“I have lots of land.”

That email title sent me and BK Farmyards down the most incredible rabbit hole. Ben Shuldiner, the principal of the High School for public Service, is a visionary man, and I’m not just saying that because he has offered up his one-acre yard for partnership. 

The high school has been awarded one of the top 100 schools in the nation three years in a row: quite a feat considering they are only seven years old! The mission of the school is to empower the students to be leaders in their communities through public service. Each student is required to complete 200 hours of community service prior to graduation, but the average student works 500 hours!

By every measure, this high school has been extremely successful. So I have been contemplating how the success of our farmyard will be measured:

Student Activity / Empowerment

We love food, soil, and plants, but will the students? The school has 400 students, and we will get as many of them involved on site as possible. Some of the students have partnered with CORO to focus on community health issues for their public service hours, so we hope that student activity on site will reinforce these nutrition discussions. Some things are easy to measure: how many hours do students choose to spend volunteering on site; how many students are employed onsite during the summer? There are several more qualitative questions we hope to answer through an online digital diary: do the students feel ownership of the school garden; do the students take leadership roles in teaching others about the farm?

Soil Health

We have an amazing opportunity to build a lot of soil on this site. Soil provides nutrients for plants, stores carbon to reduce greenhouse gases, and improves water and air quality. We will be measuring nutrient levels as well as any heavy metals in the soil as an ongoing documentation of the site. Life moves through soil, so soil health is our number one priority as farmers.

Farm Curriculum

We will be incorporating farm lessons into teachers’ curriculum. Like any other lesson planning, we will be setting objectives, planning activities, and assigning measurements for student projects. We know the teachers are ready to get their hands dirty, we just need to integrate our lessons into their course structure. We are starting now on lesson plans for health classes in May.

Community Involvement

We intend to grow a lot of affordable food, and we hope the community will consume all of it. We also hope that many of them will volunteer on site. Both of these measurements are quantitative, but we also hope to use the online digital diary to document how the community’s quality of life changes with the addition of the farmyard.

Financial Sustainability

There has been a huge surge of interest in urban agriculture in the last couple years, and we believe the only way to make urban agriculture a lasting profession is if there is a model for financial sustainability. We never want to hear, ‘Remember in the 2000-2010’s when urban farming was the latest fad?’ Part of BK Farmyards mission is to eliminate barriers for jobs in urban agriculture. We plan to teach intensive, production farming techniques on site and use the production sales to expand the farm to its full acre and employ talented farmers in Brooklyn.

You can help us! We have currently been awarded every material grant for which we have applied. Everyone loves the project! There are very limited funds available to pay us for our time, however, and the project will almost certainly fail without our experienced farmers! Department of Education budgets have gone through repeated cuts, and so we have taken funding our own salaries into our own hands. Please consider sponsoring our Kickstarter campaign. We hope to be financially sustainable on the site in 2-3 years, but we need some help to kickstart the process. We have to raise $10,000 by February 26^th, or we receive none of the pledged money.

You can visit our website for more information as we develop the project or become a fan on Facebook.

Image Source: Jbary on Flikr