Founding Partner of Brooklyn Grange Rooftop Farm

Anastasia Cole Plakias
Speaking Fee:  

Varies.

Travels From: Available Upon Request

or

Call Us For More Info

 

Anastasia Cole Plakias At A Glance:

As Founding Partner of Brooklyn Grange Rooftop Farm, the leading green roof farming business in the US, Anastasia has worn many hats over the years, focusing on creating strong and meaningful connections between the farm and the communities it serves.

A native New Yorker, Anastasia Cole Plakias was born-and-raised in the West Village, where her experience gardening was limited to growing lima beans on her sixth floor apartment windowsill. After spending four years fleeing honeybees in abject fear on the campus of Vassar College, Anastasia graduated with a bachelor’s degree in English, a respectable freelance writing resume, and a total lack of fundamental skills. Following her appetite to the world of restaurants, she spent the next several years in the Executive Offices of the Batali & Bastianich Hospitality Group. In 2009, Anastasia made the decision to leave the hospitality world to pursue her dream of making a positive impact on our food and farming systems. It was then that she met her business partners and began ascending a steep learning curve as a farm operator.

As Founding Partner of Brooklyn Grange Rooftop Farm, the leading green roof farming business in the US, Anastasia has worn many hats over the years: she developed the farm’s Events program, ran the Sales department, and continues to manage its Communications and External Affairs, focusing on creating strong and meaningful connections between the farm and the communities it serves. She Co-Founded the farm’s sister non-profit organization, City Growers, for whom she continues to serve as an Advisory Board Member.

Her book, The Farm on the Roof: What Brooklyn Grange Taught Us About Entrepreneurship, Community, and Growing a Sustainable Business, came out in April 2016. Anastasia’s passion for educating urbanites about food, farming, and entrepreneurship is outweighed only by her penchant for telling longwinded stories featuring obscure vegetable trivia. She has also overcome her fear of bees, helping to catch the occasional swarm from one of the farm’s 30 hives, and co-producing the annual NYC Honey Week. A published writer and photographer, neophyte bird nerd, and avid home cook, Anastasia is dedicated to making her native city a greener and more sustainable place to live.

  • The Farm on the Roof: What Brooklyn Grange Taught Us About Entrepreneurship, Community, and Growing a Sustainable Business

    Brooklyn Grange launched with the humble but ambitious goal of creating a fiscally sustainable model for urban agriculture. A few years later, the farm is flourishing, with two locations spanning 2.5 acres of rooftop and a third slated for development in spring of 2017, a commercial apiary, a robust events program, and a design and installations arm that builds farms and gardens across the city. Anastasia explains how the co-founders developed a savvy team and grew a small farm into a bustling business in one of the most competitive cities in the world. With a focus on sustainability across all dimensions, the operators of Brooklyn Grange rooftop farm make a case for starting a small, local business that serves its community and the ecosystem, all while remaining profitable. She argues that one small organization can make a big impact on the health of its local business ecosystem.
  • MYTHS & MIRACLES: Exploring What Works...and Doesn't for Urban Farming

    Urban farms have grown more popular than ever in recent years. Greenhouses are popping up atop roofs and community gardens are sprouting in lots in cities around the country. But urban agriculture often means growing in contaminated soil, fighting tall buildings for light, or using valuable real estate for indoor growing operations that seem more like the set of a sci fi film than your garden-variety farm. In many ways, growing food in cities is the least efficient way to produce crops, and cities can never truly feed themselves. So what's the point? As co-founder of Brooklyn Grange Rooftop Farm, a 2.5 acre business that launched in 2010, Anastasia Cole Plakias weighs in on exactly what the real value is of urban farms, and why we've been getting it wrong all along.
  • AgTech: Should We Really Be Pairing Food and Farming?

    Silicon Valley seems to have finally taken notice of its neighbor, Salinas Valley, and the AgTech Industry is tripping over itself to invest in the next big boom: farming. Digital farmer's marketplace sites are receiving tens of millions in VC funding and CEA (controlled environment agriculture) operations growing vegetables in nutrified mist are signing huge, lucrative contracts with major retail chains. Meanwhile, the farming community is up in arms over the change in legislation allowing hydroponics to be certified organic, farmer's markets continue to sprout up in greater numbers, and promising start-ups like GoodEggs and Farmigo are folding even after receiving huge cash infusions.
Gotham Artists

33 Nassau Avenue, Suite 24, Brooklyn, NY 11222

(646) 798-9651

Info@GothamArtists.com