Living the American Green

You remember that Applebees Jingle?  It used to get stuck in my head for DAYS.

Urban Farming

Bees! They're GOLD!

So, LtAG went to this thing.  It was called The Educated Eater, and it was held by the Council for the Environment of New York City.   It was on Saturday, and all the cool urban farmers were there.  It was a veritable who’s who of Green market stalwarts, including the director of the Greenmarket program (Michael Hurwitz), a guy who raises chickens in his backyard in Redhook, someone from Manhattan Borough President Stringer’s office and a Massachusetts native (pictured, graphically, right) who raises Bees on the roofs of New York.

The event was free free form, to put it mildly, with a lot of questions as we gained steam and not a lot of ideas (at least expressed aloud) about a cognizant theme holding us all together.  This hardly mattered, however, as the entire room was packed with people who were already super in the know, to the point that questions from the audience were just as likely to be fielded by the audience as by the panelists.  A tad overwhelming for the overworked/transient young Yipster like myself, but exciting none the less.

My eyes were opened to some easy “snack off the land” opportunities that don’t involve becoming a wholesale Urban farmer but do involve delicious eats and not much work.  Thammuzzy and I spent the entire time there trying to figure out what parts of it scaled to what we were able to accomplish in every day life.  I’m not the kind of dude to throw a beehive on the roof, and there’s no chance I own a building in this incarnation of life, so something like rooftop farming was cool to hear about but theoretical for my position in life.

How do I Do It Myself?

However, I don’t really know what the takeaway was from the entire experience:  was the message to buy local, thus supporting the people who were able to make the effort to farm themselves? Was the message that this stuff is easy enough to do that you should fire it up tomorrow?  Was the message Come Here to Buy Our Products?  (if it was that last one, it could have been better served by actually giving out information along those lines in an organized form…)

The samples, however, were delicious.  Thoughts from Thammuzzy?

Counterpoint…or something

So, I (the one, the only Thammuzzy) certainly don’t have a rebuttal of any sort. This isn’t that kind of point/counterpoint column. Mainly, we just wanted more than one perspective on this Greenmarket farming panel, like a bit of 3-D vantage, to give a balanced, comprehensive LtAG look at this event from the Council for the Environment of New York City.

Well, first off, Alan’s right: all the cool urban farmers were there. At some point it was clear that urban farming is a kind of inside baseball; breaking in is more than a matter of having the right kind of roof and the right kind of soil. But that’s kind of the point being made – successful urban farming isn’t a solo activity, it’s a community activity, which requires the support of the community. Community in the sense of each individual farmer contributing some particular facet of the whole farming scene’s necessities. The chicken guy in Redhook receives leftover wort from the Six Point beer brewery, then gives manure-filled hay as compost to the sprouts and grasses guy in Queens. Sprouts Man (great name for a supervillian? no?) passes on high-nutrient compost to the dude growing tomatoes on a roof in the Village, who in turn creates some amazin nutrient-filled charchoal called “biochar” and passes it all over the city. Meanwhile egg guy’s excess chickens are now shacking up with roosters in the Bronx, and the circle of life continues on.

I think this is a positive thing. I think, I hope. Without this kind of connectivity, urban farming becomes an exercise in vanity – how much cred can I personally display by my living off the grid? Admirable, yes. Change we can believe in – maybe not. If chicken dude from Red Hook didn’t interact in all these different ways with the farming community, then he would be subsistence farming, essentially. And nothing wrong with that – but it’s not progressive per se.  What Michael Hurwitz, the Greenmarket Guru, kept emphasizing over and over again, was Community: even in a recession, farming isn’t about having a food buffer in case I lose my job – it’s about shoring up viability of the entire urban ecosystem, one little bit at a time.

Fermentation: It's as easy as punching some cabbage.

And this is significant to how the rubber meets the road, as far as we farming n00bs are concerned. Granted, you or I may not have the capacity or the energy or the interest in opening up a big investment in crops or livestock on our rooftops – but whatever little we can do turns on the possibility for a community connection. That was the takeaway message for me, anyway. If I can put a big bucket in my windowsill and grow an excess of basil, then I can use what I need and trade the surplus to someone else. If I can keep chickens, I can trade or sell eggs. If I have the wherewithal to make sauerkraut or pickles in my pantry, then it’s no harder to do it in bulk than it is to do it in a dainty personal-size quanity – ergo, there is no reason not to make it in bulk and participate in a makeshift trade system larger than my own house.

So is the message simply: eat local? Sure. If that’s possible. But it won’t always be possible, and it certainly won’t be possible for the majority of people in an urban environment without a larger number of people stepping up and “farming” even if they don’t fit the traditional farming bill. Farmers’ Markets are the first and major step, definitely. But once you get to know your local market – maybe there’s that extra step. A pot of basil. A jar of sauerkraut (I’ll post on the method for this later!). And a bunch of hungry friends who are willing to each take up a minor agricultural experiment . I’m serious – it doesn’t need to be some high tech system of maximum farming efficiency. Just a contribution. And a reciprocation.

Space is not a limitation – though the possible use of space is certainly a limitation. Something like 1/3 of New York City is empty rooftop – but this rooftop is either restricted access (superintendents only, who almost always have better things to do than farm) or too weak for extensive use (thus limiting farming projects to a few buckets of tomatoes or some such) or limited by usage politics – who “owns” the products of a rooftop garden? Can this ownership be farmed out, so to speak? In other words, could someone with the will and the means to farm on a whole rooftop’s scale be given unlimited access in return for, say, discounts on produce to inhabitants of the building? I’m not a politician, just a simple visionary (to put it nicely). But the farmers in the urban agriculture panel seemed to be on board – providing that the infrastructure was suitable. Providing that the rooftops didn’t collapse under the weight of soil and munchies.

And again the rub is infrastructure. How long, O Lord?? The cost of retrofitting buildings is quite obviously prohibitive…but that doesn’t mean give up. It just means some creative edits to the master plan. Buildings that can support the weight – go for broke. Buildings that can’t – there’s a niche for us as well, in bucket farming (rather than plot farming): potatoes (one of the dudes at the greenmarket panel showed us the ropes on this one), pickles, sauerkraut, herbs. Am I a broken record here? If so, it’s because these are the items that involve both local ingredients and my personal range of agricultural methods. None of these things are going to support the community’s need for produce, of course…..

But they certainly don’t hurt! Mmmmmmm. Sauerkraut. Now all I need is my roommates’ permission to stink up the kitchen…

Who wrote this one?  TheAmericanGreen - The founding member of the American Green institute, and a New York based producer and writer hoping to make the jump from "freelancer" to "documentary producer". Read more from this author