Carbon Credits for Green Farming

Given up on stocks?  Why not buy carbon?

If climate change legislation is passed, the trading of carbon credits may well be a salve — if not a solution — for New York City’s struggling financial sector.  In this op-ed piece in the Wall Street Journal, New York State Senator Kirsten Gillibrand pushes for cap and trade legislation, noting that carbon could quickly become the world’s largest commodities market.

“With thousands of firms and energy producers buying and selling permits to emit carbon, transaction fees for exchanges and clearing alone could top nearly a billion dollars,” she writes.

It could also be a boon for family farmers, who would be able to cash in on good farming practices. Under cap and trade legislation, farmers practicing techniques that sequester carbon — like, for instance, not tilling soil — would be eligible for carbon credits that they could register and sell on an exchange.

While the carbon credits aren’t worth much, they may rise substantially in value should the U.S. enact cap and trade legislation.  The price of carbon in the U.S. goes for about $3 a ton, dirt cheap by European standards.  In Europe, where the carbon market is far more developed, it has fetched as much as €35 a ton, the equivalent of $52 a ton.

Let’s take, as an example, a pilot program that the Global Emissions Exchange, a New Jersey-based carbon trading platform, launched this year for small Pennsylvania farmers.  According to GEX, no-till cropland in most of Pennsylvania sequesters .6 tons of carbon per acre of land.  A 100-acre “no-till” farm, therefore, would be rewarded for keeping 60 tons of carbon from the atmosphere. At $3 per ton of carbon, the 100-acre farm would earn $180 — before fees — for the sale of carbon credits per year.

It’s a pittance.  However, if carbon trading gains traction — as it has in Europe — the price of carbon could take off.  At €13 per ton ($19/ton), let’s say, the 100-acre farmer could make $1,155 a year in extra income.  At €35, the farmer could make $3,108 extra annually.

With cap and trade legislation, Sen. Gillibrand has hit on what could be a triple win.  Farmers would benefit.  The environment would benefit.  And with a potentially hot new commodity to trade, Wall Street would benefit too.  

Freaky Fruit: Romanesco Broccoli

© Margarida Correia. Romanesco broccoli at the Greenmarket at Union Square.

Hey all you freaky fruitistas:  We’ve hit the peak of the freaky fruit season.  Things like celeriac, osage oranges and husk cherries are out in force at the farmers market.

Here’s another oddity to add to the season’s crop of unusual vegetables:  Romanesco broccoli.  The vegetable – a variant of cauliflower – looks like coral.  It’s not exactly the type of thing you’d want to eat at first glance.  But farmers say it’s less bitter than broccoli and tastes great when steamed or sautéed.  Plus it’s rich in vitamin C, fiber and carotenoids.  Why not give it a try?  The vegetable is going for about $2.25 a pound at the farmers market.

Click here for more freaky fruit.

Local Entrepreneurs Launch Popsicle Biz

The demand for local food has inspired many New York entrepreneurs to form niche businesses that make food using local ingredients.  These new businesses range from makers of candy and honey wine to purveyors of pickles and other pickled produce.

Here’s one small business I recently wrote about for the New York Daily News that emerged from a desire to make a popular treat local.  The company — People’s Pops — makes popsicles from seasonal fruit bought at the Greenmarket at Union Square.

High-rise Farming?

Forget about farming in wide open spaces.  The farms of the future will be in cities, where crops will flourish in multi-story buildings, writes Dr. Dickson Despommier in this op-ed piece in the New York Times.  The prophet and father of the “vertical farm” notes that the rising number of floods and droughts — and a rising global population — will make traditional farming on land untenable.

Dr. Despommier makes a compelling case for indoor urban farming.  Vertical farms take advantage of hydroponic and aeroponic technologies, which are soil-free and use as much as 90 percent less water than traditional cultivation techniques. They would free up farmland, allowing thousands of acres to return to their original ecological state.

Dr. Despommier sees high-rise farms as more than an agricultural take on Macy’s — potatoes, rutabaga and turnips on 7; collard, kale and chard on 6.  Vertical farms, he writes, can also be incorporated into restaurants, schools, hospitals and even “the upper floors of apartment complexes.”

Dr. Despommier has no shortage of vision or imagination.  He envisions vertical farms as “things of grace and beauty” with transparent walls and ceilings to let the sunlight in.  From a distance, high-rise farms would look like “gardens suspended in space.”

He contends that vertical farming is no longer pie-in-the-sky dreaming.  The futuristic form of farming is now feasible, thanks to the commercial success of greenhouse technology.

In Jamaica, Queens, for example, a rooftop greenhouse business, Gotham Greens, is on track to launch next year.  The greenhouse on the 12,000-square-foot rooftop is expected to produce 30 tons of vegetables and herbs annually using hydroponic technology.  The greenhouse will produce crops year-round.

Dr. Despommier proposes building a five-story prototype of a vertical farm in New York City.  He argues that it would help further Mayor Bloomberg’s goal of a greener city by 2030 and could easily become a tourist attraction, generating significant revenue for the city.  The sale of produce from the farm would also generate tax revenue.

The cost of the prototype?  It’s estimated at $20 million to $30 million, a tough sell in today’s economy.  It’s especially hard to make a case for farming in a city where finance reigns.

Still, with surging interest in farms and local food and growing concerns about the environment, who knows what the future holds.  The city of financiers may just trade finance for farming.

Click here for related post.

Sharecropper Art Project Unites City Folk

Peppers planted in the concrete alley of an Upper West Side home as part of Leah Gauthier’s “Sharecropper” micro-farming installation in New York City.

In June, artist Leah Gauthier drove from Indiana to New York City — 300 seedlings in tow — to initiate a public art project that called upon New Yorkers to do an unusual thing:  donate spaces to grow the seedlings and be part of a living, breathing micro-farming installation that the artist conceived and called “Sharecropper.” 

The response was stronger than she ever expected. More than 100 New Yorkers responded to her call for space donors and volunteers.  Gauthier soon had a far-flung, five-borough micro farm consisting of small bits of land in gardens and backyards, as well as grittier growing spaces like fire escapes and concrete alleys. She amassed 17 sites in all.

The plan, explained the artist, was to involve as many different people as possible in growing food in as many different urban spaces as possible. She made an offer that was hard to refuse.  In return for donated spaces, she would be a “sharecropper,” paying donors with a portion of the produce she grew on individual locations for the season.      

“I was interested in this project so even a city gal with a brown thumb like myself could do some exciting farming,” wrote Rachel Dahill-Fuchel in an e-mail message.  She donated a 20-square-foot section of her concrete alley on the Upper West Side, where 25 planters were planted with a variety of peppers.     

Though donors didn’t need to lift a finger, most wanted to learn how to garden and grow food, said Gauthier.  Dahill-Fuchel, for example, often watered and even “talked to the peppers.”

Dahill-Fuchel explained that she wanted her children, ages 9 and 14, to experience the joy of planting and harvesting.  “As city folk, it is too easy to forget where our food comes from and what is naturally required for food to grow and thrive,” she wrote. 

In addition to the donors, Gauthier developed a loyal group of some 10 volunteers who helped set up the sites and filled in whenever the artist, who worked a full-time job as a web designer, was not available. 

When deciding what and how much to grow, Gauthier considered what would be manageable for the donors.  She didn’t want to overwhelm them with tasks that might be required in her absence, like watering plants.  She made sure that watering wouldn’t take more than 10 to 15 minutes. 

“Giving someone a garden is like giving them a puppy,” said Gauthier.  “I wanted to make sure that it’s not too much of a burden.” 

Each site was dedicated to a different crop.  Not all were equally productive.  Pumpkins planted in the working garden at Lefferts Historic House in Prospect Park were coming in like a “shop of horrors,” said Gauthier.  Dahill-Fuchel’s concrete alley brought in a bumper crop of peppers, while a space in Queens produced plentiful tomatoes, free thankfully of late blight.   The roof atop EyeBeam, an artists’ residency in Chelsea, produced a fair share of melons.

It wasn’t easy covering 17 sites in five boroughs. Gauthier developed three routes that helped her make her gardening rounds.  One took from her from Williamsburg to Staten Island to the Upper West Side to Chelsea, a route that required all forms of public transportation, including the Staten Island Ferry.  Gauthier estimates it took her about five hours to make her rounds each day. 

“It was challenging but also very rewarding,” said Gauthier. She explained that as arduous as it was to manage the micro farm, she got to know the landscape and the plants in an intimate way by visiting every day.   

Sharecropper didn’t bear the most fruitful harvest, Gauthier admits.  But that, she said, wasn’t the goal.  The goal was to bring people together and “re-incorporate agrarian sensibilities and simplicity into modern life.”  On that score, Sharecropper did great.  “As an art piece,” she said, “it was very successful.”

To learn more about Sharecropper, click here.   Crops that were harvested as part of Sharecropper will be featured this weekend at Lefferts Historic House and at Snug Harbor Cultural Center.

Peach Pursuit

Peaches at Greenmarket at Union Square. © Margarida Correia

Book me a flight to China.  Quick.  It seems it’s the only place on earth where I’ll find a tasty peach.  In fact, if this Wall Street Journal article is right, China is where the world’s heavenliest peaches grow.

I’ve experimented with different peaches all season long — at the farmers market and the supermarket — and none have pleased me.  Maybe East Coast peaches are just not that great.  Last year, I lucked out with local peaches I found at the supermarket on my block, but I had no such luck this year.  The WSJ article explains that U.S. peaches — unlike those in China — are bred to have a long shelf life, rather than to be juicy and taste good.  

China’s “shui mi tao” or “water honey peaches” have a shelf life of one or two days.  They’re sold within a day or two of picking, each fetching a pricey $3 in groceries stores in Shanghai and Beijing. 

Transporting the delectable peaches across borders and time-zones is an expensive proposition that makes them off limits to most people, according to the article.  In Tokyo, the peaches go for $10 each.  Were they to make it to the U.S. — doubtful given the fragility of the fruit — the price would be off the charts.

I guess I better book that flight to China.

Garden ROI

James Ware, a gardener at Hands and Heart Farm in Brooklyn, was stunned when he earned more than $2,000 selling his garden-grown crops at the local farmers market the first year the garden opened in 2007.

Check out this op-ed piece by George Ball, chairman of the W. Atlee Burpee & Co., the largest supplier of seeds to home gardeners in the United States.

Not surprisingly, Mr. Ball extols seeds — “God’s microchips,” he calls them — and the virtues of home gardening.  Mr. Ball argues that home gardening provides people with much more than a sense of connection. In today’s shaky economic times, gardening is an excellent investment.  A hundred dollars in seeds produces a harvest that would cost consumers $2,500 at the supermarket, a 25-to-1 return, he writes. 

With other gardening costs factored in, I doubt the return would be quite that high.  Still, no one can argue the bounty — and pleasure — that comes from a simple seed.  Take urban farmer James Ware whom I interviewed last year (pictured above). He made more than $2,000 selling crops from two rows he planted at Hands and Heart Farm, a community garden in East New York, Brooklyn.

Chicken Round-Up

The recession has led Americans across the country to raise chickens in their yards. © photo by Margarida Correia

Who’d imagine chickens making major headlines?  Or front-page news in the business section of the New York Times?  But chickens are doing just that.  Here’s a sampling of recent chicken stories. 

In this article in the New York Times, reporter William Neuman writes about the “backyard chicken trend” sweeping the country.  Many Americans, he reports, are raising chickens primarily as a hedge against the recession.  Chicken keepers will at least have eggs, should things go really, really wrong.  The thinking, however, is irrational, as it’s cheaper to buy eggs and meat at the store.  The deeper reason for the trend?  Americans want to be more self-reliant in tough, unpredictable times such as we’re experiencing. Neuman quotes keepers of backyard chickens throughout the country, including Declan Walsh, a chicken farmer in Red Hook, Brooklyn, who raises hens for eggs and meat.  I mentioned Walsh in this New York Bounty post.  

In this brief article in the science section of the New York Times, reporter Henry Fountain discusses how scientists made biodiesel from chicken feather meal, a byproduct of large-scale poultry production.   

And in this segment on ABC’s Nightline, two New Yorkers talk about the reasons they keep chickens in their yards. It’s not a question of saving cash, but rather of “getting back to more basic things,” says one of the interviewees. The segment has terrific footage of exotic poultry.

Let It Rain

Taqwa Community Garden in the Bronx looked none the worse for the rain. The plots were brimming with leafy greens, and the fruit trees, despite buzz cuts, looked healthy.

Most urban farmers would be hard pressed to see anything positive in the heavy downpours we’ve been having all summer.  The rain has flooded plots, draining gardeners of their energy. 

Veteran farmer Abu Talib, however, is one of the few who sees a sunny side to the rain.  The director of Taqwa Community Garden — whom I blogged about here — says the crops in the garden are well-irrigated as a result of the rain.  The one-acre garden near Yankee Stadium in the Bronx is built on brick, which has absorbed the rainfall well.      

“The water goes straight down,” said Talib of the garden’s good drainage. 

Still, he concedes that too much rain can be problematic.  There’s double, even triple, the weeding to do, plus, said Talib, “plants need sunshine too.”       

When I visited the garden last month, the rain almost sent me on my way.  The garden was locked after a downpour, and there was no trace of Talib. Just as I was about to leave, Talib emerged from the shed in the garden.  “Taking a nap?” I asked, as he approached me.  “No, I was reading,” he said.

Talib showed me around the garden, which looked none the worse for the rain.  The plots were brimming with leafy greens, and the fruit trees, despite buzz cuts, appeared to be fit and healthy.  In fact, the bonsai-like fruit trees looked like botanical masterpieces. 

“We cut down the trees to make them more manageable,” said Talib. Though he didn’t tell me, I surmised that much fruit had been lost for the season.  Many tree limbs, I thought, must have been destroyed by the rain. 

Talib looked on the bright side. 

“They’re midgets but they’re big inside,” he said of the pint-sized apple, plum, pear, peach and fig trees.  Though the trees were smaller, they bore bigger fruit. Besides, he said, if the apple trees were allowed to grow to their full size, they’d “shade the garden out.” 

Good farmers, I learned, are not easily thrown by nature’s slings and arrows.  They know how to adapt.   

I told Talib about a Taqwa gardener who complained that the rain had hurt her plants.  She’d harvest one row for every three rows planted. 

“If a plant isn’t doing well in 13 to 14 days,” he said, a good farmer “will take it up and do it over again.”  He also recommended a “broadcast,” meaning taking a plant’s seeds and sprinkling them on the soil.  “Then, you thin them out,” he said, when the seeds begin to grow. 

All good farm tips, I thought, tricks of the trade that only a consummate urban farmer like Talib knows.

Battalion of Volunteer Bee Watchers Invade City Parks and Gardens

Purple coneflowers are among the 12 flowers volunteer bee watchers are observing as part of the Great Pollinator Project.

I called her Clare, a coneflower I singled out in Manhattan’s City Hall Park two weeks ago. Even though her petals drooped, she still shimmied and swayed amid a cluster of sister coneflowers and black-eyed Susans that basked in the noonday sun.

Clare was one of the 12 types of flowers I volunteered to monitor as part of the Great Pollinator Project, a city-wide effort to better understand New York City bees.  To keep my commitment as an official bee watcher, I’d been vanishing into city parks during my lunch hour in search of the 12 flowers favored by bees, among them bee balm, mountain mint, smooth aster and common milkweed. 

The purple coneflower was the only one of the 12 that I could definitively identify.  With their signature purple petals and striking orange cones, coneflowers are hard not to miss.  Plus they’re everywhere this time of year.

I spotted Clare right away, her head towering over the rest.  She would be the first flower I’d observe for bee pollinating activity. With pad and pen in hand, I watched.  Two bumble bees visited one after the other.  Then, nothing.  I watched helplessly as bee after bee bypassed Clare for the dainty black-eyed Susans. Finally, after 15 minutes, a visitor:  a large carpenter bee, quickly followed by another.  The two visited for five minutes, an eternity in bee-time.  I felt happy for old Clare.  She still had her powers of attraction. 

Some 300 other New Yorkers like me are hitting parks and gardens to monitor “bee visitations” to city flowers — all in an effort to find out which areas of the city have what researchers call “good pollinator service.”  Without bees and other pollinators, the city’s 700-plus community gardens wouldn’t produce nearly as many tomatoes, cucumbers, squash, peppers and other vegetables. 

Since the Great Pollinator Project started in 2007, the number of volunteers has increased every year. The project — an initiative of the Center for Biodiversity and Conservation at the American Museum of Natural History and Staten Island’s Greenbelt Native Plant Center — aims to raise public awareness of the importance of the city’s more than 225 species of native bees and promote home gardening and park management practices that benefit them.   

Most of the volunteer bee watchers are in Brooklyn, followed by Manhattan, Queens, Staten Island and the Bronx, said Kevin Matteson, a teaching fellow in the Department of Biological Sciences at Fordham University who co-wrote a soon-to-be-published report on bees in New York City community gardens. 

“Pollinator service seems to peak at around 80 degrees and in late July when wild bee populations are at a max,” Matteson wrote in an e-mail message.  He also noted that gourds such as pumpkins, squash and zucchini and fruits such as peaches, apples, plums and raspberries are among the crops most dependent on bees and other animal pollinators in New York City community gardens.  

At an orientation for volunteer bee watchers in Central Park, some 50 participants learned how to identify the four major categories of bees and how to spot and watch out for wasps, yellow jacks and other “bee impostors.” They also learned about their responsibilities.  Volunteers committed to watching bees for 30 minutes at least once every two weeks until October when bees begin to fade. 

I chose to be a “mobile bee watcher,” scouting for flowers and bees in public gardens, while others chose to take flower seedlings that they would monitor in their yards or stoops at home.  Some chose to grow the flowers from seeds provided at the orientation. 

There would be times, the orientation leader told us, when the entire volunteer corps would be asked to observe at the same time, a mass swarming, I thought, of New Yorkers on city bees.

The work of the volunteer bee watcher is relaxing, providing a terrific form of stress relief.  Volunteers observe one flower at a time for up to 30 minutes.  As soon as the flower receives five bee visitors, the volunteer’s observation is over.  The volunteer records the data online and for two weeks needn’t do another bee observation if he or she chooses not to.  They can, however, do as many observations as they like. 

With Clare, I waited 23 minutes for five bees to visit.  The other coneflowers I’ve observed since have taken half the time.

What can I say?  It wasn’t Clare’s best day.

To read the Great Pollinator Project blog, please click here.