BRIGHT IDEA: These renderings show the Sunset Park warehouse that will become the world’s largest rooftop garden when it opens next year. (
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Only in the Big Apple do you ride an elevator to get to a produce farm.
A former US Navy warehouse in Brooklyn will soon be home to the world’s largest rooftop garden — joining a growing trend of commercial and nonprofit farms sprouting up citywide.
Manhattan-based BrightFarms will announce a deal today to build a sleek, 100,000-square-foot, commercial greenhouse atop the city-owned Liberty View Industrial Plaza on Third Avenue in Sunset Park.
The soil-free, hydroponic farm will operate eight stories high — overlooking the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway — and grow a whopping 1 million pounds of organic produce annually, officials said.
“Here in New York, we don’t have acres and acres of unused land to grow fresh food, but Brooklyn’s got plenty of industrial buildings with unused roofs that are perfect for urban farming,” said Borough President Marty Markowitz, who spearheaded city zoning-law revisions to maximize rooftop space for farming.
When completed in early 2013, it would be one of six commercial rooftop farms citywide supplying local restaurants, shops and home gourmets with fresh, organic produce.
It will also be more than double the size of a 45,000-square-foot, open-air rooftop farm that Brooklyn Grange plans to open in mid-May, six miles away at the Brooklyn Navy Yard.
Other rooftop farms include Brooklyn Grange’s existing site in Long Island City, Queens, and Gotham Greens in Greenpoint, Brooklyn.
There are more than 600 community gardens and roughly 30 farms citywide — but nearly all are run by nonprofit organizations, according to the Urban Design Lab at Columbia University’s Earth Institute.
BrightFarms, which operates eight farms throughout the city, upstate and New Jersey, also wants to expand by building greenhouses above many city supermarkets.
But Kubi Ackerman, project manager for Urban Design Lab, said it’s unclear whether for-profit operators like BrightFarms will make a lot of green growing greens.
“There is a huge amount of interest in getting businesses like these off the ground, as people seek environmentally friendly alternatives to our industrialized food system, but it’s very hard to make a profit in the farming business in this country,” he said.