Forty square miles?  That's what the Ivory Tower reports this morning.  Never fear, though, because a local businessman has an idea and he's got Kwame Kilpatrick's former press secretary working for him.

John Hantz is making the rounds and pitching a plan to convert giant swaths of the Motor City into industrial farm land, cider mills complete with hay rides and... drum roll... wind turbines.  

Offering jobs and an ability to produce fresh fruits and vegetables locally, Hantz Farms could help Detroit "become a destination for fresh, local and natural foods and become a major part of the green movement," Hantz said.

Detroit already is home to hundreds of smaller community gardens. But Hantz's proposal is the first to envision large-scale commercial farming.

To say that I'm not sold on the wind turbine concept is to be overly generous, but I'm not going to hate on anyone in the private sector with a dream and the guts to chase it.  

Frankly, anyone who can find any productive use for even a portion of the blighted, vacant land in the D will be a hero in my book.  Over the last few years I've had the chance to spend months worth of cumulative time inside the city and it never fails to set me back on my heels.  

We've all seen the pictures but until you're actually standing in front of an all-but entirely burned out neighborhood, well, all you've seen are pictures.  Its an otherworldy feeling, and not a good one.

So Mr. Hantz, best of luck to you.  I hope you're serious, I hope you're organized and I hope you can beat back the local elected bureaucracy.  Still, I can't help but worry, because if we've learned anything from the last few decades of campaign cycles in Detroit, there's a population there that's used to doing things one way and just plain won't change it up for anyone or any reason.  

And crops?  They burn just as easily as buildings.