In a controversial article on the Eco-Centric TIME blog today, Bryan Walsh argues that organic farming is not efficient enough to be sustainable. Or his argument runs somewhere along those lines. Walsh seems to believe yield-per-acre is the same thing as "efficiency." For no clear reason, he keeps asserting that conventional agriculture is more efficient, presumably on ecological grounds, and then only explains himself by quoting statistics on how much more productive industrial agriculture can be per unit of land, while referring vaguely to the downsides of clear-cutting more forest. “Efficiency” can be such a slippery, dangerous goal, because it is value-neutral.  I just took off my gardening gloves and put on my rebuttal gloves. Let’s get into it.

"Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to [eat well],
The wretched [compost] of your teeming shore.
Send these, the home[stead]less, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my [trowel] beside the golden door!"

Two recent pieces of news have me wondering: what is the good life in 2012?

Announcing Farmscape's new book!

In Beans from My Father, Farmscape argues with itself on almost every page. In this lively autobiography, Farmscape explores its background as both a social and environmental cause, and also a business. What does it mean to be a mission-based, conscientous organization, and yet also feel compelled to break-even on the balance sheet?

After college, the founders of Farmscape worked for three years to develop a business that would feed a city on sustainable, local, and maximally fresh ingredients. They took the business model to the sprawling metropolis of Los Angeles in search of its "authentic" self. They wanted to see if a theory would work for real...

At Farmscape we're proud to grow food in what an academic might call the “interstitial spaces” of the city. The nooks, and the crannies, the parkways, the vacant lots, the parks, and side yards between buildings, but most especially the residential landscapes. Places that more often tend to be under the dominion of turf grass, weeds, ivy, and trees.

What’s exciting about farming in the Space Between? We take land that agriculture has forsaken, surrendered to urban development. But we turn it into intensive urban gardens, and then we can harvest a quality of produce fresher than any distant farm field ever could. Meanwhile, we don't have to leave the city to do our work.

You're sitting on LAX --> LGA... Wait! What's that down there speckled across the yards of LA? That's Farmscape, spreading like a good idea. 

Pictured above, you can see our network of thriving urban farms here in the City of Angels. We're now in our third year of operation, this summer will be our sixth (biannual) season. To date we've established over 200 urban farms and we manage more than 100 of them on a weekly basis.