LogFAQs > #952813157

Unbridled9 posted...

Unfortunately the scale of farming you need in order to sustain requires open fields. I don't think there's enough space for a city to self-sustain even if every citizen went farmer.

Edit: And even if there was; the primary advantage of a city is being able to leverage it's population for industry; which you wouldn't be able to do if you converted things into farmland. You can set up new production lines but you can't make tomatoes grow faster.

I'm not actually arguing that we try to make cities self-sustainable completely on urban agriculture, only illustrating that rural farmers, while certainly important, might not be as integral as Whiskey thinks. Farmers need this whole infrastructure to survive too anyway. It's kinda goes off that McDonald's peace theory thing: the more ingrained into a capitalist infrastructure you are, the more damage you do to yourself by rocking the boat. It's why two nations that each have a McDonald's are rarely ever seen going at war with each other.