A city of farmers

A story in last week's Free Press says a local Detroit man wants to start a for-profit farm within the city borders. If you step back and think about the transformation of Detroit over the last fifty years, from before the race riots in the 1960s to where it stands today, it's an incredible change. The amount of vacant land in Detroit can be kind of unnerving -- it feels, at times, like an abandoned city. Nothing like it once was.


Urban farming has been on the rise in Detroit for the past few years, with community activists getting together to plant gardens on abandoned lots. Now John Hantz wants to take that one step further, and make a business that would plant veggies, use wind turbines for energy, grow Christmas trees, and even compete with some suburban farms by selling cider and offering pony rides. It's a great idea, if Hantz can swing it, because he's looking for the city and state to donate some land or sell it to him at a nominal cost.


At the end of the story, the comments from the community farming activist kind of surprised me, because you'd think there's more than enough room for both community farming and for-profit farming. In fact, some of the workers trained through the community farms may actually end up with jobs at a for-profit farm, no? But there wasn't much room for the woman to speak in the story, so maybe she had more to say that didn't make it in. I'll be interested to see how the city, which desperately needs new businesses, reacts to this idea.