Visiting a Rooftop Farm in Brooklyn

Visiting a Rooftop Farm in Brooklyn

Written by Dan McDonald 

            I never visited New York City until I was 59 years old. I then found I took a strange liking to the city. I have now taken three vacations to New York City in three years, including that first one. I try to mix the normal tourist things in my visits to New York City with something I don’t think most tourists would do. In 2014 I found a pizzeria in Brooklyn called Roberta’s that attracted my attention. In 2015 I went to Staten Island and found the site where an officer named Ichabod Crane was buried, the man whose name Washington Irving borrowed when he wrote “the Legend of Sleepy Hollow”. This year I decided to take a tour of a rooftop farm in Brooklyn operated by Brooklyn Grange. Today I am presenting my story of the tour I took of the Brooklyn Grange rooftop farm.

            As I grew up on a more or less traditional Midwestern farm I knew that Brooklyn Grange’s way of farming would be different from the farm I grew up on. Maybe that made the experience of seeing an urban farm, on a Brooklyn warehouse rooftop all the more interesting. I found the experience interesting and hope you will find reading my thoughts on the experience likewise interesting.

          1. A tour fits into Brooklyn Grange’s philosophy of doing business.

Members of our tour group walking between rows while a farmer harvests produce.

            One of the things I learned from taking the tour at Brooklyn Grange is that the people at Brooklyn Grange had decided to create their business guided by three principles summed up in three words beginning with the letter “P”. They wanted their business to do right by the people within their community, to do right towards the planet on which we live, and to be sustainable through earning a profit enabling those working the farm to have a livable income. Their tours are one example of how they seek to do right by the people in their community. They have a reason to show to the public how they have built their business according to their governing principles. They present to their customers a good product, a good business plan, a hard working team, and a desire that others might be encouraged to create businesses built on similar governing principles.

            2. The tour helped me realize how small farms can be multi-faceted businesses offering a diversity of products.

            I grew up at a time when traditional American farms were characterized by diversity of crops and livestock. My father, when I was young, had chickens, hogs, beef and dairy cattle; and we raised corn, soybeans, wheat, and alfalfa. Diversification helped protect farmers from the whims of weather and markets. Diversification also meant crop rotations could be implemented which allowed for one crop to extract minerals and nutrients one year that another crop helped restore into the soil the following year. Diversity of plants made economic sense and was also an investment into the soil out of which every crop grew.

            A small farm can also bring diversity to a farm by using the land for something in addition to farming. My Dad had been a welder and he kept a place on our farm where he could take in welding work. Many local farmers whose implements had been damaged came to my Dad to have their implements fixed. While the primary use of our farm was for farming, his skill in welding gave our farm an additional income stream. Brooklyn Grange is able to take advantage of their rooftop location in a similar even if different way. Some of the team members had worked in restaurants and had hosted events. Rooftop gatherings are very popular in New York City and with team members already knowing how to do that, the Brooklyn Grange team was able to use their rooftops not only to farm but also to host various gatherings. The principle work on the rooftops continued to be farming but other possibilities were pursued as well bringing helpful secondary streams of income into their rooftop farming business.

Diversity can be seen at Brooklyn Grange in numerous ways. There are bee hives on the rooftop. Bees help pollinate some of the plants grown on their rooftops, and they also produce honey. A small Brooklyn Grange honey business exists. I can gladly testify that their honey is some of the finest tasting honey I have ever eaten. Having honey bees wasn’t always legal in New York City, but after former Mayor Bloomberg supported making New York City a city where honey bees could be raised the urban beehives appear to be thriving in urban areas where they are permitted.

Bees flourish in urban areas like NYC.

 

Bees also lend a help in the pollination of Brooklyn Grange plants.

            In an earlier photograph, you may have noticed a greenhouse. The greenhouse operated on the farm serves multifaceted purposes. A greenhouse helps New York growers to start plants during colder periods that can then be transplanted when the spring weather is more favorable to plants otherwise susceptible to frost and winter kill. Once the plants have been transplanted the greenhouse can be used  for other purposes. One such purpose done in Brooklyn Grange's greenhouse is raising trays of plants like delicate herbs, small greens, and plants providing seasoning that are desired by New York City chefs who use the plants to add color or flavor to fine cuisine. These specialty plants fetch a good income using a small space.

 

Herbs and greens were growing in the greenhouse when I visited in late August. 

There were plenty of outside crops being harvested on their farm also

 

3. Praising our guide who conducted our tour at Brooklyn Grange

I want to express my appreciation for our tour guide, Michelle. She conducted a wonderful tour. She set us at ease with a pleasant guiding of the tour. She gave us a wealth of information regarding the farm and its workings, and kept everyone's attention with stories from the farm's young history. While at points I compare the model of business at the Brooklyn Grange with what I knew growing up on my Dad's farm, mostly what I am presenting about the Brooklyn Grange operation is simply an abridged form of what our tour guide so ably presented. I hope some of you are able to get the actual tour. I recommend anyone near New York City or planning to visit the city to find a suitable time to visit the farm or take one of the farm's tours. Here is a link for information about visiting the farm.

Michelle, our tour guide, is here telling us something about Brooklyn Grange.

 

4. Some stories from Brooklyn Grange’s experience teaching people in their community about urban farming and the environment.

Brooklyn Grange sets a wonderful example of a team selecting principles to guide their corporate operations and then living out those principles. The team sets out to do well by the people in its community, with the planet and building a sustainable profit so those working with Brooklyn Grange can earn a living wage. There are tours set aside for students from area schools that help educate the community around them to better understand the farm's relationship to the community and the environment.

Michelle mentioned how rewarding it is to see a child begin to understand the relationship of our food to dirt and to the soil. She told how it is easy for a child growing up in the metropolitan area to associate food with a store similarly to how one thinks of tennis shoes coming from a store. Then a farmer pulls a carrot from the soil and the child begins to understand in a fresh manner the relationship of our food to our soil. The Brooklyn Grange farms keep a few chickens at each of their rooftop farms despite how chickens proved to be a bust for them economically. The chickens however are useful in showing a farm animal in a farm setting to the school children coming to Brooklyn Grange's rooftop farms.

Since almost every Brooklyn Grange farmer was raised in a city, and never grew up on a farm; the Brooklyn Grange farmers are able to use themselves as examples of how the sort of farming done at the Brooklyn Grange facilities can be learned and done even by kids that grew up never seeing a farm. It becomes a way to encourage children to realize that the world has more possibilities than might be suggested by the limitations of our neighborhoods.

One of the most interesting stories we heard was about the environment. I might not remember the story exactly but it went something like this: As some students were asked what they had been learning in school about the environment, one student answered that the environment was something important for people in New Jersey, but that since New York was a big city it didn’t have an environment. The story though humorous can be a metaphor for our understanding of environmental issues. We are usually much better at pointing out what someone else could do about the environment than what we can do. Brooklyn Grange can describe to students how their farm is beneficial to New York City’s desire to have a better environmental relationship with our planet.

New York City, like many older Eastern coastal cities has a system that joins together sewer and ground water drainage systems. This antiquated system has created an environmental problem. When a significant rainfall occurs, with as little as a half of an inch of rain, the storm water runoff overwhelms the system. Since the storm water and raw sewage are combined in the antiquated system, the rainfall runoff forces the city to pump both the excess rainwater runoff and the untreated human sewage into the New York harbor. Almost every significant rainfall results in a mixture of rainfall run off and raw sewage being pumped into the harbor. Many storms result in people complaining about the brown waste water they see entering the harbor. It is a disgusting environmental failure for the city of New York. There are also other cities with the same problem. With taxes already high in New York City, and an ideal fix separating storm water runoff from sewage drainage to cost many billions of dollars; the city is trying to fix the problem gradually. In the meantime one way to mitigate aspects of the problem is to create more green zones. In a city made of concrete most rainfall simply runs to the closest drain and into the city’s storm water drainage system. But when rainfall falls on soil where plants are growing, a large portion of the water is absorbed into the soil and then soaked up by the thirsty plants. This water absorbed by soil and plants does not enter New York’s harbor. The rooftops farmed by Brooklyn Grange, used to be rooftops where with every rain, the water would find its way to a drain and enter into the waste water system. But now a large percentage of the rainfall coming down on the Brooklyn Grange rooftops are absorbed by the soil and soaked up by thirsty plants helping to protect the ground water drainage system. Brooklyn Grange’s existence provides a small but meaningful help in New York City’s attempt to mitigate its serious environmental problem.

5. Farmers with a unique view

I offer one last photograph from my visit to the Brooklyn rooftop farm. It must be a special experience for this group of farmers to look up from their working with fruits and vegetables and look down their rows and see Manhattan’s downtown district from their farm. Make no mistake about it. The Brooklyn Grange team members are farmers. They grow food valued by their customers. They decide what to plant into the soil to make enough of a profit to allow them to live within their city. They weed and harvest their crops. They see that their produce is taken to markets or to places where customers will pick up the produce. More than 90% of their produce is consumed by customers within four miles of their farms. They keep extensive records to help them optimize their business. They are farmers in every sense of the word. But they are farmers with a unique view when they look down the rows on their farms in Brooklyn and Queens.

Not all farmers see such a view when they look over their crops.

 

I will continue to write about the Brooklyn Grange story in a future blog when I write a review of a book entitled The Farm on the Roof, written by Brooklyn Grange co-founder Anastasia Cole Plakias.