Recently, we’ve been hearing about a lot of ideas for cutting the city’s greenhouse gas emissions and reducing pollution. But there’s another way of making the city green. In our ongoing series about how New York is preparing for climate change, WNYC’s Beth Fertig looks at an urban farm that’s opening today.
REPORTER: On a barge off Manhattan’s West Side, Ted Caplow shows off his greenhouse.
CAPLOW: As soon as we go in here you can see that it’s much warmer.
REPORTER: Warmer and more humid. This is a hydroponic greenhouse. The crops thrive on rain water, which is collected off the slanted rooftop and re-circulated through a series of pipes. There’s no soil. The plants are kept in pots filled with a crunchy blend of rocks and straw that soaks up the water and passes along the nutrients. These crops are constantly well-fed. When the seedlings sprout this summer, Caplow says lettuce and strawberries will grow in the front of the room.
CAPLOW: And in the back we have the vine crops. So we have tomatoes, cucumbers and peppers and they grow in these buckets down on the floor and they’re trained up the strings, and they reach ten feet high. And in fact the tomato plants will keep going until the stems are 30 feet long. But because our greenhouse isn’t 30 feet high we have to lower the bottom part of the stem and wrap it around a pot.
REPORTER: Caplow’s 1300 foot glass and aluminum greenhouse is the centerpiece of his Science Barge. He started the project a couple of years ago with money he inherited from his environmentally-conscious grandmother.
The greenhouse is on a 50-foot long barge that’s completely sustainable: powered by solar panels, wind turbines and bio-fuels including used cooking oil. So it doesn’t emit any carbon dioxide. As an environmental engineer with a background in energy and water pollution, Caplow says he wanted to demonstrate the potential for urban farming. But the barge is just an example of the bigger, higher picture.
CAPLOW: It turns out that there’s a lot of rooftop in NYC. We believe there’s more than 10,000 acres actually available on the roof. Now, that still doesn’t sound like very much in farm country. But our greenhouse, which uses re-circulating hydroponics, is several times more efficient in terms of land use than field crops. In fact it’s five to ten times more efficient.
REPORTER: And if cities start their own farms, he says, they won’t need to truck in as many vegetables from the countryside… resulting in less pollution. Caplow acknowledges this whole vision of rooftop farms might sound a little, well, utopian to most New Yorkers. But just think of the possibilities for corporate sponsorship. And he says the farms could start on top of a few big box stores and schools, where they could ALSO serve as living laboratories.
NELKIN – Will you turn your hand generator to power your fan?
REPORTER: The Science Barge is really an education program, with a workshop for visiting classes. Students from the High School of Environmental Studies tried it out recently.
KIDS: This is solar panel so this is supposed to be on top of here
REPORTER: They planted seeds in miniature greenhouses about a foot long, connected to tiny solar panels and fans to keep the temperature inside from getting too high. They can crank the fans manually if the wind isn’t strong enough says Greenhouse Director Jen Nelkin.
NELKIN: Today the solar panels are working great but it’s not windy enough for their wind turbines to work, so they’re seeing that with renewable energy a nice combination of techniques work the best.
REPORTER: Freshmen Asllan Berisha and Angelica Guerrero say they did learn something from the experiment.
ASSLAN: You know we’ve learned that we could still, you know, help the environment but we don’t need to use as much energy and there’s other options you could use.
GUERRERO: I think it’s pretty cool.
REPORTER: Do you think it could be used in NYC?
GUERRERO: Sure.
REPORTER: How?
GUERRERO: I don’t know. Making space for more greenhouses so we can save electricity and all that stuff?
REPORTER: The Science Barge is scheduling classes all spring and summer, starting at pier 84 off West 44th Street. Visitors can stop by on weekends. For WNYC I’m Beth Fertig.