Derek Denckla Talks Urban Farming in Brooklyn

Urban Farm Business Initiative

By nonabrooklyn
Mar 18 2011

Excerpt:

Let’s talk a bit about urban agriculture, particularly here in Brooklyn. What excites you about it? What does it all mean?

There’s a lot of excitement. I think urban farming is exciting in part because it’s one of the most provocative things you can do in a city. Urban farming is sort of an oxymoron. Farms are supposed to exist outside of the city. But by joining them together or juxtaposing them, you provide the most radical stimulus for thinking about how you alter the food system. That’s why I’m attracted to it and I think that’s why the media is interested in it. It’s provocative – something you just want to understand.

So people ask me all the time – “You support urban agriculture…do you actually think you’re going to be able to feed the city with this food?”

And the answer to that is that I don’t care. It’s a good question, but it’s not the point. The point of urban agriculture to me is that it’s a catalyst or a gateway for people to enter into an understanding of how the food systems work – either an alternative or sustainable food system, or the dominant agribusiness-driven system. When I see kids, or adults, go to an urban farm, it’s a ‘show don’t tell’ experience. I can tell you day in and day out to eat an organic carrot, but if I show you that I can either grow it in the ground, and spray a chemical on it that’s basically impossible for you to get off, or that I can grow it in the ground in an organic way without chemicals … you can’t walk away from that unchganged.

Not that it’s just educational – it’s important that these farms be real farms. The minute it doesn’t smell like a real farm, people will discount it. So I think it’s important to have working farms in the city as a way for urbanites alienated from their food system to reconnect with how the food system works, from the core place of production and also, very importantly, waste processing.

The thing we produce the most of in the city is waste. As a city, our compost is potentially incredibly valuable, but it mostly all goes to waste. I read a book called ‘Of Cabbages in Kings County.’ It talked about how Brooklyn and Queens used to be the most productive farmland in the country until the 1920s, when they paved it all over.

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