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Come to Union Square on May 11, 2011 and we can explain the Farmacy’s AgBags and how they can aggregate and create territory for urban edibles and neutracueticals from the excess structural resources of our urban environment; and how this can significantly improve the air-quality, and urban biodiversity. We need U to participate in this exploratory research, because one of the critical components of a participatory socioecological system is how well does participation work; how to capture the incredible resource of many intelligent observations, from many diverse humans. We have some ideas we’d like to run by u.

Also we will point out the strange and wonderful incentives to transform your railing, window, parapet, fence or formerly unproductive spaces into thriving u-farm (such as snail races, black pansies and 14th floor pollinators); how u can use rainwater, grey-water or automate (with a hydraulic-robot, similar in design to the robots of the C13th) and retains soil moisture; how this is within the safety margins and structural capacity of existing urban structures; requires no destructive attachments; and is easily moved into place or removed by an individual. Most important to note is the closed and coupled systems principals of Farmacy and the Agbags specifically, demonstration an agriculture system with NO nutrient run off which means NO degradation of local ecosystem or water quality: a demonstration that food production need not externalize the environmental costs, like fertilizers, contaminants or other additives (take, for example, snail poison). By contrast, the system will augment the nutritional resources for humans and non-humans and is designed to explore new ideas in biodiversificaiton (here come the snails) intensification (how do u milk a snail?).

We can step u through the phenological diagram for each the planting scheme (depends on exposure and other factors) which we have developed to maximize the shoot to root ratio, and the leaf area for trans evaporation so that each mature AgBag has a similar capacity to cool the urban heat island effects as a mature tree–but in a single season. We can discuss how one might be able to recruit your neighbor to create a share-farm, like farmville if it were for fleshy neighbors and help explore the social experiment in how we best aggregate microplots for our mutual benefit. There is also a highly optimized pedestrian distribution system for high perishable urban foods (u-foods); and an opportunity developing to market your produce and micro-harvest, by making transaction costs very low, piggy backing on the trips u already make to the green market, and building on the observations and experiments that each of us can do.

The exploration of how we can collectively produce a viable urban agriculture begins …