Fabulous post, @nateonsteemit, and I agree wholeheartedly.

Where are you located in Texas? If it rarely freezes where you are, I hope you're growing chaya and moringa, which are two of the most amazingly productive and nutritious plants on the planet.

I already knew we were kindred spirits, and this post proves it. When I lived in Florida, I tried to talk several churches into putting in food gardens for the poor, along with offering them plants, seeds and other resources, and would you like to know how many took me up on it? Precisely zero. Sigh.

I also tried to talk numerous businesses into doing same, with one taker . . . Morning Star Fishermen, in Dade City (actually San Antonio), which is the aquaponics company from whom I earned both of my aquaponics certificates.

I gave them a couple dozen chaya cuttings, along with a bunch of different seeds, and the last time I visited, some plants from those seeds were still growing in their main system. The chaya all died though, as they didn't protect them from freezing.

I even tried to talk Pinellas County into allowing me to plant chaya all along the Pinellas Trail, which runs the length of the county, but the usual brainless automatons failed to even come to a decision.

I should have just planted the things and said nothing. They'd be massive by now, and could be feeding lots of people, homeless and otherwise.

All that aside, I also heard of several churches already running church gardens, a few churches encouraging their congregations to "plant a row for the homeless," and one group of churches in the Naples area that had organized and set up an actual food bank, that an elderly lady friend of Marek's volunteered at regularly.

School gardens are another amazing use of previously fallow land, and entire curriculums could be built around what goes on in the garden, especially with the addition of permaculture, chickens, and/or an aquaponic system. They could literally be teaching reading, writing, arithmetic, history and much more, as it relates to what they are seeing in the garden.

Talk about getting kids excited about learning!

Montessori has already done some of this, and Morning Star Fishermen has a grade school curriculum available which relates to aquaponics. It is entirely doable.