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It Will Be an Election Unlike Any We’ve Lived Through. Are the Democrats Prepared?
(newrepublic.com)
this post was submitted on 01 Jan 2024
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politics
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A quarter acre of land in my neighborhood runs for $300k. There is nothing I can do to that soil that's going to justify a $300k upfront investment in urban agriculture. Nevermind what this prepper nonsense is going to accomplish in the event the End of The World isn't happening within the next five years.
The cool thing about farmland is that its only really useful if its being worked. And the realization that we're ultimately going to have to come to terms with is that the folks who "own" the land are very far removed from the folks who give the land value.
At the same time, subsistence farming isn't a particularly productive lifestyle in a post-industrial world. So telling everyone to run out to Iowa and become soybean farmers is not good financial advice.
I find it funny that you discount learning to grow crops as something that doesn't help and can only be done on a $300k piece of land but also acknowledge the land alone isn't what gives it value. Yes that's why it's important to know how to grow food. Which is apparently only useful to know if the world ends in the next five years according to you.
It seems like you're deliberately interpreting eveything I say in a way you can argue against it instead of the way I wrote it. Never told people to move, never told them to buy a farm, never told them to buy land but you argue against all those things as if my points hinges on them. What I said was learn to grow crops, not simply a vegetable garden that relies on annual trips to buy more miracle grown. That doesn't mean you need a farm.
Also interestingly enough if we check the CPI food items are rising faster than most other costs. Also sustainable and urban agribusiness demand is growing. Posturing yourself to understand and take advantage of that is the opposite of a financial mistake.
You don't need to know a ton about agricultural science to understand concepts like "units per sqft of productivity". In fact, these are more business-minded questions that someone interested in investing in farmland might ask, particularly if they were sold on some modernist "Vertical Farming" application of the science and wanted to sink $300k into a quarter acre with the hopes that it could be maximally productive.
But then that's where you run into serious problems. Understanding the agriculture at a professional level is very different from understanding it abstractly from the financial perspective. Suggesting that people just get a professional education in both things becomes even more untenable than the original "buy land and make it agriculturally productive" pitch originally sounds.
Because the underlying energy, fertilizer, and water costs are rising faster than most other costs. So the real brain-buster move is to invest in these things, rather than trying to compete with Tyson in raising chickens.
Its always growing because its routinely failing. The boom-bust cycle of agriculture technology companies tracks with the rest of the tech sector. And, like the tech sector, you're far better off investing in Cargill or Archer Daniels than going long on Eden Green Technology.