Urban Agriculture on Wheels

Truck Farm was the brain­child of doc­u­men­tary film­maker Ian Cheney, co-star and co-creator of the acclaimed 2007 doc­u­men­tary King Corn. “I moved to New York City not long after mak­ing King Corn,” Cheney told Organic Connections. “I had a strong urge to grow some­thing other than corn and didn’t have any place to do it in the big city. So I took a good long look at the old pickup truck that my grand­fa­ther had given me when I fin­ished col­lege and decided to give it a shot. From that very sim­ple desire to grow a bit of my own food emerged this film and edu­ca­tion project called Truck Farm.

“The film emerged as the crops were grow­ing and as we started learn­ing that there were more and more peo­ple around the city who were grow­ing their own food. The film actu­ally grew out of the garden.”

The Movie

This is not your nor­mal doc­u­men­tary, how­ever. From the very begin­ning, it is nar­rated in folky, humor­ous song between each seg­ment by a musi­cal group known as The Fishermen Three. It makes for a very different—and extremely fun—watch.

“We wanted the sto­ry­telling style in the film to mir­ror or echo the whim­si­cal nature of the truck farm itself,” Cheney explained. “So it seemed like cre­at­ing silly songs was the most appro­pri­ate way of telling the story about the silly farm in the back of a truck. It made the film that much more fun to pro­duce. My musi­cal col­lab­o­ra­tors are my brother and my old col­lege room­mate, and we all wrote the music together because it was very much a part of the nar­ra­tion of the film.”

The first part of Truck Farm ded­i­cates itself to show­ing the farm being built—including the issues unique to putting a gar­den in the bed of a truck. Interestingly, the tech­nol­ogy found most appro­pri­ate is the same as for plac­ing a gar­den on the roof of a build­ing. It begins with holes drilled in the truck bed, fol­lowed by the instal­la­tion of a layer called a root bar­rier, along with an ero­sion blan­ket and a drainage mat and cups. Next is laid a blend of Styrofoam, gel, organ­ics and clay, which is lighter than—but retains the func­tions of—soil, on top of which is placed a six-inch layer of good topsoil.

Once the truck farm is fully planted, we see its first crop grow—rendered in time-lapse pho­tog­ra­phy, cour­tesy of the truck farm’s solar-powered cam­era, which snaps one still of the gar­den every hour. The crops include arugula, basil, pars­ley, toma­toes, laven­der, pep­pers, sweet peas and more. The truck then hits the road and becomes a cat­a­lyst of inter­ac­tion with some of New York City’s most inter­est­ing pro­duce gar­dens as well as lead­ing pro­po­nents of local, sus­tain­able agriculture.

The first stop is the apart­ment build­ing of famed nutri­tion­ist and author Marion Nestle—as it hap­pens, the first sub­scriber to the Truck Farm CSA—who walks us around her own bal­cony gar­den. We are then off to meet Ben Flanner, who left a career at E*TRADE to oper­ate his sub­stan­tial rooftop gar­den full time. Next we visit Red Hook Community Farm in Red Hook, Brooklyn, where farm­ers, vol­un­teers, school stu­dents and interns are grow­ing food for sale to the community.

We then hit one of the most inter­est­ing stops: the Waterpod Project located on a float­ing barge, at the time docked at Staten Island but reg­u­larly vis­it­ing five dif­fer­ent loca­tions around New York City. The object of the project is to be a place where four peo­ple can live com­pletely autonomously for six months with­out hav­ing to leave the barge, and a wide range of crops are raised right there on the barge to feed them.

After that, we cruise over and take in the Chelsea Window Farm Project, cre­ators of a sys­tem that allows food to be grown year-round in ver­ti­cal farms that occupy win­dows. One farm con­sists of top and bot­tom hor­i­zon­tal pipes that act as reser­voirs for a mix­ture of water and liq­ue­fied com­post; ver­ti­cal columns feed the mix­ture to plants, grown hydro­pon­i­cally in con­verted plas­tic bot­tles. A whole win­dow farm can be set up in a large win­dow for $100–$125 and in sea­son will pro­vide a salad a week.

Click any image above to see a larger version.

A stop is made in front of the famous Blue Hill restau­rant in Manhattan, where Chef Dan Barber him­self comes out, sam­ples the pro­duce and praises it highly.

The film con­cludes with the story of a cou­ple from Denver, Colorado, who recently read an arti­cle on Ian’s truck farm and have built one of their own. Just before cred­its roll, we see chil­dren swarm­ing around Ian’s truck farm back in Brooklyn, excit­edly check­ing it out and tast­ing the produce.

Beyond the Film

The film’s end­ing actu­ally makes for a neat segue into the con­tin­u­ing adven­tures of the truck farm project—for it def­i­nitely didn’t end with the movie.

“The truck farm has been a really sur­pris­ingly pow­er­ful and use­ful tool for engag­ing kids in think­ing about where food comes from and in under­stand­ing the prin­ci­ples of farm­ing and of sus­tain­able farm­ing meth­ods in par­tic­u­lar,” Cheney related. “We of course don’t use any arti­fi­cial chem­i­cal fer­til­iz­ers or pes­ti­cides, and though we haven’t had it cer­ti­fied organic, it is emblem­atic of an alter­na­tive to indus­trial agri­cul­ture. I think chil­dren learn pretty quickly that, although farm­ing has its chal­lenges, the prin­ci­ples of grow­ing food—healthy soil, plenty of sun­shine and plenty of water plus seeds—are easy to grasp and excit­ingly easy to access. So we’ve had kids plant­ing gar­dens in unusual lit­tle places as part of our Truck Farm Garden Contest, as a way to get kids think­ing about what it takes to grow food and what goes into grow­ing food.”

The ongo­ing truck farm cam­paign includes the cre­ation of a fleet of truck farms all across the country—now num­ber­ing a score and count­ing. “We have 20 new truck farms in 20 dif­fer­ent cities around the coun­try this spring,” said Cheney. “They have stag­gered plant­ing times, being in dif­fer­ent cli­mates, but they’re in cities rang­ing from Chattanooga, Tennessee, to Seattle, Washington. Each is going out as we do here in New York, teach­ing kids about where food comes from, vis­it­ing farm­ers’ mar­kets, and gen­er­ally adding a bit of humor, spec­ta­cle and whimsy to events related to sus­tain­able agri­cul­ture and eating.”

So get on board! Truck Farm is cur­rently being shown at select venues and events around the coun­try; check the project’s web­site below for loca­tions. The DVD will soon also be avail­able from the same site. And watch out—a truck farm may very well soon be on its way around your town!

Visit the Truck Farm web­site at www.truck-farm.com.