Farming in Long Island City
On Saturday, Slow Money NYC held its Inaugural Entrepreneur Showcase and Resource Exchange. Well-organized and well-attended, it was held at The Commons in Brooklyn, a short walk from where I live.
Although I didn’t stay for the whole day, I tasted honey from bees that feed in the New York Botanical Garden and cheese cubes from dairy cattle in the Finger Lakes, not far from where I grew up. I listened to presentations from Bronx Bees, Brooklyn Grange, Cayuga Pure Organics, NYFoods Organics, and AgSquared. I also stayed for a panel featuring speakers from The Contact Fund, Equity Trust, Mission Markets, and Accion. Majora Carter, whose TED talk I listened to some time ago, was there to mingle but not as a presenter.
The event was a welcome shot of optimism and creativity, but what caught my imagination the most was to discover that a working farm one acre in size is operating on a rooftop along Northern Boulevard in Long Island City. (The photo is by Cyrus Dowlatshahi. A bigger version can be seen at the blog Sustain by Design.)
The organizers of Brooklyn Grange took out a ten-year lease on a sturdy reinforced-concrete rooftop through Acumen Fund (apparently the first rooftop lease in the city). They hired a crane and lifted about a million pounds of topsoil onto a sturdy reinforced-concrete roof, then spread it over a green roof system from Conservation Technology. They began growing salad greens, herbs, carrots, fennel, beets, radishes, and beans, and before long earned enough to support a full-time farmer.
One of the most exciting things about this project is its scalability. The city is full of rooftops, many of them (no doubt) sturdy enough for farming. The costs are not astronomical, the payback looks relatively quick, and the demand is there.
