urban.farming.blog.jpg

2002 Echoing Green Fellow Ian Marvy was recently quoted in a New York Times article on Greensgrow and the rise of urban farming. The idea behind this innovative practice is to create a sustainable means for producing fresh and organic foods that would otherwise not have been introduced to local urban communities, while creating alternative and seemingly unconventional jobs for young city-dwellers-turned-farmers.

Ian knows a thing or two about urban farming as he’s the founder of Added Value, a nonprofit organization that has introduced fresh produce to the Red Hook area of Brooklyn. His fourteen through nineteen-year-old participants spend seventeen hours a week acquiring skills in agriculture, media literacy, environmental justice, and micro-entrepreneurship.

In the article, he points out the unique potential of farms like Greensgrow to join urbanites and the rural sources of their consumption. Even more impressively, Greensgrow’s one-acre Philadelphia farm, which pulled in $450,000 in 2007, is responsible for having “revitalized a derelict industrial site,” he says. The farms, which are built on former vacant lots, appear to be changing the urban landscape in more ways than one.

Check out the full article here.

Photo Credit: Charles Fox/Philadelphia Inquirer