Rooftop farms are the latest thing

From AM-NY:

The seeds of New York’s rooftop farming industry, planted over the past decade, have yielded a harvest in recent years.

It has grown from a niche industry to a large-scale phenomenon, according to experts, thanks to a change in city regulations and a subsequent spur of investment.

And there’s potential for expansion in the years ahead, especially in Brooklyn and Queens.

“These large-scale greenhouses are advanced and expensive, but more and more consumers and businesses are supporting them,” said Nicole Baum, spokeswoman for Gotham Greens, a rooftop farm operator in Brooklyn.

The city changed its zoning laws in 2012 to allow rooftop greenhouses certain exemptions from limits on height and floor size on commercial and industrial properties. As a consequence, landlords have come to view them as a potential amenity and opportunity for profit.

The city offers plenty of ready-made locations to allow for the industry’s further expansion, according to the Columbia University analysis.
It concluded that there were more than 5,701 private and public roofs in 2013 that, combined, were capable of holding 3,000 acres of rooftop farms. That’s nearly three and a half times the size of Central Park. Neighborhoods with the most rooftop space were Maspeth, Long Island City, Greenpoint and Sunset Park, according to the report.

Everything old is new again

From the Daily News:

The bucolic farms of middle America are getting some stiff competition from the rooftops of New York City.

A growing number of commercial farms housed several stories high throughout the city are producing crops year-round — in many cases without even using dirt.

Several city farms are looking for more rooftop space to grow their local food businesses. And swaths of Queens and Brooklyn with large expanses of industrial rooftops are prime candidates for the urban agriculture expansion.

“In dense cities like New York, there isn’t an enormous amount of vacant land,” said New School Professor Nevin Cohen, who specializes in urban agriculture.

But “there are thousands of acres of rooftop space in New York City potentially suitable for agriculture — with more than 1,000 acres in Queens,” he said.

Rooftop farm opens

From NY1:

The farm is run by the commercial farming business Brooklyn Grange and is located atop a building on Northern Boulevard in Long Island City, Queens.

The group says the idea is to inspire New Yorkers to create their own rooftop gardens by informing them of all the perks.

Local officials praised Brooklyn Grange’s initiative.

"It makes sense on every level,” said Councilman Jimmy Van Bramer. “It's locally produced, locally farmed, that will be sold locally."

Farmers cultivate a wide variety of vegetables ranging from salad greens, tomatoes, peppers, eggplants, cucumbers, squash and kale.

The farm sells its produce to city restaurants, at two markets at the building on Tuesdays and Thursdays from 3 p.m. to 7 p.m., and at Roberto's in Bushwick on Sunday afternoons. It also plans to sell at Vesta in Astoria on Saturdays.

For more information, go to BrooklynGrangeFarm.com.

Up on the roof with Big Red

It's Friday. It's been a long week. And you know you want to caption this photo of James Van Bramer fondling Christine Quinn's vegetables, which comes from the Queens Times.

Green roofs to prevent sewerage overflow

From the Huffington Post:

CSO's are the single biggest source of pathogens for many urban bodies of water. The warning bells about sewers and the insufficient infrastructure have been ringing for decades. Though not the best for holiday table talk, it is critical that there is more discussion about new solutions in order to avoid the continuing circular logic of our current ones. Only by seriously looking at new paradigms (or spending billions and billions more on construction than we need to) can this stinky problem be solved.

Too much weight is currently put on the need for more "infrastructure," meaning more pipes, more engineering, more disruption, more trying to control the flow, especially when it combines with rain. (It is as futile a solution as holding back the waters of Lake Ponchartrain during a major hurricane.) These "end of pipe solutions" represent the traditional approach to solving a problem caused by too many people paving over too many acres.

So what can better solve the problem with our sewers? The most obvious -- and most affordable--solution is bringing vegetation back into the cities that paved over green space to get there. Green roofs can dramatically reduce runoff and sewage overflows. Green roofs--roofs covered with living plants, which are, by the way, beautiful -- as opposed to ones made of tar or other impervious materials, absorb water and are a less expensive way to capture water than trying to control it through end-of-pipe ideas. Nature becomes a bigger player, acting as the engineer. Building owners benefit and so do municipalities who have to spend much less on controlling their storm water.

New York City talked a good game about green roofs but decided to spend its millions of dollars of our federal storm water stimulus money on traditional structures -- building more man-made holding tanks -- instead of looking at what is really the cause: lack of vegetation. Isn't that what got New York, Miami, Los Angeles (and countless other major cities) into trouble in the first place?

Photo by Miss Heather

From Garden of Eden to Tar Beach

From the NY Times:

Long before green roofs were hot, long before Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg declared his goal to plant one million trees across the five boroughs, Mr. Goldstein was doing his part to green New York with his 2,500-square-foot aerie atop the ninth floor.

Until now, Mr. Goldstein’s garden has been governed mostly by the quick-changing whims of the seasons. This week, his birch tree is losing its leaves, and his apple tree has been bearing sweet, mild fruit. The seasons may be intractable masters, but Mr. Goldstein, now 71, has come to expect their tyranny. Much harder to accept: that a piece of paper pinned to a door should govern the fate of the small ecosystem that he considers an extension of his home.

In July, Mr. Goldstein, who runs a merchandising business from a small, sunny office mounted on his roof, found a troubling notice from the City Buildings Department on his building’s front door. From a roof nearby, the notice read, visual inspection revealed “small housing structures built on top of this roof,” along with other concerns, including “foliage resembling a small forest.” The building was not code-compliant, the notice went on to say, and the owner would be required to provide an engineering report documenting the structural soundness of the roof.

Then Mr. Goldstein received a letter in the mail, dated Aug. 28, from the bank that bought the building when its previous owner went bankrupt. The bank was terminating his lease to the roof. He would have until the end of September to deconstruct Eden and return the roof to its natural state: black tar, the kudzu of urban surfaces everywhere.

From tar beach to vegetable garden

From the Daily News:

Few train passengers have probably ever paid any mind to the one-story building at 148-02 Archer Ave., currently home to a church.

But the building's rooftop, littered with rusted nails once used to secure railroad ties, could play an important role in the future of food production in the city.

Three young entrepreneurs are preparing to transform it into what is believed will be the city's first commercial-scale hydroponic rooftop farm.

The startup, called Gotham Greens, will feature a 12,000-square-foot greenhouse, slated to begin construction in the fall and yield its first harvest early next year.

It will use a water-based, soil-free method to grow roughly 30 tons of vegetables and fruit each year for sale to local markets and restaurants.

The groundbreaking venture aims to use an untapped urban resource - rooftop space - to meet an emerging demand for locally grown produce.