Hi everyone! It’s been such a long time! We at Farming Concrete hope your gardens are growing and blossoming this season.
There have been some major changes in Farming Concrete that we’d like to tell you about. For the past year, the Design Trust for Public Space and Farming Concrete have been collaborating with a group of 30 gardeners to develop the Five Borough Farm Data Collection Toolkit, the first free, publicly accessible set of protocols to collect data on urban agriculture. The toolkit contains detailed protocols to help farmers and gardeners keep records and tell meaningful stories about the value of their work on subject areas like skills shared, compost produced, and the numerous social benefits provided by each garden, as well as the original Harvest Count and Crop Count. Download a copy of the Toolkit today and let us know what you think!
We have also updated our free, online data entry software (Barn) to include these new metrics, so sign up your garden today. By the end of this year, we will also release Mill, a publicly accessible data portal. More on that to come.
For NYC gardeners and farmers, throughout the 2014 growing season, outreach coordinator D Rooney [5BFoutreach(at)farmingconcrete.org] will provide technical assistance on the toolkit. For everyone else, we encourage you to utilize our free toolkit & Barn, and contact us [mara(at)farmingconcrete.org] if you’re interested in consulting services.