Farms aren't the first thing that come to mind when you think of New York City. But walk along its streets and you will pass hundreds of urban gardens; jump across its rooftops and you might find yourself in the middle of a commercial farm; and drive just 20 minutes from downtown and you could discover a full-fledged experimental farming community.
New York has a lot to offer in every area and farming is no exception. This week we visited three very different farmers and heard their take on the city and how growing food plays a role in (and is influenced by) the Big Apple. We met Annie Novak from Eagle Street Rooftop Farm in Greenpoint, Abu Talib from Taqwa Community Farm in the Bronx and Jack Algiere from the Stone Barns Center. These three stories present a pretty diverse and spectacular picture of community and city life. And it's New York through and through.
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And there were neighborhoods starting at Harlem and north of homes with back lots devoted to vegetables for downtown sale, they were compared favorably in some ag book I have to those around Paris.
It seems very hard for any large scale vegetable culture to emerge in broken-up urban America, lots of volume needed if the crop is not specialty. Though it would be great if enterpreneur market gardeners would try, there is a lot of goodwill for local production. Produce can be a complicated business.
Guess how long ago was printed a NY fruit growers book that warned apple producers that easy transportation now makes it easy for low cost apples to be shipped in from afar, to undercut the local grower??? Guess first === but the answer is at the end of the first paragraph.
Small farmer will once again become a viable occupation.
http://www.omegagarden.com/index.php?content_id=1500
The key is to think about fruits and vegetables ("specialty crops") rather than grains, legumes, and oil seeds ("commodity crops"). The former are typically marketed fresh and in reasonable volumes that make them very suitable for production in or around population centers. The latter are always dried or otherwise preserved before marketing and are produced in massive volumes.
Even if we transition to a predominantly plant-based diet, we'll still need to produce very large volumes of commodity crops, and the Midwest is the ideal venue for this enterprise. However, I contend that we should be displacing corn with oat and soy with hemp, as these are more sustainable and nutritional commodity crops.
New methods of producing high-quality protein from sugars (and therefore starches), for example the fungal mycoprotein marketed as Quorn, will allow us to make much more efficient use of our commodity crop output to produce nutritious food.
But for producing foods rich in vitamins and beneficial phytochemicals (including antioxidants), high-density urban farming of fresh fruits and vegetables is the best way to go. The hydroponic solution may be prepared using municipal and human waste as the predominant input.
Hemp is key to numerous agricultural and sustainability problems all over the world. Its not insignificant that it is the oldest cultivated plant, and that it's relative is likely as significant to other aspects of the human condition. I've encountered claims that hemp oil could replace virtually all of the highest quality petrochemical oils alone.
http://scottnyerges.com/photography/Eagle_Street_Rooftop_Farm/Eagle_Street_Rooftop_Farm.html