Food Security: Urban Agriculture & Markets
Overview | New Market Development | Emergency Food Provision | Extension Education & Demonstration Farming
Extension Education & Demonstration Farming Locations
With the help of CUCE-NYC, Gericke Farm has become a full-time, off-site school and agricultural laboratory for young adults with special needs
Gericke Farm
A farm since the late 1700s, Gericke Farm is a 22 acre-tract, part of Clay Pit Ponds State Park in Staten Island. Gericke operated as an organic farm from the 1940s to the 1970s. Clay Pit Ponds State Park Preserve and its partners have maintained and developed the site for production, marketing, and environmental education and outreach, using approximately 8 acres of cropland to grow vegetables, tree fruits, brambles, grapes, herbs, flowers, perennials, native plants, and to raise bees and chickens.
An Educational Partnership
The semi-restored farm structures date back to the 1850s and include an 1890s-era Victorian-style house, two barns and a carriage house serving as an office for CUCE-NYC and the Board of Education. The barn has an attached greenhouse with classroom space and is used to grow the farm's transplants, just one of many lessons in environmental education.
The farming tradition continues through a unique partnership between New York State Parks and Recreation, CUCE-NYC, and the New York City Board of Education
The farming tradition continues through a unique partnership between New York State Parks and Recreation, CUCE-NYC, and the New York City Board of Education. With the help of CUCE-NYC (keeping with organic production practices), Gericke Farm has become a full-time, off-site school and agricultural laboratory for young adults with special needs. Youth participants are involved with production and marketing, and sell produce at their school on a weekly basis. Monies are recycled into the farm for needed supplies. The emphasis is on youth education and vocational-skills training. This learning experience is unique for special-needs youth.
New York City Board of Eduction trained special needs teenage youth with emotional difficulties at Gericke Farm from 1992 to 2002.
The barn has an attached greenhouse with classroom space and is used to grow the farm's transplants
In 2003 and 2004, autistic special education youth from P.S.37 in Staten Island propagated 200 and 230 flats of vegetable transplants that valued $1600 and $1800, and marketed approximately $1250 and $1400 worth of fresh produce at their local school market. Transplants were used by Extension Urban Food Systems participants in New Farmers, New Markets programs and New Farmer Development Project to grow produce sold at markets throughout the City.