Community Garden Magazine Issue Five January 2016 | Page 89

--- Seedstock New Data Toolkit Allows Urban Farmers to Measure Progress December 10, 2015 | Anne Craig Photo courtesy of Hornaday Community Garden. “Urban farmers and gardeners now have a brand new way to measure their results and gather hard data thanks to the Farming Concrete Data Collection Tool Kit. The project originated in New York City in 2009 as a collaborative venture between nonprofits Added Value Farms and the Design Trust for Public Space. The data collection tools are intended to help individual farmers quantify what they are doing in ways that will help them both improve and promote their farms. The toolkit includes 16 protocols organized into five categories: food production data, environmental data, social data, health data, and economic data. Online forms allow farmers to upload raw data for each protocol and create reports as needed. So far, the data includes contributions from 285 urban farms and community gardens in 43 cities, and records the harvest of over 75,000 pounds of food and 4,000 pounds of compost. The data on the website is available to any and all interested parties. “…………. ………“Farmers who make a living from their work are always collecting data on what works—and what doesn’t work—in their practices,” says Silva. “Which varieties and cultivars do well on the farm? Which sell out at the market and which rot in the field? Which do well in the local climate? Community gardeners and urban farmers are really no different. They need insight into their successes and failures as they work to meet their goals from season to season. The one big difference involves the breadth and diversity of goals and objectives you’ll see at an urban farm or community garden. For most of these initiatives, growing food is just the beginning of a long list of outcomes that benefit the community, from creating vibrant green space to serving as local laboratories for direct and participatory democracy.” 89