Microfarms come to South L.A. frontyards, bringing fresh produce to food deserts

Great hobby (I really mean that... my wife and I grow, process, and preserve a significant portion of our own produce in our front lawn), but ultimately, these are only marginally less wasteful than lawns. The distribution costs (environmental and otherwise) of having many small farms easily overpowers the current situation, which allows for more efficiency. Plus, it takes quite a bit of intense effort to farm enough to support people.

We'd do better with large-scale reforms like stop paying farmers to grow food that goes to waste or encouraging more meat consumption (meat is pound for pound more efficient at energy storage for humans, and allows the conversion of faster-growing native species into actual food, if we did it right).

beyond the fact that farming & industry use most of our water in CA, shouldn't greywater/runoff recapture+storage (instead of using fresh water) help with water usage? and because it's a hobby, there is little wasted opportunity cost, in either land or labor.

and though it's unlikely to make any difference in the farming calculus, south LA is underserved by fresh grocery, so this seems a nice little intersection of empowerment and quality of life improvement in regards to that problem.

there's really no vacant infill in south LA unfortunately, and despite it's bad rap, commercial rents in the area are nearly as inflated as everywhere else in LA. we really need to structurally discourage unproductive economic activity (like rents) to get better outcomes for all.

Seems like food desert is a very relative/subjective term. The article mentions there being a major grocery store one mile away. On a recent trip to Atlanta I visited a neighborhood where there was no significant grocery store for more like a 5 mile radius. That’s quite a lot worse. And there are plenty of outer suburban/exurban locations where the a particular neighborhood may be 10 miles or more from the nearest grocery store.

I think the defining characteristic here is the presence of a large population of lower income and lower car ownership (hence distance to a good grocery store being a greater difficulty).

As far as subsidizing a local grocer, perhaps that’s a good idea, but I suspect that if the real problem is serving car-less urbanites then we don’t just need one big grocery store, but rather a number of smaller markets spread through the area so that it’s never a burdensome walk to get fresh food. This is how grocers used to operate. However, small grocery stores don’t have the same economics of mega stores, and inevitably charge more than supermarkets as a result.

It’s not obvious to me that there’s a good way to define a subsidy such that walkable neighborhood markets can offer mega store prices - but only in low income neighborhoods that need the support.

On the other hand, something like community markets and micro farms - if they’re run and organized by the people who live in the neighborhood - seem like a very positive development, since they are empowering people to save money / make some extra utilizing the resources they have and keeping the work and value creation inside their own neighborhood.

There’s no reasonable way to have property rights and not have rents. Over time, property rights have proven to be one of the most beneficial elements of systems that efficiently allocate resources and produce wealth for all, so eliminating them is a bad idea.

What we need is to fix corrupt local governments that prohibit the supply of new real estate via redevelopment and densification. Having lived in Houston for a while, I saw first-hand how different things are when there’s a robust competitive market with new supply constantly added to (mostly) keep up with demand. If you do a poor job as a landlord you’ll go out of business fast.

Anti-trust, anti-monopoly reform is what we need most, and no more regulatory capture. Perhaps compared with more efficient redistributive measures like the negative income tax or land value tax.