Describe the critical need your solution addresses.

Urban farmers need organization to give political voice to the movement and legitimize these workers as farmers. The logistics of urban farming forces hundreds of farms to act individually, scavenging for land and resources. To make urban farming a viable business, new infrastructure is required for sharing experience and resources.

Explain your initiative in more depth and its stage of development.

Farmshare, web-based platform, allows users to share all resources of urban farming: from donated seedlings grown on a windowsill to a borrowed wheelbarrow for hauling soil. The interface mimics familiar tools such as google maps, twitter, and facebook: users can view each others farms, volunteer for a day, or donate ten pounds of coffee grounds for compost. This allows many citizens to become stewards of the landscape. As a barter system between many participants, bragging rights of who donated the most waste to a farm could result in a share of the bounty.
Simple graphs, maps, and diagrams will chart trends in urban farming. The platform can track how much waste is diverted from landfills; who was instrumental to starting and maintaining a farm; and what the radius of influence is around farms. This data can be used to convince local officials what new bills or grants will be helpful to local food and economy.
BK Farmyards is now in the concept stages for Farmshare. We have sketched up the website interface and detailed how the user would use each feature. Our next step is to determine what features are critical to starting the project and what features will follow later.

How does your strategy and approach respond creatively and comprehensively to key issues?

BK Farmyards has been building a network of farms across Brooklyn, and noticed two major opportunities. The first opportunity is that tons of organic waste is required to sustainably rehabilitate the heavily contaminated soil, and luckily much organic waste is currently heading to the landfills instead. It would take a while for a city to efficiently track all coffee grounds, food scraps, newspapers, cardboard, wood pallets, and leaves separately; however, these are tasks that community groups and start-ups can accomplish. One community garden in Park Slope collected 2000 pounds of leaves in one weekend last year. The strength of a city is its density of resources, but those resources are useless if there is no infrastructure for sharing.

The second opportunity we encountered was thousands of Brooklynites who want to help local farming succeed. They volunteer on farms, vote with their forks, and compost, but they are eager for more. Using tools we already understand in a new way can result in the construction of many new farms in dense urban areas. Farms already work through social connections, but Farmshare magnifies the reach of individuals

By 2010 Gen Y will outnumber Baby Boomers and 96% of them have joined a social network. We are in a communication revolution that is reorganizing our communities, and social networks are better predictors that people find others with shared values. Successful companies are acting more like party planners and aggregators than traditional advertisers. Our strategy addresses the thousands of people who are hungry for local food making them agents of their own community change.
Trying to farm as a profitable entity is very difficult and most farmers sacrifice crop variety in order to cover their costs. Farmshare allows the community to share some of the start-up ‘costs’ of the farms ensuring the long term success of the farmers.