BBC speaks with John Hantz about his Detroit farm plans

The BBC talks with John Hantz of Detroit's planned and somewhat controversial Hantz Farms.

Excerpt from the BBC:

Drive through Detroit and immediately you see the scale of this city's problems. There are burnt out houses, piles of rubbish and empty lots on every block. Anyone who can seems to have fled.

The city was built for two million but now has a population of only 800,000. So 40,000 acres of Detroit now stand unused, home to weeds, broken glass, even pheasants.

Mr Hantz's scheme is to take that land and turn it into a hi-tech farm, growing a mixture of vegetables, fruit and trees using the latest agricultural science and tapping into America's growing obsession with local and organic food.

"One of the first things we will do is plant orchards, trellis orchards and what we want to do is more than beautification, we want to be about the learning around urban agriculture."

In place of the trash piles and vacant lots he envisions rows of neat apple trees, indoor salad farms and acres of walnut groves.
He also hopes this beautification will help stem the urban flight by making Detroit a prettier place to live. That, in turn, could push up local house prices which have plummeted.

"I believe people will want to live next to this," he says.

Read the entire article here.