The Farm on the Roof: What Brooklyn Grange Taught Us About Entrepreneurship, Community, and Growing a Sustainable Business

by Anastasia Cole Plakias

Overview

The founders of Brooklyn Grange, the world’s largest green rooftop farm, share their inspirational story of changing the world through entrepreneurship.
 
In their effort to build the world’s first and largest commercial green rooftop farm, the founders of Brooklyn Grange learned a lot about building and sustaining a business while never losing sight of their mission—to serve their community by providing delicious organic food and changing the way people think about what they eat. But their story is about more than just farming. It serves as an inspirational and instructional guide for anyone looking to start a business that is successful while making a positive impact.
 
In The Farm on the Roof, the team behind Brooklyn Grange tell the complete story of how their “farmily” made their dream a reality. Along the way, they share valuable lessons about finding the right partners, seeking funding, expanding, and identifying potential sources of revenue without compromising your core values—lessons any socially conscious entrepreneur can apply toward his or her own venture. Filled with colorful anecdotes about the ups and downs of farming in the middle of New York City, this story is not just about rooftop farming; it’s about utilizing whatever resources you have to turn your backyard idea into a sky-high success.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781592409488
Publisher:	Penguin Publishing Group
Publication date:	04/05/2016
Pages:	288
Product dimensions:	5.70(w) x 8.30(h) x 1.10(d)

About the Author

Anastasia Cole Plakias is a published writer, photographer, and veteran of the NYC restaurant industry. As co-founder and vice president of Brooklyn Grange, the world's largest green rooftop farm, Anastasia focuses on creating strong and meaningful connections between the farm and the communities it serves. A born-and-raised New Yorker, Anastasia is dedicated to making her native city a greener and more sustainable place to live.

Read an Excerpt

It’s hard to say exactly what it was that drove us to band together and start a business. Perhaps it had something to do with the radical climate fomenting as the depth of Wall Street’s fraud became clear; it galvanized us. None of us wanted to feel complicit in the greed of the financial industry, of course, but it was more than that: we were compelled to prove that there was an alternative. At the very least, we had been stripped of the idealism that goodwill and humanity held more sway in our economy than the power of the dollar. More and more, when we got together to catch up over a coffee that autumn, the conversation turned to numbers. We found ourselves asking not whether urban agriculture could feed cities of the future—we knew it couldn’t—but, rather, whether an urban agriculture business, which was inherently committed to environmental stewardship and community engagement, could be fiscally sustainable as well. We never explicitly articulated it to one another, or even to ourselves, but each of us was driven to dispel the notion that business and greed were intrinsically linked. We were determined to prove there was space for compassion in commerce.
 
It didn’t hurt that urban agriculture seemed like an endeavor perfectly suited to each of us and, moreover, that our personalities complemented one another’s. Chris loves to launch projects—like a shark, he seems to thrive only when moving forward. Ben needs a challenge, and writing a business plan for a fiscally solvent rooftop farm was certainly challenging. Gwen doesn’t like theorizing about things for longer than thirty seconds. Once she’s decided an idea is good, she wants to act on it. Brandon can rally support better than a mascot during the final seconds of a championship game—if he’s rallying for something he believes in.
 
We all agreed that our hometown needed more agriculture practiced within its borders, but having practiced it ourselves, we realized there was a reason the existing urban agriculture projects relied on grant funding to sustain themselves. Farming is a humble business, and New York City has little room for humble businesses. Yet we also knew that one only has so much power advocating for things. We all shared the belief that running a project profitably was the only way to prove possibility. That mutually held conviction was ultimately what propelled those early conversations about our nascent company from passionate lip service about a hypothetical model to the early brainstorms of a business-to-be.
 
Ben was being approached left and right by candidates who wanted to work with him on a variety of local food projects, but it was our shared goal of creating a business that could grow over time and be replicated in cities all over the world that led him to consider leaving behind the rooftop farm he’d built to work with us. The more time Ben, Gwen, myself, and our friends at Roberta’s spent together, the more we realized we had a special kind of chemistry, diverse skills, and shared ambitions. It would take years for us to realize just how special our chemistry was as a team, and even longer to grow that team into what it is today. But back then, in the fall of 2009, it was just beginning to dawn on each of us that we had met the people with whom we wanted to start a business.

Table of Contents

Introduction: Nowhere to Go but Up 1

1 The Crossroads of Complicity and Conviction: Why We Left Steady Jobs to Take a Chance on a Dream 9

2 Needle in a Haystack Finding a Home for Our Farm 35

3 Return On Ideals: Creative Capital and the New ROI 61

4 Just Monster It Building the Farm 91

5 A Work in Progress Taking Stock and Creating Order 117

6 We Are Farmily: Growing Our Team 151

7 Growing Organically Knowing When to Sign a Deal 185

8 The Web We Weave Fifty Ways to Stay Afloat 205

9 It Takes a Village The Partnerships That Make Us Whole 235

Epilogue: Toward a Healthier Business Ecosystem 261

Acknowledgments 267

Index 269

Editorial Reviews

01/04/2016
In this enjoyable but not especially useful book, Plakias relates her story of cofounding Brooklyn Grange, a commercial rooftop farm, as part of a group of people determined to build a self-sustaining, profitable business. They viewed success in more than one sense, focusing on “people, planet, and profit.” The group’s members left steady but unsatisfying jobs in more traditional businesses to start the farm. The book shares their struggles to raise capital, the process of building the farm, their first growing seasons, the formation of a community, and what they learned along the way. Plakias’s colleagues express skepticism right up front about writing a business book—skepticism that, it turns out, was justified. This is a sweet and inspiring story about what can be accomplished by a group of smart, idealistic young people dedicated to environmental and business goals, but it is not descriptive or prescriptive in any way that would help readers improve or change their thinking around business. (Apr.)

Publishers Weekly

This is a sweet and inspiring story about what can be accomplished by a group of smart, idealistic young people dedicated to environmental and business goals…”
—Publishers Weekly

“Brooklyn Grange is the incredible rooftop farm I dream of seeing in every city across the country.”
—Alice Waters, Owner Chez Panisse Restaurant, Founder the Edible Schoolyard Project

“Brooklyn Grange represents the best of passion and purity, and every page of this book oozes the sweet nectar of creativity, community, and commercial wisdom. That the story reads like a fast-paced novel simply confirms the power of visionary sustainable businesses.”
—Joel Salatin, author, farmer, and owner of Polyface Farm
 
“The Farm on the Roof tells an unvarnished and gritty tale about what it takes to build a business with purpose and profit. This book is jammed with inspirational stories of overcoming entrepreneurial challenges and provides endless lessons that can be applied to any organization.”
—Eric Ryan, cofounder of Method and Olly
 
“The remarkable tale of how a bunch of savvy do-gooders turned their socially conscious dreams into an innovative and economically thriving reality. The Farm on the Roof is an engrossing story of how hard work, ingenuity and an utter refusal to settle for the status quo led to the largest for profit green roof farm in the world.”
—Joe Bastianich, author of Restaurant Man, restauranteur, and TV personality
 
“This book answers the big, tormenting question: how can a small, organic, local farm become financially independent? It's a blue print for sustainable agriculture, which requires not only that we don’t pollute Mother Earth, but that we  find ways to make farming work financially in order to perpetuate and sustain it.”
—Isabella Rossellini, actress, filmmaker, and conservationist
 
“The Farm on the Roof is not just a heartwarming success story about how a group of young people with a shared dream faced every challenge head on to reach their goal. It’s also the story of the search for a new way of living, one that makes the reader reflect on the endless opportunities sprouting in the streets of our cities.”
—Carlo Petrini, founder of the international Slow Food movement

From the Publisher

2016-02-10
The co-founder of "the world's first commercial rooftop farm" chronicles how she and a small group of socially conscious and creatively resourceful individuals built their successful business. In this lively and graciously written account, Plakias, a founding partner and vice president of Brooklyn Grange, relates the numerous painstaking efforts (and pitfalls) made at each step in the development of this unique business currently operating across 2 1/2 acres on two buildings in Brooklyn and Queens. The author begins with how the concept and principles were established through the shared commitment of a core group of diversely talented yet like-minded staffers back in 2008. She then tracks the arduous process of scouting for ideal locations and the grueling experiences building and maintaining each farm. Throughout, the stories are colorful yet instructive. Intending for Brooklyn Grange to be a community-minded business that could be both agriculturally and fiscally sustainable, Plakias is careful to stress how continuing research and a shrewd use of data, as well as their agility in diversifying channels of business, were crucial to their eventual success: "It was a combination of community-minded enterprise and straight-up necessity that brought us to where we are today, with distinct but interwoven divisions of our business," she writes. "The community gives us clear direction about what they would like to see us doing, and by listening to them—by reading every email that comes in, by talking to our customers and the chefs to whom we sell—we understand the markets available to us." An engaging, well-documented business book that should become a valuable resource for urban farmers everywhere. In a category glutted with titles on digital startup operations, the thoughtfully detailed planning and advice laid out here will be inspiring to a wide range of small brick-and-mortar business entrepreneurs.

Kirkus Reviews