Tubes for the Sticks: Internet for Rural America
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I find this attitude galling. I grew up in the rural American midwest. We bought our beef, a half-cow at a time, from families within a long walking range (maybe a five minute drive). My next door neighbor and childhood best friend lived on a 40 cow dairy operation -- I drank milk that hadn't been out of a cow ten minutes. My water came out of a hole in the ground maybe 250 feet away from our house. Food doesn't come from big glass boxes and isn't grown on trucks. Water doesn't come from pipes or big processing plants. My daily commute in Seattle is longer than any normal commute I would make into the city as a child. In fact, small town America looks a lot like the mixed-use urban utopias that all of the enlightened people are trying desperately to recreate -- small groups of people each near the resources they consume, banding together to collectively look out for each other and improve their world.
End rant.
What’s more, I really don’t think people who lack access to technology have any idea about the user experience they are missing.
My largest gripe with living in the midwest (until ~2000 when I left) was that, as a geek, I wasn't able to find a lot of other people who shared my hobbies -- kind of a recreational version of the advice to live in SFO if you want to start a business. Threeish years after I left my parents were able to get broadband internet, via 12 mile (!) 802.11b shot from a hilltop to a tall building in the nearby city. I certainly knew what I was missing, and I think easy access to internet in a lot of the smaller communities (say, less than 25,000 people) could have a transforming effect on the USA in both directions -- culture in to and culture out of rural America.
But more importantly, regarding the second comment: This statement is in response to real-world polls that show that a huge number of people lacking broadband specifically say they don't want it. Your experience proves my point that these polls simply cannot be correct. If anyone actually says they don't want broadband, they can't possibly know what they're even talking about. I can only suppose that they think there's a hidden cost to it (money, or maybe learning something new) and that the pollster is asking a trick question.
I contend that life in rural America (from in the country to 10,000 person towns) probably contributes less carbon per person than suburban life (say the outer 1/3rd of any city over 500k people). Furthermore, while there are always exceptions, people who live in towns where everyone knows their name have a great incentive to maintain order and not ruin resources (wells, sewer/septic, grade the land or irrigate irresponsibly).
As for the polls, I agree. Lies, damn lies, and statistics. For better or worse, there's a southern and midwest stereotype that regards curmudgeonly behavior very highly. These are the people that claim to not want anti-lock brakes or fuel injection but sure don't whine too much about their cars starting better for the last 20 years. Maybe those people won't ever want internet, but their children certainly will.
Your roads, electricity, and communications were subsidized by urban/suburban America. http://www.google.com/search?q=rural+electricity+subsidies What did urban/suburban America get in return for its investment?
My next door neighbor and childhood best friend lived on a 40 cow dairy operation
That dairy farm was subsidized (apart from the previously-mentioned rural subsidies) by urban/suburban America. http://www.google.com/search?q=farm+subsidies+billion Grain/hay/straw-fed cows can be raised in urban areas. They don't need to be raised in rural areas.
Food doesn't come from big glass boxes and isn't grown on trucks.
That is correct. Food comes from automated factories. http://www.google.com/search?q=dairy+operations+automated
End rant.
Why were you ranting?
What's literally possible and what's economically and logistically feasible are not necessarily the same.
It is not just me making the claim: http://www.juliansimon.com/writings/Ultimate_Resource/TCHAR0...
At the current efficiency of PhytoFarm, the entire present population of the world can be supplied from a square area about 140 miles on a side - about the area of Massachusetts and Vermont combined, and less than a tenth of Texas. This represents only about a thousandth as much land as is needed for agriculture at present (give or take a factor of four; for illustrative purposes greater exactitude is unnecessary). And if for some reason that seems like too much space, you can immediately cut the land space by a factor of ten: just build food factories ten stories high, which should present no more problems that a ten-story office building. You could economize even more and build a hundred stories high, like the Empire State Building or the Sears Tower. Then the surface area needed would be no more than the space within the corporate limits of Austin, Texas, to pick the first alphabetically among the many U.S. cities large enough.
PhytyoFarm techniques could feed a hundred times the world's present population - say 500 billion people - with factory buildings a hundred stories high, on one percent of present farmland. To put it differently, if you raise your bed to triple bunk-bed height, you can grow enough food on the two levels between the floor and your bed to supply your nutritional needs.
The article is really interesting. I guess if the question is "would it be cheaper to raise the food in the sun and drive it into town or use that energy to raise it in a building" it's possible the answer would be the latter, particularly if we're talking specifically about ensuring caloric and nutritional production, not specific foods. Furthermore, there are other points on the continuum that may also work well, such as the large grocery store that has a huge garden inside for fresh ingredients.
I guess the proof is in the pudding. There must be a reason why foods are processed in rural areas and only transported into towns in high calorie form (HFCS, beef, concentrated juices). I suspect subsidies contribute, of course. However, there's too much variability in opportunities to explain it all, in my opinion.
It is a book chapter (6, of The Ultimate Resource II). Have you read the book?: http://www.juliansimon.com/writings/Ultimate_Resource
The proof of the pudding is in the eating. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_proof_of_the_pudding_is_in_...
Not if it costs more to produce food in rural areas than to produce the same food in urban areas.
telling Americans that they're not going to be able to eat meat at every meal is [...] a non-starter.
The statement of HeyLaughingBoy that I was responding to was: "Yeah, we'll just level midtown Manhattan to raise 100 acres of corn."
What I had been referring to in my original comment was the raising of "dairy cows" in urban areas. If one could grow corn in a 100 story building, what would stop one from running an automated "Grain/hay/straw-fed" dairy cow operation, or automated beef or veal-calf operations, in a 100 story building?
1) The relative costs of land urban vs rural. Around here usable farmland land is a relatively expensive $8.5-10k/acre. What's it cost in Manhattan? SF? Boston?
2) The costs of removing animal waste and supplying animals with food: instead of shipping beef in, you're shipping feed in and manure out. Yeah, I know: just put the manure in a digester and run the operation from the resulting methane gas: digester takes up expensive space too and just reduces, not eliminates the waste.
3) How much corn can you grow in that 100 story building? What's the opportunity cost of using the building to grow corn instead of housing an insurance company?
4) I'd really like to know what the financial company across the road from say, a pig farm (mmmm. big manure lagoons) thinks of the lovely midsummer scent.
Don't get me wrong: I'm all for local sourcing of food and reducing energy cost where possible. Hell, when I lived in the city, I dug up most of my back lawn to put in fruit & vegetable gardens because grass carpets are a waste of space. But local sourcing only works in small amounts in urban areas for the simple reason that land is so expensive and while sunlight is free, even very high-efficiency lighting costs money. Like the other poster said, theres a reason (actually, reasonS) why farms are in rural areas and it's not just because "that's the way it's always been done." If anything, increasing "efficiency" of food animal operations is going the wrong way: the eggs I get from my chickens every day taste and look infinitely better than the ones I buy at the supermarket from a 10,000 hen operation.
~$100-1,000/sqft (from Harlem to Midtown, respectively). (At the $8,500-10,000/acre price-range you cited, farmland is $0.195-$0.23/sqft.) For a 100-story building, that works out to $1-10/sqft of floor space, not accounting for walls and columns. Would you choose to locate food factories on the most expensive land in a given urban area? If so, why?
Farmland at $0.20/sqft is 1/5th as expensive as 100-story Harlem floorspace. Since the Harlem floorspace would be 1,000 times as food-productive, the farmland would have a relative cost 200 times that of the Harlem floorspace.
2) instead of shipping beef in, you're shipping feed in
Why ship feed in, instead of producing it onsite?
2) you're shipping [...] manure out.
Manure can be dehydrated. That makes it less expensive to ship.
3) How much corn can you grow in that 100 story building?
A 100-story 1 square mile PhytoFarm facility could feed 25 million people. * The New York metropolitan area's population is only 19 million and covers 6,720 square miles. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_metropolitan_area
3) What's the opportunity cost
A 100-story Midtown office building would rent for $8,500/year/sqft land area ($85/sqft floor area). http://www.crainsnewyork.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/2009... A 1 square mile (28 million sqft) factory would cost $238 billion/year in opportunity - if it could attract renters. Midtown currently does not have any 1 square mile 100-story buildings, and in fact does not allow them. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Setback_(architecture)#Setbacks... That much office space might not currently exist in the entire New York metro area, not to speak of all of Manhattan.
4) pig farm [...] the lovely midsummer scent.
Exhaust air can be filtered. This is standard operation procedure for urban cannabis grow operations, and such grow operations are notoriously smelly.
* http://www.juliansimon.com/writings/Ultimate_Resource/TCHAR0...
At the current efficiency of PhytoFarm, the entire present population of the world can be supplied from a square area about 140 miles on a side [...] This represents only about a thousandth as much land as is needed for agriculture at present [...] you can immediately cut the land space by a factor of ten: just build food factories ten stories high [...] You could economize even more and build a hundred stories high [...]
PhytyoFarm techniques could feed a hundred times the world's present population - say 500 billion people - with factory buildings a hundred stories high, on one percent of present farmland.
140^2 is ~20,000 square miles to feed 5 billion people. With a 100 story building, that becomes 200 square miles. Scaling down to 1 square mile scales down the number of people fed to 25 million. 1 square mile is 28 million square feet. At land costs of $100-1,000/sqft, that works out to $2.8-28 billion in land costs. Outside of Manhattan, but still in the metro area, land might cost as little as $10/sqft, bringing the land cost down to $140 million. For comparison, a typical supertall skyscraper construction project costs over $1 billion. http://www.google.com/search?q=freedom+tower+billion
Would it be less expensive to grow food in Manhattan, or in rural America?
However, there is one thing lacking: how we should pay for it. Should urbanites subsidize internet for the rural? Should rural folk subsidize rent for urbanites? More importantly, what is broadband? Does 768k DSL count? It's definitely way above dial-up.
Part of it isn't even a last mile issue. Part of it is that many people don't live within 100 miles of an internet backbone. It's physically impossible to get that far from a backbone in places like South Korea or Japan and a lot of Western Eruope. It means that you have to draw fiber a lot further in terms of distance and that costs a lot more.
That's partly why I think wireless will be the savior here. It isn't as fast as hard lines, but it can cover big distances (especially fixed wireless where you have a stable antenna on your roof which is what you can install for homes) and current technology could probably provide 1.5Mbps to rural areas today with increases coming at a decent clip. It's no 20Mbps cable modem, but it will allow them to use VoIP, video, etc. And it would be a lot cheaper than running so much fiber to rural areas.
I have a love/hate relationship with "great projects" and I think the internet is a wonderful thing and would love to see more have access to it, but I don't think rural areas can see parity. Likewise, I think we can work to close the gap. If we moved the USF (http://www.fcc.gov/wcb/tapd/universal_service/) to focus on broadband we could get the ball rolling and it's something that already exists for a similar purpose. Give the telecoms a little incentive to push 3G into more rural areas and offer fixed wireless (basically, the same as a data card only with a nice antenna since it's fixed). Verizon Wireless is already pushing into areas unserved by DSL and the like with EV-DO.
It's tough, but I think that wireless, especially with LTE, HSPA+, and WiMAX in the very near future (Verizon has said they're going to have LTE in a few cities within a year and AT&T is going to be aggressive about HSPA+) is going to allow us to light up the rural areas in a way that allows them to participate in the online community nicely.