Grow your own...
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Stacey Murphy is the founder of BK Farmyards in Park Slope, Brooklyn. "I think there's a gap in the food system," Murphy says. "There's available land that's underutilized, and people who want to use that land."
The Brooklyn-based decentralized farming network declares its mission as:
"Providing local food to reduce the city's reliance on fossil fuels and offering local jobs to boost the economy. We are seeking partnerships with developers willing to temporarily transform their idle land to farmyard; homeowners who want to eat from their own yard; and city agencies holding under-utilized land. Our strategy is to stay nimble, growing food between the cracks of urban development. BK Farmyards mission is to bring communities together around the dinner table: our educational agenda includes eating seasonally, growing food locally, storing and preparing food, species biodiversity, and food democracy. We aim to build a local food network that enhances the health of our culture, our people, and our environment."
Gersh Kuntzman, in The Brooklyn Paper, calls it "sharecropping, but with a Brooklyn accent." The concept is simple, he adds, "there are tens of thousands of unfarmed acres in Brooklyn, but all that arable land is imprisoned in backyards of roughly one-seventieth of an acre."
