Brooklyn Urban Farms Devastated by Monday’s Hail Storm

Photos by BK Farmyards.

A severe hailstorm that wiped out 80-90% of our crops

By Nona Brooklyn
NonaBrooklyn Blog
October 14, 2010 

Excerpt:

On Monday night, as a line of powerful thunderstorms moved across Brooklyn, something that rarely happens in these parts began to unfold. Updrafts in the storm front’s giant cumulonimbus clouds pushed massive amounts of rain thousands of feet up into the atmosphere, where the raindrops began to freeze and coagulate into marble-sized balls of ice which quickly grew heavy enough to fall back onto our streets as hail. Millions of Brooklynites gawked in disbelief as close to an inch of ice pellets coated many neighborhoods in a matter of minutes, creating a fleeting (if unsettling) wintery fantasy. For most, it was all over in a matter of minutes. But for some of our urban farmers, it was a living nightmare and it was just beginning.

BK Farmyards and the Added Value Community Farm in Red Hook suffered devastating losses, with 90% or more of their harvest-season crops destroyed, and countless hours of hard work lost. These projects will need the support of the community to recover and move forward. They’re looking for volunteers to help clean up the farms, and for donations to help recoup the revenue they were counting on from produce sales over the next six weeks.

And from Ian Marvy of the Added Value Red Hook Community Farm:

Excerpt:

“Things look really bad. On Sunday afternoon Edie Stone from GreenThumb, Gerard Lordahl of Grow NYC’s Open Space Greening program, and John Ameroso, one of the founding forces of urban agriculture in NYC were all on the farm remarking that it had never looked so good. That all changed Monday evening.

On Monday night as the rain turned to hail our heads and hearts turned towards our fields and the food that we grow. It’s October and our hard work has been transforming land into beautiful fields (small and large) of food to feed ourselves, our friends, and our community. However Mother Nature (and man-made climate change) brought us a severe hailstorm that wiped out 80-90% of our crops. The collards look like Swiss cheese, the chard the same, the okra are riddled with holes, the salad seems to have turned to soup and the bush beans are all but gone.

Read the complete article here.

And from BK Farms.