Please see http://nysunworks.org - for one thing their photos are better then ours.

 New York City, located mostly around Greenwich Village.
Some 9,300 students are enrolled in graduate and undergraduate degree programs in a variety of disciplines, including the social sciences, liberal arts, humanities, architecture, fine arts, design, music, drama, finance, psychology and public policy. The school is renowned for its avant-garde teaching and houses the well-known international think tank, the World Policy Institute.

From its founding in 1919 and for most of its history, the currently-styled New School was known as the New School for Social Research. Between 1997 and 2005 it was known as New School University. The university and each of its colleges were re-branded to their current names in 2005.

The graduate school of The New School began in 1933 as the University in Exile, an emergency rescue program for threatened scholars in Europe. In 1934 it was chartered by the New York state board of regents and its name was changed to the Graduate Faculty of Political and Social Science, a name it would keep until 2005 when it was renamed New School for Social Research.

Parsons The New School for Design is the university’s highly-competitive art school.

The current president of the New School is former U.S. Senator Bob Kerrey (D-NE), who assumed his role in 2000.

When I visited the barge on Wednesday June 25th, we were shown around by Maia Raposo of the New School. She told me that the program was run by Benjamin Linskey under Dean Jonathan Veitch. As said earlier in scanned in material, the barge is out in the summer - this is the second year - and wanders to different locations at the New York City waterfront - so that schools and others, can be shown that a more rational life-style is good for you and for the world as well.

This is about:

Building Integrated Agriculture -

Building Integrated Agriculture
Locating the production of food in our cities and on the buildings within the city (Building Integrated Agriculture) offers a valuable response to two major challenges of modern urban living. The need to reduce the distance food travels before arriving on the plate of urban consumers and the need to reduce the environmental impact of buildings. Our pragmatic approach takes tried and tested technologies from the high-profit, controlled agriculture industry, and sites them directly next to free or cheap sources of energy, within the urban environment.
Two Problems, One Solution
Modern farming feeds billions every day, but is the world’s largest consumer of both land and water, the primary source of water pollution, and accounts for 15% of global greenhouse gas emissions. Increasing urbanization worldwide has underscored the importance of efficiency in the built environment. In the United States, buildings account for 39% of total energy use, 12% of water consumption, and 38% of carbon dioxide emissions, and figures for Europe are similar. Agriculture has an equally significant impact. Fresh produce typically travels several thousand km to reach urban consumers, adding to traffic congestion, air pollution, and carbon emissions. Moving the farm not just into, but onto the city addresses both of these challenges. Cultivation of food crops within the built environment can reduce our environmental footprint, cut transportation costs, enhance food security, save energy, and enrich the physical surroundings of building occupants.
Hydroponics
Hydroponics, the culture of plants in water, is a technically sophisticated commercial practice in most regions of the world. Applications of hydroponics within the built environment appear to date back at least as far as the Hanging Gardens of Babylon. As publicly demonstrated by New York Sun Works at the Science Barge greenhouse in Manhattan, and demonstrated commercially at other sites around the world, recirculating hydroponics can produce premium-quality vegetables and fruits using up to 20 times less land and 10 times less water than conventional agriculture, while eliminating chemical pesticides, fertilizer runoff, and carbon emissions from farm machinery and long distance transport.

What this means - if we were to use all flat rooftops in the New York City for the production of vegetables, we would have more then enough - actually we could also feed all suburbs with our vegetables.

We could have healthy food and we also would save fuel by not having trucked the vegetables in from Mexico or California, or flown in from Chile and Peru.

The barge is just an educational tool to help disseminate the ideas of NYSUN Works.

Further BrightFarm (TM) is the trade-mark registered name of a business that makes available technologies and equipment to whoever wants to implement the ideas put forward by the staff of the barge and the scientists involved with this program.

The Science Barge:

The Science Barge
“The Science Barge is not only an invitation to ideas and learning, but to change.”

Dr. Jeffrey Sachs, director of the Earth Institute at Columbia University
and special economic advisor to the United Nations

The Science Barge is a prototype, sustainable urban farm and environmental education center. It is the only fully functioning demonstration of renewable energy supporting sustainable food production in New York City. The Science Barge grows tomatoes, cucumbers, and lettuce with zero net carbon emissions, zero chemical pesticides, and zero runoff.
From May to October 2007, the Science Barge hosted over 3,000 schoolchildren from all five New York boroughs as well as surrounding counties as part of our environmental education program. In addition, over 6,000 adult visitors visited the facility along with press from around the world.
Read more:
Know more about the Science Barge
The Science Barge education program
How to visit the Science Barge
Press coverage of the Science Barge
Further Reading: (download)
Science Barge Brochure
Technical Specification
Frequently Asked Questions
Resource List

Brightfarm Consulting Services:

 BrightFarm LLC is a commercial design consultancy. We provide technical services in support of rooftop greenhouses and building-integrated agriculture (BIA) in both educational and commercial settings worldwide. Our core value is ecological sustainability. The company’s team presents a unique expertise in ecological engineering and science, focused exclusively on the application of controlled environment agriculture to the urban domain. We offer sustainable system design, facility layout, crop selection, energy and water analysis, system commissioning, and educational curricula.

Current clients come from the United States, the United Kingdom, France, India, China, and the Middle East. Our designs include both horizontal layouts, integrated into rooftops, and vertical formats, integrated into glass facades.
BrightFarm LLC is a subsidiary of New York Sun Works.

Further reading:
Download the BrightFarm Systems brochure
Download the BrightFarm Schools brochure
Or for more information about our projects please contact:
Email:          info [at] nysunworks.org
Telephone:  +1 212 757 7560
BrightFarm LLC
1841 Broadway, Suite 200
New York, NY10023
USA

The barge uses solar energy 85% - and has also a demonstration program for wind energy.

It is basically about hydroponics and a controlled hothouse. For water it uses river water - filtered and cleaned. Water is recycled. In the city they suggest the use of catchment water as there is plenty of rain in New york City. Plants are stacked vertically in what Maia called Dutch Baskets set up vertically. We also saw a compound for seeding the plants and other substrates made from recycled materials - mainly glass.