Brownsville Student Farm is an oasis of plant and animal life in the middle of Brooklyn. We focus on youth education, providing a green community space and raising awareness about health and nutrition.
The Brownsville Student Farm is the first school garden built by Student Farm Project. It is a 7,500 square foot urban farm - an oasis of plant and animal life in the middle of Central Brooklyn, an area usually noted for urban blight and vacant, trash-filled lots. This year the garden will be available as a living classroom for K-8 students and their teachers at PS/IS 323, our partner public school. The garden is also an active green space for the Brownsville community at large and serves as a focal point, highlighting healthy living and nutrition issues facing the community.
Construction began on the garden in March 2012. We are already harvesting beautiful produce, which is sold at well below market value at our Thursday student-run farmstand. We also give produce to students to take home to their families. Our team works every weekend with a wide variety of volunteers from many different organizations. We are nearly 70% finished but need an extra boost to get us there.
We have built over 70% of our garden so far. We need to finish construction of our last 2 garden beds, our chicken pen and our compost bins. We need to build our garden bed benches and set up our commercial grade sink station. We need to truck in two more loads of soil and hire a trash removal company to take away our construction debris. We also will need to purchase some new pressure-treated wood and hardware for our outdoor classroom pavilion (most of the wood we've used so far has been recycled scaffolding). We also need to amend our soil to balance out the pH and the nutrient content. We will need to continue to purchase chicken feed and bedding, seeds and farm supplies. We expect construction to be finished by late Spring 2013.
This project addresses several community issues that exist in many neighborhoods city-wide. Brownsville has plenty of open space in the form of vacant chained-off lots, but very few green community spaces or parks. Central Brooklyn also has some of the worst statistics in the city on diet-related diseases such as diabetes, heart disease and obesity. This is due to a variety of factors including lack of food exposure and nutrition education. We aim to incite change in the cycle of poor community health by starting at the beginning with outdoor environmental childhood education.
