Posted on 12/27/2009 3:08:59 PM PST by reaganaut1
On the city's east side, where auto workers once assembled cars by the millions, nature is taking back the land.
Cottonwood trees grow through the collapsed roofs of homes stripped clean for scrap metal. Wild grasses carpet the rusty shells of empty factories, now home to pheasants and wild turkeys.
This green veil is proof of how far this city has fallen from its industrial heyday and, to a small group of investors, a clear sign. Detroit, they say, needs to get back to what it was before Henry Ford moved to town: farmland.
"There's so much land available and it's begging to be used," said Michael Score, president of the Hantz Farms, which is buying up abandoned sections of the city's 139-square-mile landscape and plans to transform them into a large-scale commercial farm enterprise.
"Farming is how Detroit started," Score said, "and farming is how Detroit can be saved."
The urban agricultural movement has grown nationwide in recent years, as recession-fueled worries prompted people to raise fruits and vegetables to feed their families and perhaps sell at local farmers' markets.
Large gardens and small farms -- usually 10 acres or less -- have cropped up in thriving cities such as Berkeley, where land is tough to come by, and struggling Rust Belt communities such as Flint, Mich., which hopes to encourage green space development and residents to eat locally grown foods.
In Detroit, hundreds of backyard gardens and scores of community gardens have blossomed and helped feed students in at least 40 schools and hundreds of families.
It is the size and scope of Hantz Farms that makes the project unique. Although company officials declined to pinpoint how many acres they might use, they have been quoted as saying that they plan to farm up to 5,000 acres
(Excerpt) Read more at latimes.com ...
“Cottonwood trees grow through the collapsed roofs of homes stripped clean for scrap metal. Wild grasses carpet the rusty shells of empty factories, now home to pheasants and wild turkeys. “
Ahhh, an eco-paradise.
Look up “Agenda 21”.
And in 10 year or less, union farm help will be demanding $50 an hour to pick lettuce
You know according to Jim Rogers Agriculture is the way to go says there will be food shortages and some say we have economic armageddon due to the shortages
http://www.benzinga.com/media/cnbc/21844/rogers-holdings-thinks-agriculture-has-to-go-higher
Global Food Crisis 2010 Means Financial Armageddon
http://www.marketoracle.co.uk/Article16063.html
The Cesar Chavez’s of that union stronghold would ruin that. You would have union corn pickers making $30 per hour and the government bailing it out due to the price of corn being so high. It’s a great idea, but until Michigan can shake off it’s unionistic, Communistic monkey, Michigan as a whole is doomed to die into a part-time tourism economy.
20 years ago, I did weatherization rehab on ghetto houses in Detroit for a year or so. I was as amazed by the architecture of these once stately homes as I was appalled by the abuse they had endured. At that time, I knew that even if good people moved in, the houses were for the most part beyond any hope of repair.
Now, farming is about the best bet. Tear down entire suqare mile sections. Tear them down to the sewer pipes. The streets themselves are not worth keeping.
Actually, buy teh land, rent it out to every SWAT team, fire department, National Guard, Homeland Security, Special Ops outfit you can find. Let them have at it at a rental cost that will allow you to recoup the cost of demo, then in two years, build the farm...and hire plenty of security. Or hire one of those SWAT teams.
I can attest to the pheasants, I almost hit one a block before Conner while driving to my now closed plant on Conner and Charlevoix........Thats the same neighborhood where I would release possums on the way to work that I trapped around my house
The plant's storage yard has always had pheasants running around in there..........
Ridiculous story. The first thing that will happen is a soil test that will dictate that there will be no farming on most of that land. Next is that the inner city folks won’t show up to do that “slave” labor.
And most important of all. Michigan is primarily rural. What isn’t swamp or forest is already farmland.
Now he and his type celebrate it as a solution??????/
I'm confused?
Why not build a bunch of job-creating maximum-security terrorist prisons?
fantastic returnng Gaia to pre colonial bliss
2010 thru 2020 = Urban Deconstruction Grant
Either way you pay.
Exactly, exactly, and exactly.
My father in 1937 at age 19 went to work at Revere Copper. That same year, he came back home via the train and saw the dirt being turned over near Toledo and said he could do that and do better. In Pennsylvania, he did. He farmed the best land available at the time and then bought it. And he paid cash. Can you imagine that? No Goldman Sachs, no JP Morgan, Nothing. He wouldn’t have anything to do with this these ___s.
As he said before he died, “I’m glad I lived the last 80 years and not the next 80 years”. How I miss him and people like him. We have few like him today.
He was so right.
Plenty of $hit there so stuff should grow pretty good. Problem is, it requires work to plant, water and then pick it so that won’t happen.
I would imagine that the soil in Detroit is loaded with PCBs and other contaminants, so any large scale farming would be subject to immediate “environmental racism” lawsuits.
Also, the local “community organizers” would call the hiring of local labor a “sharecropper arrangement” and there would be no hope for anything.
It’s pathetic that these guys can’t come up with a better idea than this. Apparently, turning Detroit into farmland comes above shutting down the unions to these fools.
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