| Brick City Urban Farms |
What can you do with a ½ acre of contaminated soil in downtown Newark? What can you do with 8,000 square feet of tar papered commercial rooftop in the same city?
For John Taylor and his associates, there was an answer that few would find. Both of these locations became farms without dirt.
There was no need for turned earth because both spaces were covered with EarthBoxes, the 21st century way to grow food in the city. This is how Brick City the downtown farm in Newark was born this past summer.
Now that Brick City has demonstrated that you don’t need plowed dirt to grow vegetables in the city, the bigger question is why haven’t other cities done the same. Many individuals and organizations have already done it. Read about some of them.
Why aren’t “urban box gardens” blossoming on every block in every city of the country? Why hasn’t Brooklyn, where I live, done the same? We’re just across the harbor from Newark and we have the exact same problems as they do.
I’m going to try to answer that question in a new series of posts about urban agriculture and our woefully inadequate efforts to grow food locally. You will discover as I have that our institutions have let us down. We have an endemic education problem and we need to fix it.
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