New York City Health Department Moves to Overturn Ban on Beekeeping

New York urban beekeepers may soon no longer need to keep their beekeeping secret. The New York City Department of Health earlier this month introduced a proposal to remove honey bees from a list of animals that New Yorkers are prohibited from raising in the city.  The proposal will be put to a vote in March, following a public hearing on February 3.  If all goes well, beekeeping could be legal by spring, according to this article in OnEarth, an independent publication of the Natural Resources Defense Council.  The article very nicely sums up all the efforts made to overturn the ban on urban beekeeping.  It’s an informative and well-rounded piece, one that I recommend reading.

Food Policy in the Works

Food is turning into a matter of public policy in New York City. At a press conference last week, New York City Council Speaker Christine Quinn announced “FoodWorks New York,” an initiative to analyze the city’s food system and tap its potential to create jobs, improve public health, and protect the environment.

Speaker Quinn noted that New Yorkers eat very little food that is actually grown in New York State.  Only 2 percent of the fruits and vegetables at Hunts Point Terminal Market in the Bronx – the world’s largest produce market by revenue – for example, are grown locally, she said.

The FoodWorks initiative will examine how New York might keep more of the $30 billion New Yorkers spend on food. One way might be through State legislation that would allow the city to prioritize local producers.

FoodWorks New York will also look to create new jobs in the food industry. Speaker Quinn cited a kitchen incubator that is expected to open next summer in La Marqueta, a city-owned retail market in Harlem.  The 4,000-square-foot commercial kitchen is designed to help entrepreneurs launch bakeries and other food manufacturing businesses.

Speaker Quinn noted that as the nation’s second largest institutional food buyer, New York City presents a large market for local growers.  The institutional food market is currently dominated by out-of-state farmers.  Take, for example, the Department of Education, which spends nearly $300,000 a year on Romaine lettuce for salad bars at many public schools.  It purchases the lettuce from growers in California and Maryland because New York farmers lack a local facility in which to wash, cut and bag the lettuce.

Speaker Quinn is pushing for a washing, cutting and bagging facility in the city, so that local growers would have a chance to supply the Department of Education with the lettuce it needs.

FoodWorks New York will also focus on creating better transportation links between the city and upstate producers.  In addition, it aims to reduce diet-related diseases and environmental damage from the production, transport and consumption of food.

Details of FoodWorks New York will be worked out over the next six months, with final recommendations presented in the spring, said Speaker Quinn.

“With FoodWorks, we’ll make sure that food works for our economy, that it works for our environment, and that it works for our health,” she said.

Click here to read the press release.



Urban Farmers Here to Stay

©Margarida Correia. Karen Washington, founder of the Garden of Happiness in the Bronx, insists that urban farmers are here to stay.

Skeptics call it a fad, but Karen Washington insists otherwise.  “Urban farming,” says the ardent Bronx gardener, “is here to stay.”

With New York City each year turning in bigger and bigger harvests, Washington may be right.  Community gardens throughout the city had waiting lists.  Meanwhile, scores of volunteers lined up each Sunday to plant, harvest, weed and water herbs and vegetables on a 6,000-square-foot rooftop farm in Greenpoint, Brooklyn.

New York City may soon even have an official farm school.  Ever since she returned from a six-month farm apprenticeship program in Santa Cruz, Calif., Washington could not get the idea of a “farm school” out of her head.  Now she’s working with Just Food — a local food advocacy group — to launch the school so that urban growers “won’t have to go to California” to learn farming skills.  The school — set to open in the Spring of 2010 — will provide decentralized classroom instruction at community gardens throughout the city as well as the New York and Brooklyn botanical gardens.

“This is a labor of love of all the gardening groups in the city,” said Washington of the new school.

The longtime gardener founded the15,000-square-foot Garden of Happiness in the Crotona neighborhood of the Bronx in 1988.  The garden is part of La Familia Verde, a five-garden food growing coalition that sold $4,000 worth of produce at its weekly farmers market this year.  Washington is the farm manager of the market.

“All of the community gardens and urban farms are my favorite,” said Washington, as she sat at a table in the Garden of Happiness, the resident cat, Compost, tagging along behind her. “I like them all the same.”

Washington had to be diplomatic.  She was recently named president of the New York City Community Gardens Coalition and to the board of the New York Botanical Garden, an honor that she — “a little girl from the projects” — still finds hard to believe.

Even though community gardens like the Garden of Happiness have “been put to rest” or tucked in for the winter with compost and cover crops, Washington has been as active as ever.  She recently returned from a trip to Detroit where, at the invitation of Just Food, she toured the city’s projects and met and consulted with greening groups there.  Detroit’s burned-down buildings and battered homes reminded her of the devastation of the Lower East Side in the late 60s and 70s.  Though saddened by the devastation, she took heart in the resiliency of the people.

“People,” she said, “are taking back the land and bringing back food,” despite the difficulties and the lack of support for gardening groups in Detroit.

“We’re building bridges across state lines and bringing the movement closer among community gardens and urban farms,” said Washington.

She’s working hard too to strengthen ties within New York City gardening groups.  Earlier this year, she worked with a group of urban gardeners to open Finca del Sur, a one-acre farm in the South Bronx, where she now also gardens.

“The soil,” she recalled of the new urban farm, “was as hard as a rock.  From that brittle soil, though, the gardeners coaxed a rich bounty of collards, eggplant, tomatoes and other crops — enough to sell at the farmers market and donate to local food co-ops and pantries.

Washington has big plans for next year.  In addition to opening her beloved farm school, she is planning a conference for black urban farmers in February. As president of the New York City Community Gardens Coalition, she will also be focusing on extending a 10-year gardening agreement with the city, which expires in 2010.  The agreement gives community gardens certain protections against potential developers, including a review and hearing process should community gardens become development targets.

“We want to make sure our gardens are protected and preserved,” Washington said.

The threats sometimes are more immediate.  Washington spotted a hawk and followed it as it soared across the sky.  She didn’t want it coming anywhere near the chickens, which pecked on scraps in the garden beds.

Hawks are chased away at the Garden of Happiness.  Children, though, are embraced.

Washington understands that preserving gardens means getting youth involved, particularly as older gardeners retire.  She reveres “the elders” — those who were growing food in the city long before it became fashionable.  It’s time, she said, the city’s longtime gardening warriors get the recognition they deserve.

“People have been doing this for years,” she said.  “It’s not a new yuppy thing.”

Visions of Urban Farmland for the Grand Concourse

The Grand Concourse in the Bronx would be transformed into four miles of contiguous urban farmland under a proposal submitted to the Bronx Museum of the Arts as part of an international competition.

The Grand Concourse in the Bronx was supposed to be the city’s Champs Élysées.  Instead, it turned into a nine-lane motorway.

The 100-year-old boulevard may be in for a makeover though.  Nearly 200 proposals for the Grand Concourse flooded the Bronx Museum of the Arts in response to the museum’s call for ideas as part of a global competition jointly sponsored with the Design Trust for Public Space.

Guess which idea placed second?   One called Agricultural Urbanism, a proposal that would transform the concourse into four miles of contiguous urban farmland and public open space.  The envisaged stretch of land would produce more than 500,000 pounds of organic produce, with water harvested from two million square feet of green roofs.

The six other finalists proposed plans that featured everything from windmills to tree farms and agricultural greenhouses.   Animations, renderings, models and interactive installations of the top seven proposals are on view at the Bronx Museum of the Arts through Jan. 3, 2010, as part of the “Intersections:  Grand Concourse Beyond 100” exhibition.  Click here to see some of the renderings and learn about each of the proposals.

Food Cans and the Fight against Hunger

© Margarida Correia. PumpCAN pie “canstruction” was created with 2,580 cans of tuna, sardines, baked bean, sweet corn and other food. It is part of the 17th annual Canstruction design/build competition.

A piggy bank.  A pumpkin.  A dove.  The three giant sculptures — on display among dozens at the World Financial Center through Monday — are made entirely from food cans.  Thousands of them.

The “canstructions” are part of an annual competition to draw attention to the problem of hunger in America.  With a growing number of Americans cutting back on food or skipping meals due to restricted budgets, the sculptures resonate more than ever.  Just this week, the Agriculture Department reported an increase in the number of American households lacking access to adequate food.   It reported that 49 million Americans are “food insecure,” meaning they don’t have enough to eat.  That’s up from 36 million hungry Americans last year.

Many of the canstructions tried to strike a hopeful chord.  The creators of the winning piggy bank sculpture—made with 3,024 tuna and salmon cans—noted that the piggy bank served as “humble reminder that with a little effort from a lot of people we can help feed many.”   A canstruction of the “very hungry caterpillar” in the popular children’s book reflected on the caterpillar’s metamorphosis, using it as a metaphor for hunger.   The caterpillar took an astounding 9,168 tuna cans to build.  It was a very hungry caterpillar indeed.

My personal favorites revolved around Thanksgiving.  There was Jack the PumpCAN, a 3,000-can jack-o-lantern whose lantern “glowed as a beacon of hope” and “warded off the demons of hunger.”  And there was a slice of pumpCAN pie complete with a dollop of cream.  The giant slice was made with 2,580 cans of baked beans, sweet corn and lots of other goodies.

Happy Thanksgiving everyone.

For an account of last year’s Canstruction competition, please click here.

Urban Farmer Featured in Today’s New York Times

Today’s New York Times features a brief Q&A with urban farmer Kristen Schafenacker, the senior farm assistant at Added Value, a one-acre urban farm in Red Hook, Brooklyn.  “It’s a large urban farm, which makes it a very small, small farm,” says the Indiana native.  The article’s a brief, easy read, plus it comes with a great photo of Schafenacker holding a huge squash.  Anyone know what kind of squash it is?

The Real New York Apple

© Margarida Correia. Newtown Pippin apples arrived at the Union Square farmers market from Locust Grove Fruit Farm in Milton, N.Y., but they originated in the 1700s on a farm in Maspeth, Queens.

It took a little time, but I found what might soon be New York’s official apple.  Scrunched in the corner of a farm stand at the Union Square farmers market – amid hundreds of Honeycrisps, Jonagolds, McCouns and other celebrity apples – was a solitary crate of Newtown Pippins.  The little-known green-yellow apples were much scrappier than the others at the stand.  They had more spots, more bruises.  But that’s to be expected from an apple that’s fighting its way back into its hometown.

All the apples at the stand came from Locust Grove Fruit Farm in Milton, N.Y., but only one — the Newtown Pippin — got its start in Maspeth, Queens.   That’s right.  The Newtown Pippin apple originated on a farm on the banks of Newtown Creek in western Queens in the 1700s.  The apple became a popular commercial variety throughout the country, cultivated and praised by George Washington and Thomas Jefferson.

Now there’s a campaign to reintroduce the apple tree in New York City.  More than 100 saplings have been planted in parks, community gardens, urban farms and other places throughout New York City this year.  New York City Councilman James Gennaro even introduced a resolution in June to declare the Newtown Pippin the official apple of the Big Apple.

“Our primary goal is to restore and celebrate the Newtown Pippin, our city’s heirloom apple,” state the founders of the Newtown Pippin Project on their Web site.

The saplings, which are expected to bear fruit by 2011, were donated by New York dry cleaning service Green Apple Cleaners in partnership with Slow Food NYC, the New York City Parks Department, Earth Day New York, and Cummins Nursery, a family-run tree nursery in the Finger Lakes district of western New York.

As with any real fighter, the Newtown Pippin has thick skin.  It’s a bit tart, like a Granny Smith, and watery, like a Jonagold.  It varies in size, shape, and even color.  The new apple adds variety to the New York apple market, and that for me means more choices when I’m looking to bite into something to match my mood or food I’ve eaten.



Staten Island Breaks Ground for Farming Project

Staten Island now has one too:  a working farm.  On Friday, at Snug Harbor Cultural Center and Botanical Garden, city and state officials broke ground for a two-acre organic farm that will feed the hungry in the city’s richest borough.

The new farm, which is expected to produce 9,000 pounds of fruits and vegetables annually, joins a growing number of urban farms and community gardens in the city.  It will be among the city’s largest urban agricultural producers.

New York State Assemblyman Matthew Titone, a board member of the Snug Harbor Cultural Center and Botanical Garden, had long tinkered with the idea of honoring Snug Harbor’s agricultural past.  The 83-acre site had once been a farm and a nursing home for retired sailors. What’s more, the borough had been a farming hub, with as many as 300 farms in 1900, according to the New York Food Museum.

“Staten Island was the largest agricultural community south of Westchester,” said Assemblyman Titone, adding that the last commercial farm closed as late as 1979.  “Why not,” he thought, “bring farming back to Staten Island?”

The recession and growing lines at food pantries plus healthy food initiatives coming from both Albany and First Lady Michelle Obama made the moment right for a new farm, said Assemblyman Titone.  He collaborated with other city and state leaders and representatives of Snug Harbor to get the pilot farming project off the ground.

The farm will work closely with two Staten Island-based social service organizations that feed the hungry:  the Staten Island Coalition of Feeding Ministries and Project Hospitality.  It will also coordinate with African Refuge, a non-profit that assists Liberian refugees.  In exchange for produce, the organizations will provide volunteers to plant and harvest fruit and vegetables at the farm.

The two-acre farm will include a nursery that will grow trees, shrubs, and grape plants for a planned one-third acre demonstration vineyard.   It will also include a compost demonstration site.

In time, the farm plans to develop a farmers market, with profits reinvested into the farm.  While the details have not been worked out, the goal is to have a farming venture with 50 percent of the produce going to food pantries and the remainder to a for-profit farmer’s market, said Assemblyman Titone.

The Staten Island farm will be comparable in some ways to the 47-acre Queens County Farm Museum, which began cultivating land in 2008 for the purpose of selling organic produce locally.  The Queens County Farm, like its Staten Island counterpart, cultivates two acres.  It also raises livestock, which the Staten Island farming project doesn’t.

As generous as two acres are in a cramped city, the Staten Island farm still doesn’t match some of the city’s largest community gardens. Bissel Garden in the Wakefield neighborhood of the Bronx is two-and-a-half acres, while the Added Value Community Farm in Red Hook, Brooklyn is three acres.

The Staten Island farming project might catch up however.  Assemblyman Titone noted that the two-acre plot at Snug Harbor is a pilot program.  If successful, he said, they would look to set up other plots throughout Staten Island.

“Why can’t the farm be spread out?” he asked.

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.