About this project
THE FARM:
When Fayette Plumb gave his grandson the keys to the old pickup, he wasn’t expecting the half-ton to drive back home––as a farm. But last spring, using green-roof technology, lightweight soil and heirloom seeds, filmmakers Ian Cheney and Curt Ellis transformed granddad’s ’86 Dodge into a traveling 20-member CSA. They planted between the wheel wells with arugula and tomatoes, parked the truck on a Brooklyn street, and waited for sun and rain to work their charms. When the first sprouts came up, Truck Farm was born. Subscribers received deliveries of produce, arriving via the mobile farm itself.
THE FILM:
The friends behind Truck Farm, Ian Cheney and Curt Ellis are also filmmakers––the Peabody Award-winning co-creators of King Corn, Big Riverand The Greening of Southie. Now, with your help, Ian and Curt are turning Truck Farm's story into the centerpiece of a new 40-minute documentary about the urban farms taking root in America's biggest city. The Truck Farm film will carry viewers from a self-sustaining Staten Island barge to a 6,000-square-foot market garden atop a Brooklyn roof to the elaborate Window Farms of two Manhattan artists. Along the way, we'll see how far today’s city-dwellers are willing to go to grow food on whatever land they’ve got. According to the National Garden Association, 7 million new gardens were planted in 2009, everywhere from White Houses to schoolhouses. Truck Farm is the story of how these gardens are breathing new life into old cities––and helping one old pickup find meaning in its last years on the road.
THE FUNDING:
Principal photography for the Truck Farm film has been completed. Now that we're in the editing room, we need your help to finish the job. We need to clear our schedules of other work and spend ten weeks with our editor (Freddy Shanahan), composer (The Fishermen Three) and animator (Sharon Shattuck) to turn all that tape into a documentary. If you help us reach our Kickstarter campaign goal––$15,000––we'll be able to finish the Truck Farm film this summer, and will launch it in film festivals this fall. If you're REALLY generous, we'll even bring the farm to you, for a special outdoor screening with our outdoor screen and Truck Farm's under-hood projector. Thanks to our non-profit partner Practical Farmers of Iowa, your contribution is tax-deductible. If you're only kinda generous, at least you'll still get a Truck Farm trucker hat.
SPREAD THE WORD!
Follow us on Twitter Fan our page on Facebook Forward our Kickstarter page and website to your friends.
We can't thank you enough for your support. Keep on trucking / farming!
Ian Cheney and Curt Ellis
Wicked Delicate Films
FAQ
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Funding Successful
This project successfully raised its funding goal on June 10, 2010.
Pledge $35 or more
Pledge $35 or more and get a wicked handsome Truck Farm gray and white trucker hat. Features the retro Truck Farm logo, silkscreened in Brooklyn.
Pledge $70 or more
Trucker hat ain't enough for you? Pledge $70 or more and you'll get the hat and a signed DVD of the finished Truck Farm film.
Pledge $250 or more
It's startin' to feel like a PBS pledge drive around here! Contribute $250 or more to Truck Farm and you get the trucker hat, the signed Truck Farm DVD, and copies of King Corn, Greening of Southie, and Big River.
Pledge $1,500 or more
Okay, you're serious about this. Thanks. We're very grateful. You get all the hats and discs you can shake a stick at (or at least a couple of each). You also get our most coveted prize: an outdoor screening of the Truck Farm film, displayed on our mobile screen from the Truck's own under-hood projector. Filmmakers will attend, and Truck Farm salad will be enjoyed by all. Hate to say it, but you gotta be within a 4-hour drive of Brooklyn to collect this prize.
Project By
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Ian Cheney and Curt Ellis run the Brooklyn-based documentary and advocacy organization Wicked Delicate.
Ian and Curt graduated from Yale College in 2002, where they helped launch the Yale Sustainable Food Project and the freshman orientation program Harvest.
After college they turned to film, moving to Iowa to farm an acre of industrial corn, homebrew high-fructose corn syrup, and create the Mosaic Films documentary King Corn. The film showed in theaters in 60 cities, aired nationally on PBS, and won a Peabody Award.
Ian and Curt next created The Greening of Southie, a documentary about the men and women behind Boston’s first green building. That film was released in theaters, broadcast nationally on the Sundance Channel, shown in union halls around the country, and featured on Good Morning America, NPR, and in The New Yorker magazine.
In 2009, Ian and Curt launched Big River, a 30-minute documentary about the ecological consequences of industrial agriculture, created under Curt's Food and Society Fellowship with the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy.
They have served as jurors for Wisconsin International Film Festival, Camden International Film Festival and BendFilm, and have spoken at more than 100 college and corporate campuses from California to Qatar. They are now working to start a national AmeriCorps school garden and Farm to School service program, FoodCorps.
