From City Soil to Fork

2A. From City Soil to Fork: The Urban Grower's CSA Facilitator: Annie Novak, Eagle Street Rooftop Farm Presenters: Bee Ayres, BK Farmyards; Kristen Schafenacker, Added Value; Regina Ginyard, La Finca Del Sur Stacey Murphey, BK Farmyards

Packed house, we rearranged the room to have 2 circles for better conversation. . Urban CSAs based in NYC are called CSA, but they are more like csa (lower case) community supported agriculture. Q: “When you say csa, how is your project csa?” BKF Stacey . We partner with anyone with land to create urban agriculture. We do backyard farming; people are very interested in having someone use their space. It is a little trickier because you have to keep landscaping in mind as well as urban growing. Landowners help build the farm and get a stake in the community.

BKF Bee . This year they will be installing a new farm at the HS for Public Service in Crown Heights. It will be pushing what a school garden could be. Students must complete 200 hours of community service to graduate, but the average is 700. They are excited about nutrition and food. One acre of land in BK is a lot of space. . Everything at the school is for the school community. CSA on the site is for the school community: teachers, staff, students’ families. Students will work. 20 family CSA this year. . They have a progressive stepping back plan for 5 years. . They also have an Egg CSA starting in northern Crown Heights at a garden that used to have chickens and rabbits. They are building a large coop and will have 15-20 customers this year. . It is a good way to bring the community back into a space. In the backyard CSA they have 6 members in a 600 square foot garden.

Finca, Regina . Located in the South Bronx, it is the first urban farm run by women, mostly women of color. It is 3 acres, though they are currently farming only one. . They will have programs and other initiatives to address health problems in the South Bronx. The lack of fresh produce in the South Bronx, the highest rates of childhood obesity both contribute to their desire to create a space where the community can get active, play in the dirt and learn about food. . At the farm there will be wellness initiatives like karate and tai chi. . There is a young farmers program (they will help plan the plantings etc) and leadership initiatives for women of color. They have done (or are talking about…) a gumbo garden, just one way to celebrate the diverse food cultures of the South Bronx.

Added Value, Kristen . Added Value is a Redhook based community development organization. They have a three acre space in Redhook, though are growing on 1 acre right now. . Last year they got a 3 acre plot on Governors Island which they farmed 1 acre of, but this year they are hoping to expand to all of it. . They have a youth program and work with elementary school classrooms as well. Last year they had a 40 member CSA as well as the farmers market.

Q: “What are your challenges with soil? Can you talk a little bit about the soil you are farming in?” Kristen . AV grows on top of an old baseball field in raised beds. Beneath the field are old freight yards, so it would be pretty cost prohibitive to try to clean up and regenerate the land underneath the farm. . As it is the soil comes from the Bronx zoo, city composting, Staten Island, Long Island, and their own composting program. Every year there are dump trucks of soil to help replenish. It is one of the biggest expenses on the farm every year.

Regina . Farming on 1 acre, 2 others are disputed. No one seems willing to claim ownership of the other two acres, either they are part of DOT or MTA land, though it seems there may also be a third owner. No one will step up, so no one can give the OK to farm it. . They want to get it signed over to the Parks Department, who would then let them farm it.

Stacey . Certain crops do well in certain plots, and when you are working with a lot of small plots, this makes planning very challenging. . Trying to then get the produce to the people who are buying it gets even more challenging. You want to make sure there is enough variety on any one site, but still are limited by what may grow well. . So, it is important to do soil testing each time they take on a new plot and then work on developing soil fertility as well. One of the challenges is telling people the soil test results, especially when they are not great. One time a woman volunteered a plot she had been growing on and feeding her family from and it had a very high level of lead, which was a difficult conversation to have. Audience Q: “How have you experienced working with the DOE and NYCHA? It seems like with the school you had a pretty easy time?”

Bee . If you have the support of the top people at whatever organization or site, it is much easier. The principal of the school is a real visionary and has had this idea in his mind for about 7 years, so with him pushing it went pretty quickly. . We are contractors hired as consultant and the full management is by the school so that helped cut down a lot of the bureaucracy as well.

“Can you speak to the culture of csa in the city?”

Kristen . AV is a non-profit, so we don’t really need the upfront money in the way that a business farm does. . Our CSA members want to play a bigger role in the social justice part of the mission. They want to be more involved in outreach and education. . We have workshares to get reliable labor, also a full pay and sliding scale option.

Stacey . It is hard to plan because CSA members want the produce at the pick-up site, but homeowners want the harvest when it is ready and it is dinnertime. It is hard to plan what comes in when. . The benefits of having such a close connection to the members (such as in their backyard) is they have great ideas about what BKF could be (such as offering to pay more to be able to provide donation, but with such a small production this might not really be feasible).

. Annie The thing I like about csa is you know how many people you are feeding. I am starting with a small group of people, and hope that they will be the strong core if we expand next year. I am using 40% of the rooftop to grow for the CSA. . One great opportunity that you get with CSA is the opportunity to educate about the diversity within each vegetable. So, I know I can’t grow squash well on the roof (I think it is too shallow) but eggplant does great. If I can grow several varieties of eggplant, the members feel like they are getting a diversity, but it is still all things that do well on my roof. So, I developed a specialty rooftop mesclun mix that my members are really excited about.

“So, now I am going to ask the elephant in the room: Can NYC feed itself?” Bee . To give the short answer: no. We can’t produce the grains or proteins that we need to sustain ourselves in the city. . But, we can produce fruits and vegetables and feed people who need them while creating jobs and empowering people. We can do a lot; grow a lot. And we can do it at low cost. . There are 10,000 acres of vacant land in NYC and 52,000 acres of backyard land. There is also so much experience and knowledge in the city about growing, but we need more people dedicated to farming to make a significant impact.

Kristen . According to the numbers I’ve run we would need 40,000 acres to give every family in NYC a CSA share. That wouldn’t be feeding them, but it would give everyone vegetables for the season.

Stacey . I just want to use the “H” word, since it hasn’t come up yet. Hydroponics are often in the conversation about urban agriculture. We are all soil farmers. I am an architect by training so I am very interested and follow the studies about buildings and hydroponics, but I am not a huge proponent. . There are a lot of ways to use hydroponics, but you still have to bring in nutrients from somewhere, and that is sort of the ‘dirty little secret’ of urban farming.

Regina . The finca is to grow for and feed the community. But, it is also an agent for social change, I hope that when residents come they will leave different. They will have a conversation about food, health, exercise etc in their garden and be able to take that with them when they leave. It is a community space, we provide a green space and activities in addition to the food we grow.

Annie So maybe a more appropriate way to talk about csa would be “community supportive agriculture”

Open to questions!

Q: what do you do to make the cost for community members? Do you accept EBT? Bee: We make it as affordable as possible, based on what they can afford and spend and we offer a few payment plans. Kristen: We have one of the cheapest CSAs in the whole city. 20% of our CSA are reduced price shares, 10 low income and 5 workshares. We also take EBT

Q: How do you take EBT? Kristen: We use the same machine we have at the Farmers’ Market. Bee: Just Food figured it all out for us, we don’t really know how it works but what they have done is really amazing.

Q: So if we are talking about how to make it affordable, on the other side of the question is how do you make a good wage as an urban farmer? Kristen: AV is a non-profit and is funded by grants. Without the grants, we would make enough to pay for one full-time position: me. Annie: Education plays a big role in the spreadsheet. I could make $70,000 a year if I only grew microgreens, especially arugula. But, that is not what I want to do or why I became an urban farmer. The work we are doing feeds a sustainable food system. Stacey: If you were a very efficient farmer with 10-12 600 square foot plots, and grew a wide variety of crops you could make $35,000 a year.

Q: What sort of pests do you encounter in NYC? Annie: Rats (you can’t grow melons) but no deer or woodchucks! (Ok, so I am on a rooftop, so they couldn’t get up there anyway). Has anyone else noticed the city’s aphid problem? Especially if you have nitrogen rich soil. And white flies.

Q: what about two-legged pests? That can be a big issue, stealing, sampling. If you community feels ownership then it is less of a problem. Get lots of your community involved, local businesses too. The more eyes on the site, the better. Kristen: I have seen the gardens in Chicago in Millenium Park and they aren’t even touched. The looked very display-y, so maybe that was part of it, people didn’t realize that they were food.

Q: This is a question for Regina, how did you end up with a women run organization full of women of color farming? I work at Nuestras Raices in Holyoke, and the women in my organization are really involved in the gardens, but the men run the farm. Did you have to do outreach and education or is that what knowledge existed in your community? Regina: This sort of just happened because that is who was interested in getting involved. We did some specific outreach, but really the women in the community stepped up to take on these roles.

Q: I am interested in making a rooftop garden at my house, what do I have to do? How did you make yours? Annie: There is a company that installed it and they were great. I have black plastic, felt, black plastic cups to hold water, felt to wick it and then the soil. Just be sure you talk to the right people about installing one and then make sure you take the proper precautions to protect the roof.

Q: I just want to make a Making Brooklyn Bloom plug: http://www.bbg.org/vis2/2010/mbb/index.html Q: How can I learn to be an urban farmer? Take classes at the botanical gardens, volunteer with gardens or other projects (or become a reliable volunteer for AV), go to a farm, do an apprenticeship. We get so excited when people ask us how to become a farmer or urban farmer.

Q: It says growingchefs.org on the board, what is that? Annie: That is the hat I am wearing as facilitator. It is the concept of connecting people from “food to fork” we do all sorts of educational programming for adults and kids.

Q: Do you do direct sales? Annie: My passion is handing you that food. So, I do some direct sales but specifically to restaurants in my home community. We also do events. I am more interested in getting conversations started, not in the actual cooking or preparation of the food. That is the purpose of growing a good tomato.

Q: What are the economics of selling to restaurants? Kristen: AV sells to 6 restaurants and, if I don’t mess up, we can supply all of their salads from May to July and in September.

Audience comment: The question may not be can we feed ourselves, but can we tap back into our knowledge and plug back into the world. Can we feel the park etc? Agriculture is a several century tradition. People have been inventing this wheel for so long, you all are doing such a great job educating.

Plug for the Black Farmer’s Conference.