Report: “Room to Grow” mini-conference at NYU, 4 February 2009 10 February 2009 1:31 pm
Posted by Tracy in : agriculture, environment, events, garden, geekery, local food, nyc, people, school , trackbackAs you probably guessed from the title of this post, on Wednesday 4 February 2009, I attended the “Room to Grow: Envisioning Urban Agriculture at NYU” mini-conference. It was a great way of getting up to speed on gardening efforts around campus, and inspiring pictures of city farms and gardens always do a Tracy good. Plus I got to plant kale in a nifty newspaper pot (you can bet I snagged an extra to dissect, in the hopes that I can learn the relevant origami), hang out with other NYU gardening geeks, and there was tasty food, much of it locally grown. All told, it was a fabulous evening.
The keynote, by recent Gallatin graduate Adam Brock, was a presentation of the research he did during the summer of 2008, funded by his Gallatin Dean’s Award, titled “Room to Grow: Participatory Landscapes and Urban Agriculture at NYU”. He showed us a few different models of urban agriculture, highlighting Growing Power the Milwaukee, WI farm project by amazing, MacArthur “genius” grant-winning Will Allen. Adam ran down the list of reasons urban agriculture is awesome, addressing its social, environmental, and economic benefits and dropping the “triple bottom line” sustainability catchphrase without even bothering to define it, which made me smile. He also described civic engagement (the “participatory landscape” idea) as people transforming from consumers to citizens, which turned out to be a popular phrase when I ran a library search on it, but I remember it most fondly from an article assigned in my first-ever food studies class at the University of Oregon: “Eating right here: Moving from consumer to food citizen,” by Jennifer L. Wilkins (originally an address to the Agriculture, Food, and Human Values Society, later published in Agriculture and Human Values (2005): 22: 269-273). So that made me happy, too.
Next there was a panel discussion, moderated by Jeremy Friedman of the NYU Sustainability Task Force, and featuring food studies professor Jennifer Berg, Gallatin graduate student Annie Myers, NYU head gardener George Reyes, and ecological designer Andrew Faust. Prof. Berg talked about the creation of NYU’s first campus garden from its conception (rooftop) to implementation (ground-level raised beds and cold frame greenhouses) and the Grow, Cook, Eat, Learn program that uses it. Annie Myers described her research into urban farming, including work on how farmers and city planners can work together (later I got a link to her report on the subject, because I guess I’m turning into a planning geek). George Reyes shared his vision for an honest-to-goodness botanical garden at NYU, and hopes for more long-term planning for sustainable landscaping. Finally, ecological designer Andrew Faust waxed visionary and kinda lost me with the hippie-woo talk about the spiritual components of sustainability, but hey.
The panel discussed how NYU students, faculty, staff, and members of the surrounding community all stand to benefit from campus food-growing projects, as well as barriers to achieving those goals and ways to overcome them, and then Jeremy Friedman opened the conversation to questions from the audience. People asked about the timing of on-campus agriculture programs, whether the Village is too polluted to safely grow food (answer: it’s good to do soil testing, but air pollution is probably not significantly absorbed into plants), community involvement, and food as a “gateway drug” to greater ecological awareness and better environmental practices in general. Then it was time for a snack break, and smaller group discussions.
Of course, the snacks were fabulous. There were mushroom quesadillas, bite-size appetizers of endive leaves topped with goat cheese and bee pollen, delicious little risotto cake thingies topped with pesto, apples, and apple cider. I found out that the food studies program organizes a CSA, and there might still be slots available (although travel plans might make it hard for to participate this summer, now’s still the time to put my name on the list for the fall). We agreed that although it was great to hear from so many groups within and around the NYU community, it would have been nice to see more representation from the administration (but it was great of the Gallatin deans and the Sustainability Task Force to sponsor the event, don’t get me wrong). On a personal level, I came away more eager than ever to find out how to garden vacant lots in my neighborhood, and also, as I wrote in my journal during the panel discussion, that “I need a worm bin already” because not composting my food waste has sort of been freaking me out.
In conclusion: yay food gardens! I look forward to playing along with whatever grows up at NYU and the city beyond.
