerful_are_poisoning_us/

anyone have access to some local numbers for NC?

I wouldn’t be terribly surprised to see a lot of those “soulless housing developments” razed in the next decade. Detroit is basically doing that right now in an effort to curb blight. But would the newly razed land be suitable for farming?

No. Not in the short term. Over time, decades, sure. Some of it. A lot of it may very well be a superfund site. Of course, most people’s yards are basically superfund sites, and they still grow veggies in em.

The more logical, long-term solution, though, wouldnt be to turn it into ‘conventional’ farm land, but to utilize a more ‘holistic’ method of remediation, which would most likely include years of cover crop, followed by the addition of fruit tree guilds, and mix in veggies and the like. As many know these days, there are different varieties of mushrooms that can be used quite effectively to remove toxins, heavy metals, etc. from the soil/former soil.

i bet chris c has some ideas suitable for this discussion.

Well this presupposes some miraculous disappearance and removal of suburbia when the more likely scenario is a long slow decay. People aren’t just going to live out in the bushes when there are abandoned houses available to squat in. Detroit has been decaying for the last 40 years. The removal of old houses and entire neighborhoods there did not happen over night or quickly.

Turning that kind of land back to farming will have to be on a site by site basis. What was it before it became vacant again? Is the top soil gone? Is the soil polluted, on and on. Who will farm it and how? Yes land in and around the urban cores can be put back into production. There are already plenty of urban community gardens now. There just isn’t a one size fits all solution.