The project Farming Concrete is working to measure food production in New York City’s community gardens and highlight the value of neighborhood green spaces
Their project is called Farming Concrete and they’re on a mission. They have set out to map and weigh the produce grown in community gardens all over New York City. These garden spaces--sometimes plot after plot of overflowing vegetables, sometimes just a few plants scattered in the sun--are community run, community kept, and the food they produce is, without a doubt, the freshest produce you can find in this busy city of ours. Talk about local food--it's even fresher than the Farmer's Markets.
Farming Concrete is an ongoing project started earlier this year by Mara Gittleman, who recently completed a Compton Mentor Fellowship through the Compton Foundation. While working to finalize the citywide map and database of community gardens through this fellowship, Mara saw a hole in any data regarding food production within NYC. Existing maps and data detail where gardens are located and how big they are; but no one has ever looked at just how much is being grown. Mara formed her project idea in response to the lack of data and found that GreenThumb (a project of NYC's Department of Parks and Recreation), Just Food, and other local non-profits had been seriously hoping for something like this, and so Farming Concrete was born.
What’s the plot?
The goal of Farming Concrete is to determine how much food is actually grown in community gardens in the city. This means mapping gardens and plots under cultivation and weighing the harvests of a sample of gardeners over the summer and autumn months. With this information, Farming Concrete can then determine the monetary value that would correspond to the quantity of vegetables grown and the approximate number of people the food could feed.
The project has been in full swing all summer and will continue on into the fall. With over 20 researchers roaming the streets and helping to fill in the missing data, and with support from the Parks Department GreenThumb program and non-profits JustFood and the NY Restoration Project, Farming Concrete has legitimacy and mobility. Fundamentally though, city-backed or not, Farming Concrete is a group of young adults and community members dedicated to food sustainability, community green space, the importance of data, and the intersection of the three.
The members of the research team of Farming Concrete spent hot summer days (and they were hot!) scouring the streets of New York: speaking to community garden members, drawing up maps of existing plots, marking what plants grow where, learning to identify crops by leaf-type. As one of these researchers I can say how familiar we've all became with the issues, joys, and plights of gardeners dedicated to urban agriculture and sustainability. It has been a massive undertaking and it has been both fun and strenuous, irritating and at the same, enormously educational.
Would you like tomatoes or roses?
The project is important. It’s the first of its kind and it’s enormous in its goals. There are nearly 500 community gardens scattered across the five boroughs of New York City. Anyone would agree that these gardens offer something unique in the urban setting. If you’ve ever had the opportunity to take a break from the city streets and sit quietly on a shaded bench in an open community garden, you know that these green spaces are invaluable to city life. If you’ve ever had the luck to attend a potluck dinner at a community garden on a summer evening--to see how the garden brings people together, how the space opens up for community development, and positive energy--you know that community gardens are unique and special places, deserving of study, promotion, and protection.
Instead of tomatoes and cucumbers, some gardens grow countless varieties of sweet-smelling flowers and botanical plants, work tenderly towards space-beautification, or offer simply, a quiet, green setting. Others, that harvest mountains of squash and kale each year, sometimes have hundreds of members, sometimes just a handful. But all types of these gardens bring unique benefits and extraordinary joys to their members, to their communities, and to passersby on the street. All foster community development, have a history of preservation and protection, and deserve recognition and support as urban, green spaces.
And this is precisely what Farming Concrete works to do: in focusing the project’s survey on those gardens that do grow food in the city and using the more easily measurable aspects of these gardens--the physical weight and quantity of produce grown within them--Farming Concrete helps to bring about wider-spread recognition, funding, and protection of all gardens, vegetable and flower. Farming Concrete supports community garden development in the urban setting; it works to give that much more clout to the individuals who have struggled to keep these spaces open and free to the public; and it hopes to bring attention to those lucky New Yorkers, with earth under their nails, who diligently work to make the idea of ‘eating local produce’ in the city, actually mean eating from the garden just around the block.
Measuring that sweet, sweet sweat
Mara and her team are now elbow-deep in food logs from gardeners all over the city. But how will they turn pounds of tomatoes, ears of corn, and bunches of chard into usable information for interested gardeners, city-members, or councilmen? The research team is already in the midst of creating an interactive map showing each garden in the city, how much food was grown in specific areas, and actual poundage of plants in the survey’s sample gardens. It’s exciting to have this kind of searchable database already under construction and we’re looking forward to seeing the final product when the team is finished with it later this year. To keep abreast of the ongoing work of Farming Concrete, check out their website.
