Walt Brunson on Pusing Urban Agriculture
Walt Brunson
Pusing Urban Agriculture
Claims and stances
Transcript
- 0:00 One of my uh kind of favorite topics to look into is agriculture and just how it's how it's developed over the you know the past hundred years and seeing the the rise of the agricultural, the green revolution, um, and then kind of that food supply chain that that we as as you know everyday people don't really see that much of.
- 0:18 You know, you go to the grocery store and you see you see everything on the shelf, you know, year round you have access to avocados and bell peppers and celery and kale and all these vegetables that you know they don't grow year round in in your location.
- 0:33 Um I think something that is really interesting to me is the use the the use of land and the land allocation that we see in modern uh agriculture.
- 0:44 And I think it's uh something we really need to look at because this whole monoculture, monocrop system where you have hundreds of thousands of acres as as one crop, you know, you have a uh half of Minnesota is is you know soybeans or something.
- 0:58 That's just a destroying farm, it's destroying farmland in the long run because of this uh monoculture that's not found in nature, and you don't see you don't see anything like this in nature.
- 1:10 And that's why I'm a big advocate of this new idea of urban agriculture, which I think is really cool.
- 1:18 Um so you know, there's three million acres of unused lawns in in America alone.
- 1:24 And you take that, you take the pesticides, the fertilizer, all of the expense that people that people pay just to have uh, you know, a green lawn and a pretty lawn that really doesn't have any uh intrinsic value to it.
- 1:38 Where you've got guys taking these these little plots of lawn, sometimes you know, 800 square feet, you know, almost nothing for a modern farm.
- 1:50 And they and they've taken them and transformed them into a productive uh productive plots that can grow vegetables and crops and usable foods.
- 1:58 Um and I think this is fascinating because you haven't really used any more land.
- 2:04 This land wasn't being used in the first place.
- 2:07 In fact, it was really just a drain.
- 2:09 We have you know, like I mentioned, the chemicals and all the fertilizer and cost basically that people are putting into these lawns and getting nothing in return.
- 2:16 And there's been a couple cool pioneers that have gone and they don't they don't even own the land.
- 2:22 They you know they have an agreement, they have a lease, a contract, whatever it may be with the owners, and they're making very productive productive farms off of these uh off of these just plots of lawn.
- 2:35 Uh, they've been doing it up in Canada a lot in uh the Northeast, and it's been it's seen a lot of success.
- 2:41 Um it's also been a great way to keep things local.
- 2:45 You keep healthier, healthier fruits and vegetables in stock.
- 2:48 Um, and it's a great way to improve your food chain security.
- 2:52 I think that's a main point that we need to think about as a society is food chain security.
- 2:57 You saw during COVID uh when all these people were having to stay inside, couldn't get to the grocery store.
- 3:04 Um, even these farmers who were who were shutting down, were not able to get all their their supply chain in, like their seed, their food, their fertilizer, whatever it may be, because of these supply chain issues.
- 3:18 Um it it reveals us how delicate that that supply chain was and our food security really is.
- 3:24 And I I think it's I think it's great, especially considering how many food deserts we have in the U.S.
- 3:29 Um, people that are really lacking access to those fresh fruits and vegetables.
- 3:33 And um I think this idea of kind of urban urban agriculture is really something that needs to be explored.
- 3:39 I think it's a a cool, a cool topic.