Climate resilient community gardens in the New York borough with the most urban agricultural spaces

The NYC Urban Agriculture Data Explorer Hub launched in January to help inform future urban agriculture (UA) policy initiatives.

By Joanna Insco
Brooklyneagle
February 13, 2025

BROOKLYN — A new mapping tool revealed that Brooklyn has the highest concentration of urban farms and gardens of any borough, but some farmers say the borough needs more.

The NYC Urban Agriculture Data Explorer Hub launched in January to help inform future urban agriculture (UA) policy initiatives. It documents over 2,500 UA spaces across New York City. Of these, 972 are located in Brooklyn.

This data comes at a pivotal moment in the climate fight in New York City. The last few years have seen a historic flood, brush fires, drought and extreme heat. Brooklyn farmers and gardeners have had to adapt to climate change — promoting practices such as composting, rainwater capture and biodiversity to help mitigate the effects of a warming globe.

East New York Farms! (ENYF!) Farm Manager Alexx Caceres said, “We’re currently farming during climate change so things happen as they go, so there’s a lot of learning from that.”

East New York has seen rising levels of asthma and flooding due to climate change. However, the neighborhood, which is home to the most community gardens in NYC, is taking initiative to mitigate these effects.

“There’s a section of folks who might like to think that we can do fancy experiments to mitigate climate change while also still continuing with endless expansion and endless growth. Spaces like this, and all the green spaces in the city, need to be scaled up,” said ENYF! incoming Project Director Ariella Riapos. “There’s study after study that shows that even the smallest green space within an urban environment punches far beyond its weight — the benefits to the local ecology are so much greater than really anything else that they could think of to do.”

Caceres shared that they like to grow a whole bed of pollinator plants such as flowers and herbs to attract different species of beneficial bugs and support ecosystems through biodiversity.

“Through the land management practices that Alexx uses there is a lot of carbon that is being sequestered into the soil … essentially just being taken out of the atmosphere and stored in the ground where it should be,” said Riapos. “It’s hard to separate ecology from climate change. Through intercropping and all of the indigenous land management practices that are used here there is space for insects and for a diversity of species that help balance the local ecology.”

Even notoriously polluted communities like Greenpoint — which faced an ExxonMobil oil spill estimated between 17 and 30 million gallons, are finding creative solutions for cultivating biodiversity and food producing plants.

McCarren Park Demonstration Garden is a 6,000 foot open greenspace that was built by environmental nonprofit GrowNYC in 2016 using a portion of the Greenpoint Community Environmental Fund $20 million Exxon settlement. GrowNYC brought in clean soil, built a 200-gallon rainwater harvesting system, green roofs atop two shipping containers and constructed an asphalt bottom under the garden before handing off the space to the community to cultivate.

In 2022 a neighborhood group organized with North Brooklyn Mutual Aid to steward the space and began donating what they grew to community fridges in the neighborhood. Last year, the harvest was estimated to be 935 pounds.

“I’m excited for the strawberries this year because I missed out on them last year,” said garden co-lead Carla Yuen.

Yuen also emphasized the importance of sharing the story of the Greenpoint spill to McCarren visitors: “We want to continue telling people that story every time they come in and learn about the garden to push the message that Greenpoint is a very environmentally aware neighborhood. We seek climate justice because we are a climate devastated neighborhood.”

Garden co-lead Mara Moss added, “The scale of our garden is quite small but any sort of vegetation we can add to the environment is going to help mitigate the heat island effect.”

Another way that Brooklyn’s UA spaces are fighting climate change is through composting. Compostable waste in NYC accounts for 34% of residential waste, and 20% of the city’s greenhouse gas emissions. City-wide curbside composting was officially mandated last fall, but UA sites have been engaging communities using food scraps to restore habitats and fertilize soil for decades.

“This particular community garden has been on the forefront of composting. One of our first events after organizing September of 97’… we’re having a pumpkin smash potato bake bash,” said Prospect Heights Community (PHC) Farm Master Gardener Traci Nottingham. “That was before compost was even really widely thought of … The compost movement started really heavily here, in this neighborhood it started here.”

PHC Farms still hosts an annual pumpkin smash where jack-o-lanterns turn into garden food and neighbors feast on baked potatoes and hot cider. But what Nottingham described as starting out as a “compost pile” was eventually upgraded with rat-resistant hardware cloth and rust-proof perforated aluminum.

Like many UA sites, PHC Farms has partnered with GrowNYC to collect extra compost for their garden beds. When the Program ended and then was restored again in 2024 as a result of City budget cuts, gardens like PHC Farms had to consider the possibility of purchasing compost.

“We would have to end up purchasing things like our lumber to rebuild our raised beds or if we couldn’t get soil or compost from them,” said Nottingham.

Looking forward, the Mayor’s Office of Urban Agriculture’s new NYC UA Data Explorer Hub aims to assist in policy changes surrounding gardens and farms in Brooklyn — maybe providing incentives to preserve or grow these community spaces through their documentation.

New Yorkers interested in joining a community garden can use the data hub or the NYC Parks GreenThumb map to find the space nearest them. But be forewarned, there may be a waiting list: “People want to grow stuff,” said Yuen. “We are really lucky to have so many volunteers, and I think this is the case for many community gardens where they have a waiting list to get in.”

Read the complete article here.

Source: https://cityfarmer.info/climate-resilient-community-gardens-in-the-new-york-borough-with-the-most-urban-agricultural-spaces/