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

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

Anastasia Cole Plakias. Avery, $26.95 (288p) ISBN 978-1-59240-948-8

In this enjoyable but not especially useful book, Plakias relates her story of cofounding Brooklyn Grange, a commercial rooftop farm, as part of a group of people determined to build a self-sustaining, profitable business. They viewed success in more than one sense, focusing on “people, planet, and profit.” The group’s members left steady but unsatisfying jobs in more traditional businesses to start the farm. The book shares their struggles to raise capital, the process of building the farm, their first growing seasons, the formation of a community, and what they learned along the way. Plakias’s colleagues express skepticism right up front about writing a business book—skepticism that, it turns out, was justified. This is a sweet and inspiring story about what can be accomplished by a group of smart, idealistic young people dedicated to environmental and business goals, but it is not descriptive or prescriptive in any way that would help readers improve or change their thinking around business. (Apr.)