NYC luxury condo owners want to play farmer

It my sound like a bad SNL sketch about Brooklyn hipsters, but it’s no joke. A luxury condo building in Brooklyn comes with a working farm.

Eight floors above the ground at Barclays Center in downtown Brooklyn, workers at the condo building at 550 Vanderbilt Avenue are installing plots of soil on a south-facing terrace, according to the Wall Street Journal.

But not just anyone can farm. Owners will have to pay to play. And the building already has one high-profile farmer. Ian Rothman, a farmer and co-owner of the restaurant Olmsted, plans to grow hot peppers for the restaurant’s homemade aji dulce sauce at the building.

“We plan to develop a substantial amount of our space to peppers,” Rothman told the Journal.

Building residents can sign up each season for plots that are seven feet by 10 feet at the 1,600 square-foot “farm” — enough to harvest “a significant edible crop,” Ashley Cotton, executive vice president for external affairs for the developer Forest City Ratner Cos., told the Journal.

And while it may seem strange to garden high above the ground, there is one advantage: light.

“As a general rule,” Rothman said, “the more sun, the more vegetables you are going to get.” [WSJ] —Christopher Cameron