A Woman Who Harvested a Two-Acre Wheat Field Off Wall Street (2018) | Hacker News Reader

A Woman Who Harvested a Two-Acre Wheat Field Off Wall Street (2018)

nytimes.com

104 pointssstriegs38 comments

Today there is an educational organic farm about 1,500 ft away from where the wheat was grown: The Urban Farm in Battery Park http://thebattery.org/destinations/urban-farm/

And there are hundreds of community gardens across the city that are maintained by neighbors and supported by the Parks Department.

Bonus: A time capsule was also part of the piece, set to be opened in the year 2979 http://www.agnesdenesstudio.com/works7.html

Is this stuff edible? Being in a city sounds like it would be near a lot of pollution? Does it not affect the plants?

The garden is overseen by professionals, so it has likely had soil testing done, especially since they are growing produce.

Manhattan is mostly an island of bedrock, and there is no manufacturing or industrial areas in Lower Manhattan that would contaminate the soil. The only concern would be protecting the garden from water running off the streets bordering the park, but those all have drainage and curbs installed.

Air quality is also an issue!

Ironically, there is little confrontation between a skyscraper and a wheat field, in the sense that they are both extremely artificial and totally man made.

Huh, cool observation

There's a huge confrontation.

One is a agrarian and the other urban.

Two types of completely different civilizations clashing.

Clashing. Or harmonizing. Depending on perspective.

Ask the Swiss. A friend worked at UBS (bank) and told sometimes a cow would peek in through the window.

No, no, no: you can't have the skyscraper without the wheat field. Agriculture and city are part and parcel of each other since Ur.

(I often wonder how dense you could get and still be ecologically harmonious using e.g. Permaculture; you might be able to reach the density of a town.)

No. There's a distinct difference between rural and urban, which has only grown since industrial revolution.

You said,

> There's a huge confrontation.

Which I agree with, history shows that urban folks and rural folks are often at odds, to put it mildly.

However, you also said,

> Two types of completely different civilizations clashing.

Which I disagree with, rural (not wild) areas are just as artificial and man-made (for all that they have more foliage and critters per area) as cities. Agriculture and urbanity have proceeded hand-in-glove. Farms and cities are both parts of the same civilization.

Yah... With that same logic so is the untouched forest from which we get our rarest mushrooms from, or wild game from.

I don't follow, wild areas are not the same as rural areas.

What you're describing is hunter-gatherer (which IS a different civilization, in my opinion, from urban/agriculture) even if it's happening on the fringes of some other civilization.

As far as i know, and I'm not a historian, there haven't been farming (rural or pastoral) civilizations without some town or city involved, farms have always been the umbra of the city.

There were nomadic herders, hunter-gatherers, and farmer/city-states, but there never were cities without farmers nor farmers without cities, ever. So I say they are part of the same civilization even though they are in tension within that system.

I assure you the wheat field will survive without the skyscraper, the other way around not so much. Cities may believe that they are independent of agrarian and rural society but the reality is that modern cities consume an incredible amount of raw resources and by necessity require the resources that an agrarian society produces. While it may sting and be sub optimal an agrarian society doesn't per say need an urban one to survive.

"Agrarian society" doesn't really exist anymore in the first world, given the overwhelming centralized corporatization of farming.

The Amish might count atleast.

Modern farming is also dependent on machines and chemicals manufactured in cities.

Those chemicals are not typically made in cities but either outskirts or in far flung towns outside cities.

How are they confrontational? They go hand in hand.

Nomadism and foraging is the opposite of urbanization and agriculture.

I plant a small field at the end of my parking lot in grain; wheat, oats, or barley. It started as a way to replace the weeds the previous owner let be, but over the years it has become its own challenge.

The progress from bare soil to green shoots, tallish grass, grain heads and then the dried straw color before harvest ties the viewer to the seasons.

It’s a small field. 1/20th of an acre (1/50th of a hectare if you go that way), but since I do all the work by hand it keeps it from being a burden. The down side of being the only grain field for miles around is that wildlife can wipe me out. A large flock of birds before harvest can do serious damage. Lately I lose most of the crop to sleeping deer which mash it down before harvest.

On a good year I make more seed than I plant.

Is it edible? Since it's near cars and their exhausts I imagine that some of it is going to seep into the plants.

Some modern farm equipment literally injects diesel exhaust into the soil, the claim being that the increased carbon and nitrogen levels augment or replace fertilizer. And no I am not kidding, see Bio-Agtive.

I was hoping it was going to be about a loophole in wheat futures that let you claim ownership of the wheat field.

There was a very similar art installation in downtown Los Angeles in 2005:

https://www.kcet.org/shows/earth-focus/field-of-dreams-the-c...

I wish you could put produce farms into transparent tethered ballons- then they could provide shade for the buildings reducing ac-cost, while producing produce like a greenhouse.

Idiotic dream i guess, but a nice one.

This is about art, not farming and it is great!

> “a two-acre wheat field that was planted in May 1982 on the landfill that would eventually become Battery Park City”

I would not eat wheat grown from a New York landfill.

Depends how deeply it was covered.

To be fair it was an art installation. It may seem whimsical but at the same time it was a juxta or urbanity (which is known to think of itself as divorced from the far flung hinterlands that feed it) and farm. Business and cultivation. Suits and overalls. I think it was a pretty cool installation. Not as flamboyant as that artist who circumscribed islets with pink plastic film[1], but to me it has more meaning.

[1]Christo

The Irish Hunger Memorial is worth a visit to experience such a juxtaposition in BPC today.

By "landfill", they mean land that was created by filling in the Hudson River, not a landfill where refuse is buried. But still, I would eat anything made from that wheat.

Yeah, the Hudson probably had just as much trash in it.

To add context, that river is polluted with things like PCBs and mercury to the extent that official guidance is to not eat fish you catch there.

All seafood is contaminated with mercury from coal mining/burning

Different kind of landfill.

From the headline I assumed some “average Jane” had discovered a way to rip off the big banks via wheat derivatives, or futures or some such financial non-sense. Of course the headline for this article seems to reflect the post-modern bullshit that everyone from Wall Street banks to emerging artists (and yes, SV startups) seem to be participating in today. Since post-modernism seems to be preoccupied on the banality of the present I will leave no further words.

What does "post-modern" mean in this context?

This isn't a leading question - I really don't know what you mean here.

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