‘Brooklyn Farm Tour’ Organized
As Part of United Nations Conference
By Kate Daloz
Special to Brooklyn Daily Eagle
BROOKLYN — This past Saturday, U.N. delegates from Kenya, Croatia, Japan, Barbados, Venezuela, France, South Africa, Nigeria and the UK arrived in Brooklyn for a lesson on urban agriculture.
The Brooklyn Farm Tour, organized as part of the U.N. Conference on Sustainable Development held in Manhattan, visited two community gardens and two farms to highlight some of the city’s most innovative food production projects.
Tour organizer Siena Chrisman wanted to “bring conversations about sustainability out of the halls of the U.N.” She hoped that an afternoon spent in reclaimed vacant lots that Brooklynites have converted into green spaces dedicated to raising tomatoes, collards, basil and peppers would allow delegates to “make practical connections about sustainability, environment, health and community on a personal, human level.”
At the Hollenback Community Garden in Clinton Hill, delegates listened closely to explanations of a rainwater-harvesting system, a neighborhood compost program and a new solar-powered composting toilet.
The tour’s next stop, Hattie Carthan Community Garden in Bed-Stuy, featured a local foods-cooking demonstration by Community Food Educator Yannette Fleming; afterward, delegates and community members shared a lunch prepared by the gardeners.
A few blocks later, Reverends Robert and DeVanie Jackson explained the development of Bed-Stuy Farm, which grows fresh vegetables for the Brooklyn Rescue Mission’s emergency food program, and led delegates on a brief tour of the neighborhood. Farmers at East New York Farms!, including members of its youth program, showed off the “fields” where they grow vegetables for sale at a weekly market, along with the two modest beehives that produce 80 pounds of highly-prized local honey.
Not Just Women’s Work
Delegate Harriet Ndirangu had signed up for the tour hoping to get ideas for the urban farming initiatives she’s trying to establish at home in Kenya. She was not disappointed. “The rainwater harvester — I loved that!” she said. “And the composting toilet — we will definitely borrow that.”
She also hopes that youth programs like those at Bed-Stuy and East New York Farms might help solve one of the biggest challenges she faces: convincing young Kenyan men that growing food is not just women’s work. “I can’t wait to start implementing what I learned with the gardens,” she said.
South African delegate Harold Liversage saw many similarities between Brooklyn communities and those he visits regularly as part of his work in Africa. “What farmers need” — in East New York as in Swaziland — “is good information, access to markets and dynamic leaders,” he said. He saw those elements at work here and was glad he came on the tour. “Going to other countries, you get to talk to people you don’t normally get to talk to. I didn’t think I’d get to do this in New York — it’s much better than sitting around in a boring UN session.”
Not Like ‘Sex in the City’
Like Liversage, delegate Tomislav Tomasevic experienced a side of New York he’d never seen before. He had hoped that seeing Brooklyn’s approach to urban gardens might give him ideas for how to fend off developers and preserve similar community green space in Croatian cities.
“If people in New York can do it with 10 times more valuable land, it should work in Zagreb,” he said. Standing between the rows of freshly planted collards at East New York Farms, he gazed around at a grape arbor, a bed of bright-green garlic shoots, and a majestically drooping weeping-willow. In the background, the elevated No. 3 train rumbled by.
“It changes your prejudice,” he said. “Just seeing different parts of New York gives you a perspective on the US. How would you ever find out about a Brooklyn community garden [from TV]? This is not the image you get from ‘Sex and the City.’”
For French delegate Fabrice Burger, his conversation with a Bed-Stuy resident at Hattie Carthan Community Garden summed up the importance of local food movements to sustainable development around the world. “She loves Brooklyn,” he said. “If you love a place, you are going to love everything in that place.”
© Brooklyn Daily Eagle 2008
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