Too much of a good thing?

Urban farms are an exciting new phenomenon. They allow people to feel more connected to their food, help fuel the "locavore" movement, and are often sustainable and/or organic. However, their growing popularity is matched by growing size and this might be a problem. A recent grist.com article explains the downsides of large (20+ acre) urban farms. Examples of "too big" farms include San Diego's 140 acre Suzie's Ffarm which raked in $1 million in profit last year. These farms can get so big within city limits because of newly vacated land deserted during the "Great Recession". Cities, in an effort to fill empty plots, are dedicating the space to urban farms and agriculturally-inclined citizens are jumping at the cheap price and buying up swaths of land for their own privately owned urban farms.  So what's the problem? Kaid Benfield of the NRDC explains that while small urban farms are great facets of the sustainable food movement, large urban farms threaten to suburbanize cities, creating a whole new host of environmental problems. By interrupting the dense, compact, urban landscape these farms make cities less walkable, encouraging the use of cars and leading to greater sprawl as developers are forced to build outside of the original city limits. Robin Shulman, author of Eat the City, explains another problem: cyclical highs and lows of land prices will eventually force these urban farms out of business. She explains that since the 1800s, economic recessions have lead to people and cities buying cheap land to feed people (just like what is occurring now). Then, as the economy recovers this land is purchased at a much higher rate and converted back to urban space. Considering this, it seems like big urban farms may help the sustainable food movement but they are not necessarily sustainable themselves.

I found this article very interesting and am actually planning on exploring the urban farm movement for my final research paper (don't steal my idea, guys!!). This is of one may examples of how solutions, just like the issues they attempt to solve, are not black and white. Check it out below:
http://grist.org/food/overgrown-what-happens-when-urban-farms-get-too-big/