A Farm Grows In The Hudson

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.

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