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| Stacey Murphy: an urban farmer and her crops. |
Photo Credits: Stacey Murphy, bk farmyards
Stacey Murphy's vision is literally to grow food in the cracks of urban development. Founder of the nonprofit bk farmyards, Murphy's organization will turn your backyard into a self-sustaining garden, your abandoned lot into a CSA, and a developer’s idle land into a source of, locally grown, nutritious food. Murphy sees bk farmyards as filling serious gaps in the food system. By eliminating the distance between farm and home, local farmlands can cut back on the pollutants created by mass industrialized farming every day. Importantly, they have the potential to easily and economically bring healthy produce to chronically underserved areas.
Award Winning Ideas
Murphy's fresh take on solving sustainability and food injustice issues won the attention of the Buckminster Fuller Challenge Award and their "urgent call for a design science revolution to make the world work for all." As a finalist, Murphy benefited from the process of working with Foundation innovators, who asked penetrating questions that ultimately helped her to formulate a business plan.
With a background in architecture and engineering, and a childhood spent nibbling lettuce in her mother's mammoth 1000 square foot garden in Michigan, Murphy has all right stuff to make an endeavor like bk farmyards work. Today, Murphy's team is lean: a manager, two interns, and a part time farmer - plus a group of very enthusiastic but transient volunteers.
Forging Farms in BrooklynSince its inception in May of 2009, Murphy has sewn roots in a number of local projects, including a CSA in Ditmas Park called Foxtrot. "We've just finished harvesting Foxtrot and we're hoping to double the yield next year," says Murphy. "I mean it's really astounding how little space it takes to grow your own food." The 600 square foot backyard CSA supplies its six members with 7 months of produce. "When you intercrop plants - peppers with lettuce, cukes with radishes to control beetles and to make use of root space - you can really increase your yield."
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Foxtrot Farmyard in Ditmas Park, Brooklyn. |
bk farmyards also works with the High School for Public Service in Crown Heights, where garden-related educational projects are in the works. Murphy sees vast opportunities to enliven the curriculum through gardening. She lists some of the real life lessons offered by gardening: sustainability, water conservation, biodiversity, reproductive health, in addition to learning plant species. And like a true farmer, Murphy uses the fallow period to prepare for next year's growth. In the case of bk farmyards, this not only includes plans to create larger and more CSAs, but to write grants, cultivate connections, and develop proposals for developers.
Bringing It All Back Home
The low-hanging fruit for bk farmyards lies in private homeowners. "It's easier because the decision-making is with one person, and you can create a plan pretty easily," she says. "With homeowners, you're already part of the community, and the idea blossoms from one backyard to the next." For a predetermined price, bk farmyards will create a garden - from building raised beds to harvest.
Like a true architect, Murphy sees possibilities in the limitations of a site. Does a developer have vacant site for two years because funding dried up? "I'll ask for them to lend us the site, and see if he has other land." Looking at ways to cut down on the food-to-table footprint? Murphy is exploring the possibilities in transportable farming systems, greenhouses on big flatbed trucks. "There are liability issues and other questions," she says.
But, give Murphy any opportunity to create low cost, local, and sustainable food sources and she'll keep digging away.
About the Author
Marietta Abrams Brill is a mother, writer, and green advocate who lives with her family in Park Slope, Brooklyn.
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