Posted by David Sherman on Friday, August 10, 2007 at 19:54:14 :
In Reply to: Time to start my own business. posted by Clint Dixon on Friday, August 10, 2007 at 19:43:45 :
Wait till diesel's $30/gallon and nobody can afford to truck food 1000 miles or haul it clear across the ocean from China, and then you'll really have something. Best bust up the concrete and clear out the houses and mini-marts now while you can still afford diesel for the cat, though. It'll be a bitch trying to turn parking lots back into farm land via picks and shovels, and I bet when people are forced to do it, they'll have some choice words for the morons who paved it over in the first place.
In my lifetime, I watched the Kent Valley near Seattle get paved over. It used to be all truck gardens -- berries, hops, row crops, etc. Now it's all parking lots, distribution warehouses, and shopping malls. The thing that sealed its fate was when they dammed up the Green River. Before the dam, the valley flooded every year and you couldn't build anything on it. The farm houses were up on 10' high concrete foundations to stay above the annual floods. After the dam, the floods stopped, the "highest and best use" of the property became anything but farming, and I watched them dump a couple feet of gravel and then a layer of asphalt over thousands of acres of the richest, blackest soil you ever saw.
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