Farm City Fair

At Farm City Fair, “local” literally means “grown in Brooklyn.”

Farm City Fair, part of Crossing The Line: FIAF Fall Festival, tweaks the traditional country fair, featuring only foods grown or made in Brooklyn. Farms from Red Hook, East New York, Bushwick, Bed Stuy, Crown Heights, and Greenpoint and other neighborhoods will display and sell their produce alongside small batch producers of specialty food and drink assembled from now-endangered Greenpoint Food Market. Local chefs will prepare dishes using ingredients grown in the borough. DIY workshops will teach participants how to start brew their own kombucha or pickle at home. Greenthumb hosts a Blue Ribbon Competition calling for entries in flowers, vegetables, artwork, and baking. For more details on the competition see Greenthumb NYC. Competitive chefs can test their chops in a cook-off entitled “Brooklyn Roots,” produced by The Food Experiments.

Brooklyn Food Coalition is curating a series of workshops at the fair, including:

Foraging with Leda Meredith
Honey extraction with beekeeper Meg Paska
Composting with Liz Neves and NYC Composting Project
Sausage making with Tricia Okin
Pickling with Kate Payne
Kombucha brewing with Kombucha Brooklyn
Hydroponics with Boswyck Farms
Cultivating microgreens with Garden in a Bag
Rooftop farming with sub-irrigated planter systems with Frieda Lim and Bob Hyland

Crossing The Line festival (crossingtheline.org) hosts Farm City Fair, an all-day celebration of local food, artists, chefs, and ideas at the Invisible Dog Arts Center. The fair will include a number of site-specific art works including “The Mobile Garden Classroom” by artist Tatfoo Tan, Andrew Casner’s community process “Compost Painting,” and Miwa Koizumi’s “NY Flavors,” a geographically-inspired ice cream, as well as music such as the local marching band, Asphalt Orchestra, and and specially commissioned works, like “Ça Pousse!” by Mathilde Roussel-Giraudy.

Farm City is an action-research project launched by Derek Denckla as a means of enhancing urban agriculture. Farm City celebrates urban agriculture and investigates the possibilities of a new agrarian future within the current urban reality. Components include: Farm City Fair 9/12, Farm City Film 9/12 and 9/14, Farm City Tour 9/18 and 9/19, and Farm City Forum 9/25, spotlighting the work of artists, farmers, activists, planners, architects, chefs, and foodies, all devoting themselves to feeding the city both culturally and agriculturally. For more information on Farm City Fair and other Farm City events please see farmcity.us or crossingtheline.org.

Crossing the Line is conceived as a platform to present vibrant new artistic practices. The festival engages with widely diverse traditions, perspectives and ideas in partnership with leading New York cultural institutions.

Following the fair, Moviehouse
3rd Ward, 195 Morgan Ave, Brooklyn
September 12, 2010, 7pm
Admission: Free ($5 Suggested Donation: Cash Bar & BBQ)
American Meat by Graham Meriwether
Meal by Laura Braslow and Chloe Bass of Umami: People + Food
Brother Mark’s BBQ by Mark Bernal & Matt Rivera