Garden of Youth, Bronx
Farming Concrete is a volunteer, citizen science project to measure how much food is grown in New York City’s community gardens.
Calculating the area, weight, and monetary value of food grown in these spaces would enhance the perceived value and legitimacy of community gardens as a public land use in New York City and would give the gardens a defined place in the fabric of the urban food system. It would also open the gate to making connections between surplus food production and local soup kitchens, food pantries, or schools.
A team of more than twenty volunteer researchers, students, interns, and gardeners are working with hundreds of gardens to map areas under production, measure total acreage, and track harvest volume by crop. For the first time, metrics will be developed to estimate yield from a small, poly-culture raised bed, a common model for urban agriculture with characteristics that differ vastly from large-scale conventional agriculture. The data from this will be open to the public and will be able to answer for each garden and for all gardens as a whole:
“We at ___ Community Garden grew ___ pounds of food in ____ square feet, which is worth $___, served approximately ___ people, and prevented approximately __ pounds of greenhouse gases from entering the atmosphere.”
Farming Concrete is fiscally sponsored by the Open Space Institute, Inc. as part of their Citizen Action Program. OSI is a nonprofit public charity exempt from federal income tax under Sections 501(c)(3) and 509(a)(1) of the Internal Revenue Code. Contributions should be made payable to “Open Space Institute, Inc. / Farming Concrete” and are tax deductable to the extent permitted by law.
