An Urban Farming Pioneer Sows His Own Legacy

John Ameroso at a farm he started on Governor’s Island. Photo by Ozier Muhammad/The New York Times

“Anybody doing urban agriculture today should thank him personally”

By Tracie McMllan
New York Times
May 18, 2010

Excerpt:

John Ameroso didn’t hoe the rows of vegetables that help feed the Bronx at the Padre Plaza Success Garden in the borough’s Mott Haven section. He didn’t pick any tomatoes from the vines at the Brooklyn Rescue Mission’s farm. And he didn’t turn the composting bins that kept East New York Farms! fertile ground for collards, cilantro and chard.

But he’s responsible for all of it, along with the rest of more than 18 tons of produce grown in city lots for market last year.

You have most likely never heard of Mr. Ameroso. Yet from a rubble-strewn vacant lot in Brooklyn where he showed New Yorkers how to grow food in 1976 to a three-acre stretch of Governors Island that he’s helping to sow now, he has been behind nearly every organized attempt to grow and sell food in the city, as well as many of the city’s best-known food organizations.

He was New York City’s first extension agent focused on farming, and now probably its last one. Mr. Ameroso formally retired in March and will spend the 2010 growing season removing himself from the daily work of city farms and making sure his colleagues — many of whom he’s trained — can carry on without him.

“Anybody doing urban agriculture today should thank him personally,” said Michael Hurwitz, director of Greenmarket, the system of farmers’ markets that began the same year that Mr. Ameroso started tilling Brooklyn soil. As a founder of Added Value, a group that has coordinated an urban farm in Red Hook since 2003, Mr. Hurwitz got advice from Mr. Ameroso about crop plans and starting a farm stand. “If there hadn’t been a John Ameroso,” Mr. Hurwitz said, “they wouldn’t be doing what they are today.”

Mr. Ameroso’s work, as a Cornell University Cooperative Extension agent, started in 1976, when Representative Fred Richmond, Democrat of Brooklyn, — a gardening enthusiast who’d installed a vegetable plot outside his Capitol Hill office — got money for an extension office in New York City, to show that urban food gardens could help feed inner-city neighborhoods. By 1994, the project, called the Urban Gardening Program, had expanded to 23 cities and was producing $16 million worth of food each year.

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