An Edible Schoolyard Grows in Brooklyn

Yesterday Historic P.S. 39 The Henry Bristow Landmark School in Park Slope, Brooklyn launched an innovative Edible Community Garden (ECG) pilot program. The program plans to integrate the garden into the school’s curriculum, food program, and the surrounding community and is based in an edible micro-garden, showcasing modern planting methods appropriate for urban challenges. 

The growing obesity epidemic across the US has highlighted the critical link between children’s health and nutrition, and improving school food has been recognized as one important area where cities can tackle the problem at a local level.  School gardens have been recognized as engaging, hands on solutions to this issue. With the stated goal of engaging students in all aspects of farm to fork activities from inception to harvest, the project hopes to foster curiosity and a desire to understanding where food comes from in the students and community, as well as encouraging healthy lifestyle choices, and teach them in a hands-on way what it means to be environmental stewards.  

Currently, outside of several well-publicized and intensively funded school garden initiatives, few examples exist in the US that can quickly and affordably enable communities to tackle nutritional and food justice issues right now.  The pilot project hopes to team P.S. 39 staff with parents and community members in order to build a showcase school garden that aims to become a template and inclusive model of urban micro-farming for schools, homes, and businesses across the country, all within a 6 month time period.

P.S. 39 ECG intends to implement a garden-based learning curriculum where scientific principles come to life. The edible garden will be used to engage students with hands-on learning experiences from ‘seed to plate’ throughout the growing seasons.  The elementary classes will study, plant, maintain, harvest and enjoy the edible plants through curriculum-tied activities, learning about scientific principals through hands on experience. 

The pilot program will be based in pioneering sub-irrigated micro-garden planter technology, ideal for urban environments. Sub-irrigated planter systems (SIPs), store water and oxygen below the potting mix and roots, conserving water and nutrients, and are therefore more accessible and environmentally friendly alternative to conventional gardens.   The beneficial closed loop system dramatically increases yields, and aboveground planter system is ideal for urban lots without open soil areas or with possibly contaminated soil.   Through the use of readily available recycled containers such as shipping pallets and soda bottles, SIP design makes ‘plots’ portable and easy to maintain, as well as, providing an economically efficient solutions for communities with limited resources

The Edible Community Garden Pilot Program represents an integral component of a larger district-wide movement to become a pilot district for wellness in the schools.  Other local schools are also growing food in school gardens, implementing salad bars and healthier menus in their cafeterias, reducing styrofoam and waste, integrating food choices into the curriculum, and helping families learn to cook healthier meals.

Hopefully this innovative project will prove inspirational to other schools in the New York area and beyond, but also show that these projects can be successful even with limited time, funding and experience, so that all communities see that enjoying the fruits of their labors is within their reach.

Funding Food and Farming: Obama’s Budget for FY 2012

President Obama announced his proposed budget for the fiscal year 2012 this morning.  This years budget specifically provides $23.9 billion in discretionary funding, a decrease of $3.2 billion, for the United States Department of Agriculture  (USDA). In keeping with the Administrations priorities, investments are targeted towards renewable energy and key research areas.   Savings are to be created across a number of key areas: reducing direct payments to high-income farmers, refocusing USDA’s homeownership programs, and targeting USDA conservation programs.

Below are some overall funding highlights and those directly pertaining to the USDA, and those which will most directly effect policy related to food and the food movement: 

Local and Regional Food Systems & Agriculture

• Agriculture and Food Research Initiative - Increases funding to $325 million and targets increases or research in areas that are key to American leadership: human nutrition and obesity reduction, food safety, sustainable bioenergy, global food security, and climate change.
• Farm to School Tactical Team —An increase of $2 million is sought to support work at the USDA between agencies to facilitate the building of supporting linkages between schools and local producers.
• Healthy Food Financing Initiative —Provides $35 million as a public-private grant and loan program to bring grocery stores and other healthy food retailers to underserved communities.
• Rural Development Regional Proposal—USDA is again proposing to dedicate 5% of several rural development programs to the development of local and regional food systems.
• Community Food Projects Competitive Grant Program —received $5 million in mandatory funding as provided by the 2008 Farm Bill.
• Value-Added Producer Grant Program —The Administration proposes $20 million in discretionary funding, for a wide-range of value-added projects.
• Farmers’ Market Promotion Program —$10 million in mandatory funding as provided by the 2008 Farm Bill.
• SNAP Point of Sale Devices—As proposed in the FY 2011 budget, the President again proposes $4 million to equip farmers’ markets with wireless EBT terminals.
•  Rural Housing Assistance – refocuses on programs that work better, providing 170,000 new homeownership opportunities, of which at least 30,000 are expected to go to low income rural borrowers.

Nutrition & Hunger Programs

• 2012 Farm Bill —The Obama Administration is committed to working with Congress to reauthorize the 2008 Farm Bill and simplify programs, improve access, target payments, and enhance program performance and efficiency. As part of this collaboration, USDA will also work with the Congress to improve access to SNAP benefits, program operations, and program integrity.
• Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) —$73.2 billion in mandatory funding. The Administration re-proposes to temporarily suspend the time benefit limits for certain working-age, low-income adults without dependents for an additional fiscal year. The Budget also proposes to restore the SNAP cuts that were used to offset the costs of Child Nutrition Reauthorization.
• Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC) —$7.4 billion was proposed, an increase of approximately $138 million above the 2011 level. This funding will support a monthly average of 9.6 million participants in the WIC program, as well as $60 million to help states work toward implementation of EBT, which is mandated by 2020.
• Child Nutrition Reauthorization—The budget funds changes from the Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act of 2010 , as they become effective in 2012. Improving access to food for children and improving their eating habits are top priorities.
• Increasing Access to Child Nutrition Programs—New school breakfast expansion grants and state childhood hunger challenge grants funded at $10 million and $25 million, to increase access to Child Nutrition programs, and combat child hunger.
• Healthier US School Challenge —Funding will be increased to $1.5 million in FY 2012 so that work to encourage schools to take a leadership role in helping students learn to make healthier eating and lifestyle choices will be strengthened.
•  WIC and Senior Farmers’ Market Nutrition Programs—Both programs were level funded at $20 million and $21 million, respectively.  
• Hunger Free Community Grants—$5 million was proposed for the grants to focus on promotion, outreach, demonstration projects, and technical assistance to support communities in exploring local strategies to prevent hunger.
• Congressional Hunger Center Fellowship—$3 million included to level fund the Bill Emerson and Mickey Leland Hunger Fellowship program.

Conservation and Energy

• Renewable and clean energy  - Invests $6.5 billion to spur the creation of high-value jobs, make America more energy independent, and drive global competitiveness in the sector.
• Forest restoration -  Maximizes efficiency and effectiveness of efforts to improve forest health and resiliency by combining and streamlining multiple programs.
• Wetlands Reserve Program and the Environmental Quality Incentives Program – Provides funds to restore and protect 271,158 acres of wetlands and provide over $1.4 billion for conservation assistance. 

However, not all proposals were positive, the President’s 2011 budget would eliminate funding for two important programs, Healthy Urban Food Enterprise Development Center (HUFED) (http://www.wallacecenter.org/our-work/current-initiatives/healthy-urban-food-enterprise-development-center ) and the School Community Garden pilot program (Both these programs were funded at $1 million in FY 2010.

Currently, the FY 2012 Budget must still pass through Congress, who will make the final funding decisions.  (At this time Congress has yet to decided on government spending levels for FY 2011).  While Congress and the President agree that cuts need to be made in order to reduce the federal deficit, their opinions diverge around differ is how and where the cuts will occur. Therefore, many of the above sums are likely to change before the budget is finalized. 

For the full detail of the FY 2012 Budget, click here.

For PBS coverage of President Obama’s budget address, click here.

For NY Times coverage of the 2012 budget, click here. 

Destruction of the Garden of Eden

Today marks the 25th anniversary of the destruction of New York’s Garden of Eden, an earthwork created by Adam Purple in the 1970’s and 80’s.  The Garden once covered five city lots on Manhattan’s Lower East Side between Eldrige and Forsythe St. 

In 1975 much of the Lower East Side was a crime-ridden wasteland, but Adam Purple looked around him and saw the opportunity to reclaim the vacant spaces around him with the natural.  Purple had taken over the lot for the landlords who had abandoned them and left them vacant.  He set out to plant a garden behind his tenement building at a time when much of the area around him was being raised. The site where he began his project was covered in rubble from the demolition of two adjacent tenement buildings.  By the end of the project, Adam would have cleared almost 5,000 cubic feet of debris using only simple tools and his own muscle power. He also set about creating his own topsoil from materials on-site and around the cit.  By combining traditional composting with horse manure from central park he was able to create a fertile growing material which was eventually home to many crops, fruit bushes and flowers, including over 100 rose bushes and 45 fruit and nut trees. (Adam made daily seven-mile round trips on his bicycle to bring carriage-horse manure to the Garden, carrying about 60 pounds on each trip from central park.)

By 1986, his world famous eARThWORK had grown to 15,000 square feet and over 5 city lots. The circular design of the site meant that as nearby tenements continued to fall, the garden could grow exponentially with the addition of each new ring of plant beds. Adam, a long-term social activist and urban gardener AND revolutionary, “zenvisioned” the Garden eventually expanding and pushing out all the skyscrapers of the city.

In the early 80’s the Garden was slated for demolition to make way for a federally funded housing project.  At the time support poured in from various sources, including many prominent New Yorkers who wrote letters and delivered statements of support for Adam and the Garden.  In 1984 the Storefront for Art and Architecture in SoHo hosted an exhibition called “Adam’s House in Paradise” which showcased various alternative designs that would have spared the Garden or incorporated it into the new structure.  Unfortunately the city paid no heed to the protests and The Garden of Eden was razed on January 8, 1986.   It took 2 days for a bulldozer to break through the outside wall of the garden and another hour and fifteen minutes for a highway leveling machine to raise the agricultural masterpiece sheltered inside.  At the time the city had never recognized the site as anything other than a vacant lot (a problem still faced by many NYC community gardens). The new housing project did not include an apartment for Adam or space for a new garden.

The Garden of Eden was destroyed 25 years ago and the FusionArts Museum aims to ensure that Adam Purple and his unique artform are not forgotten, and are instead revived in theis time of pertinent urban discussion about the future forms our city takes. Documentation of the expansion of the Garden from 1978 to 1985 (by Harvey Wang), as well as a few rare prints of Adam’s own 1975-76 negatives will be on display in February at.

FusionArts Museum (Gallery B),
 57 Stanton Street, New York

February 2-20, 2011


Opening Reception: February 3 from 6-9 pm


For more information:, click here.

To hear an interview with Adam conducted for the StoryCorps Oral History Project, click here. 

To view a gallery of photographs of the Garden, click here. 

State of Global Hunger: Global Hunger Index 2010

It has been suggested that global hunger, rather than being halved in pursuit of the Millennium Development goals is actually getting worse. However, according to the 2010 Global Hunger Index (GHI),  published by the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI),  hunger and food security in many nations has not changed over the last decade.

The GHI is calculated for 122 developing and transition countries countries and it’s rates are based on three equally weighted indicators: the proportion of people who are undernourished, the proportion of children under five who are underweight, and the child mortality rate. Twenty-nine countries, mostly in Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia, have levels of hunger that are "extremely alarming" or "alarming." Of the nine countries in which hunger levels rose eight were in Africa, including: Liberia, Burundi and the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). North Korea was the only country outside Africa to show an increase in hunger levels, which has been blamed on negative trends in economic growth and food production.

The report claimed that "the high prevalence of child under-nutrition is a major contributor to persistent hunger," the biggest contributor to the global figure, accounting for almost half of the score.

Addressing issues during pregnancy and the first two years of life could provide critical opportunities for preventing future health problems among children, as undernourishment during early childhood (those first two years) can cause irreversible, long-term damage.

“In order to improve individual GPI scores “countries must accelerate progress in reducing child malnutrition. Considerable research shows that the window of opportunity for improving nutrition spans from conception to age two. After age two, the negative effects of under-nutrition are largely irreversible" said Marie Ruel, director of IFPRI's poverty, health and nutrition division and co-author of the report. Furthermore, the need to attend to the health of all women, but specifically mothers was also highlighted as “crucial to reducing child malnutrition” by Bärbel Dieckmann, the chair of the German NGO Welthungerhilfe, who explained that “Mothers who were poorly nourished as girls tend to give birth to underweight babies, perpetuating the cycle of under-nutrition.”  The report estimated that the burden of child undernutrition could be cut by 25-36 percent by providing universal preventive health services and nutrition interventions for children under two and their mothers during pregnancy and lactation.

While major gains have been made over the last 20 years in reducing hunger and undernourishment (hunger levels fell by one quarter), the number of hungry people has recently begun to rise. The report defines world hunger levels as "serious" and notes that recent spikes in food prices has pushed the number of undernourished people in the world beyond one billion.

To download the Data, click here. 

Window Farming: Growing Food in your Flat

A new project has introduced city slickers with a new, innovative way to grow food in their homes, by using their  creating new ways  apartment windows.  The Windowfarm project creates kits that allow urban apartment dwellers to grow a diverse group of plants in a modular, hydroponic "farm" kit that hangs in front of window frames.  

Windowfarms use repurposed plastic bottles (supplied by the purchaser) along with a pump and irrigation system that circulates nutrient-laden water to your plants. The vertical systems open design allow apartment residents to grow up to 32 vegetable plants in a typical apartment window, ranging from tomatoes, snow peas, and lettuces, to many other vegatables, allowing urban dwellers to produce their own fresh produce and herbs year- round, as well as potentially cutting down on grocery bills.  The company also sees the projects as a potential way to address food deserts in areas experiencing food poverty and environmental injustices (particularly low income neighborhoods).  While this may be an idealistic view, the company has also created educational units to be used in classrooms, and runs a contest so that even schools lacking funding can incorporate them into science/ classroom curriculum. 

The company considers the projects to be “R&D-I-Y, or research and develop it yourself.” Windowfarms founder, Brooklynite Britta Riley, sees the kits as a “public mass collaboration on hydroponic food growing research & development,” and a way for non-experts to contribute to the green revolution.  Currently over 17,000 people world over have joined the window farming community and the kits are being used as far as China and


To learn more about Windowfarms kits, click here.
To listen to more about Windowfarms on NPR, click here.

Changing the Way We Eat - TEDx comes to Manhattan

On February 12, 2011, TEDxManhattan “Changing the Way We Eat” will take place in New York City.  The day long event will highlight various aspects of the sustainable food movement and current projects and work being done to shift the current food system from industrially-based agriculture to one in which healthy, nutritious food is accessible to all.

Speakers with various backgrounds in food and farming will share their insights and expertise and relevant information from this years TED conference will be reviewed.  The event hopes to promote the development of new synergies and new ideas to help bolster the sustainable food movement.

To learn more, click here.

To apply, click here.

NYC's Greenhouse for Growing Little Gardeners

Photo credit: Phoebe Zheng/The Epoch Times

Monday marked the launch of the NYC Greenhouse Project a 1,420 square-foot, state-of-the art rooftop greenhouse in Manhattan. 

To read more in the Epoch Times, click here.

To read more on the NY Times City Room Blog, click here.

To watch the launch, click here.