$5M Environmental Education Center Coming To Queens County Farm

LITTLE NECK, QUEENS — A historic farm in Queens is getting a new education center as part of a multi-million-dollar investment in two of the borough’s museums, Mayor Bill de Blasio said on Wednesday.

The city granted the Queens County Farm Museum in Little Neck $5 million to build a new education center, and the Queens Museum received a $26 million investment to complete a children’s museum, announced the mayor, speaking from Queens Borough Hall amid his borough-specific “City Hall in your Borough” initiative.

De Blasio connected both investments to Climate Week NYC, an international summit focused on climate action. He said that the farm museums’s new education center will teach about sustainability, and the Queens Museum expansion will help the museum be energy efficient.

“It’s important to be at one with nature around us. That’s how we build the future,” said the mayor of environmental education.

Sustainably growing food is already a central tenet of the farm, which has been continuously operational for 325 years, and currently runs three locally-sourced farmstands as well as environmentally-focused educational programming for kids and adults.

Council Members Barry Grodenchik, who represents Little Neck and helped secure some of the millions allocated to the Queens County Farm Museum in the 2022 budget, spoke about the impact of the farm’s educational programming at Wednesday’s news conference.

“About 133,000 children a year visited the farm before the pandemic [which amounts to] about 13 percent of all school children in NYC,” Grodenchik said, adding that during COVID — when there’s been a push for outdoor programming — the museum became the most-visited organization in Queens County.

Both of the politicians went to the farm earlier this summer — a visit which left a lasting impression on the mayor, who repeatedly called the farm “amazing,” “beautiful.”

He specifically encouraged people to visit the museum’s Amazing Maize Maze, a three-acre cornfield labyrinth, which this year depicts a rendition of Andy Warhol’s “Cow” print.

The maze was designed for the annual Queens County Fair, which took place earlier this month, but will remain open through Halloween.