Cities has been built on locals once upon a time fit for urban living. Long time ago, plain fields near running water were perfect urban settlements. Upstreams, catch drinking water, downstream return sewer. Around the city, fields for food. All has now changed. Step for step in evolution the cities have adapted to new conditions and expanded horizontally in directions guided by infrastructure and financial shortsighted interests. As evolution yesterday was more comprehensible and easy to follow, the architects could easy adapt the buildings for human life, anticipating some 100 years of social development. Today, it is impossible to preview more than a decade, in best case.  

Stupidity turns farmland to trash. Today we could build on other grounds, preferably the most sterile ones. However the annoying financial system obstruct us to prospect and plan in a correct way. In fact, farmland is today often the worst place to build on, generating high costs. We rise a lot of high buildings on places which only could support small houses. The perverse economic vantage of a field, plane and free from blocks and rocks, are for a constructor discounted by the disadvantage of poor, humid soils, perilous for settlement.

Why is this happening? There’s no simple answer than just a statement that we are slaves under a very shortsighted financial system. One major reason, which has reciprocal effects, is that farming in a minor scale is an incredibly difficult and not a very lucrative career path. The average age of the farmers in West is high, around 50-60 years, as those farmers retire or pass away, successive generations turn elsewhere for jobs, the land goes fallow and is sold off.

Another reason: it’s more lucrative to sell farmland rather than actually farm the land, especially if that farmland is near a city or town. There’s no one to take it over and it’s worth more selling to developers, so why not? That’s also part of the reason it’s obscenely difficult to find new land for new farmers.

Development on new farmland have negative effects, removing land that wild animals use as a habitat.
Well-operated farms should care for the soil, air, and water, and produce viable ecosystems, as near the urban cities as possible.  Economically, the agricultural industry employs millions in all sorts of fields, from machinery to inputs to researchers to retailers to packagers.

Urban and farming systems must be better adapted to the modern conditions. Exactly where we should farm is an important question to be analyzed. We are building with unnecessary high costs, as the good farming soil is the worst construction soil. Good farming land means for the entrepreneur poor, low resistant soil, needing a lot of enhancements.