Innovation

The heart and soul of Brooklyn Grange is the rooftop farm, where the company grows delicious food for the local community in a regenerative fashion. The farm sustains a Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) program, which offers produce shares to community members who make an up-front investment before the growing season begins, and thus help to finance the farm’s pre-season costs. The Brooklyn Grange team sells the produce to the general public through a variety of farmers markets across the city.

While central to the identity and mission, the produce proceeds alone do not drive profitability. The Brooklyn Navy Yard location, a spectacular 360° view of the Manhattan and Brooklyn skylines, is a significant asset on which the founders have capitalized. They turned an otherwise underused roof into a unique and prestigious event space, coveted as a rental location for a wide range of events such as weddings and corporate photo shoots. The special events department is a crucial second revenue line for the business, and helps build a reputation of the farm as a one-of-a-kind venue.

Another key element of the Brooklyn Grange business ecosystem is landscaping consulting. This design and build extension started on a very small scale, with the team helping friends green their terraces or develop their own urban gardens. Over time, the practice has grown organically into a stand-alone department with multi-year maintenance contracts with major institutions such as Vice Media. Gwen Schwartz, co-founder and Chief Creative Officer at Brooklyn Grange is currently consulting on a project on the roof of the Javits Center to develop Manhattan’s largest farm and the city’s first rooftop orchard. The consulting practice represents a majority of the company’s revenues and has very strong growth potential.

Brooklyn Grange has deeply integrated a range of SDGs into its holistic business model in a way that keeps the company profitable, impactful, and scalable, and creates an exciting vision of what the future of urban life can be.

Inspiration

Access to fresh, local food is typically a challenge for urban areas such as New York City. Lack of affordable space, along with minimal profit margins, are major barriers for farmers looking to grow food in densely developed cities.

After working with restaurants, growing food for fun, and drawing inspiration from the local makers movement that characterized Brooklyn in the early 2000's, the founders of Brooklyn Grange were moved to develop a creative and innovative business model for urban farming. Their goal was to address accessibility of local and sustainably-grown food in the city, and reshape the way we envision urban sustainability and agriculture.

Gwen told us, “My partners and I are inspired by the city of New York and the opportunity that this city gives small businesses to make the world better through creativity and hard work. We are driven to positively change our environment, health and community by building and operating urban rooftop farms, and by participating in a larger movement of social entrepreneurship.”

Overall impact

There are many things that Gwen is proud of over the past nine years. She desctibes, “the sheer amount of green space we are adding to our city” as highest on her list, next to the number of green jobs her team has created. To date, the company has added a total of 175,000 square feet of green space within New York City, and employs 17 full time, year round staff and 20-30 seasonal staff.

Another key component of Brooklyn Grange’s success is the educational opportunities that have come from the rooftop. “The business is so visual and experiential,” Gwen told us. “We are exposing people to a whole new way of envisioning cities and a whole new way of improving our environment.” Brooklyn Grange helps to educate a diverse range of city stakeholders about urban farming and green infrastructure, which is discussed in more detail in the social and environmental benefit section below.

The Brooklyn Grange team continues to prove that their business model can be profitable and scalable not only in NYC, but in cities around the world. It is a model for contribution to the development of Sustainable Cities and Communities—SDG 11. The key is a fully interconnected business ecosystem that gracefully intertwines revenue streams and community engagement programs. At the time of this interview, urban ag enthusiasts around the world, including from Paris, Atlanta, Houston, Barcelona, Copenhagen and Australia, have reached out to Gwen and her team for assistance as they embark on their own local adaptations of the Brooklyn Grange model. The social and environmental benefits that the business creates, combined with its financial growth potential, make Brooklyn Grange’s model attractive to many cities, and its flexibility allows it to be implemented on a global scale.

Business benefit

The bold idea for a fiscally self-sustaining urban rooftop soil-based farm was developed by Gwen and her business partners, Ben Flanner and Anastasia Cole Plakias. Working with the established albeit small Brooklyn-based Eagle Street Rooftop Farm, the team developed metrics to determine the per-square foot cost of running a large-scale, profitable rooftop farm. After successfully opening and running farms in Long Island City and the Brooklyn Navy Yard, the company will open its third third full-scale rooftop farm location in Sunset Park, Brooklyn this summer, and expects to grow over 40,000 pounds of produce each year there, up from a capacity of 30,000 pounds in the Navy Yard. The Brooklyn Grange team has proved that urban agriculture can give both life and financial value to unused real estate, finishing its first decade in operation in 2018 with $2,500,000 in revenue.

It is clear that Brooklyn Grange’s success has been made possible by a confluence of complementary revenue streams, as described above, and a wealth of partnerships. Right from the beginning, the Grange was allowed to operate out of the back of Roberta’s Pizza, and their first launch at Eagle Street brought a wave of community support from Kickstarter and small local loans. This initial buy-in allowed them to grow the CSA program and expand to the Brooklyn Navy Yard location, which simultaneously provided the launching pads for both the event and catering business, and the expertise for the green roof design, build, and consulting practice. With the help of NYC government grants to finance the expansion of infrastructure needed to manage these much larger projects, Brooklyn Grange has been able to evolve from a farm in the back of a pizza parlor to an industry shaper. The web of collaborators has made many positive contributions, and demonstrates SDG 17, Partnerships for the Goals.

Social and environmental benefit

The CSA program has a strong relationship with the local community, who empower an independent urban farming movement that provides a bounty of nutritious produce. Vending at local farmers markets reinforces the - sometimes still surprising - connection between city living and sustainability. Third, the garden serves as an educational hub and outdoor classroom for children and adults alike, providing a window into innovative food production within a city’s limits. Brooklyn Grange offers open visiting hours during the season and partners with City Growers, a non-profit which runs hands-on programming for K-12 students.

Green roofs themselves offer many environmental benefits beyond growing wholesome produce. They provide natural insulation for the buildings they live on, reducing the temperature and decreasing the need for greenhouse gas-intensive air conditioning, especially in the hot city summers. Green roofs also play a key role as habitat for pollinators. Additionally, they aid in stormwater runoff retention and stormwater filtration, as well as improving air quality.

These social and environmental benefits are closely tied to the Life on Land, Climate Action, and Zero Hunger SDGs. The organic practices of Brooklyn Grange protect biodiversity and natural habitats and maintain genetic diversity in the food supply. The educational drive of the business supports building local and global knowledge and capacity to address the challenges of climate change in urban areas. As a direct result of this mission driven pursuit of innovation, Brooklyn Grange has also taken a lead on integrating climate change measures into policies and city planning, including a 2019 bill that will require certain buildings in New York City to have green roofs.

Interview

Gwen Schantz, Co-founder and Chief Creative Officer