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Preparation for this year's BBC World Challenge required less paperwork and red tape than usual on my part, with no requirement to attend a hostile environment course or purchase war-zone insurance. My last two World Challenge projects were based in Pakistan and Afghanistan. The weather though was going to be as hot as Kabul and humid as Islamabad in August, so sunscreen and sunglasses and the coolest of cottons were essentials on the packing list.

My BBC World Challenge project this year was a one-acre rooftop farm in New York City, seven floors above busy Northern Boulevard in industrial Queen's - not Brooklyn as the project name curiously suggested. As I arrived at the imposing, if austere, facade of the former Standard Motor Products Building in Long Island City, I squinted up towards the roof. A dazzling row of lofty sunflowers were peering over the edge, nodding their heads in the slipstream of the many air conditioning units that noisily share their oasis in the sky.  

The farm - the only one of its kind in the United States - was established less than eighteen months ago but is already producing bumper crops of tomatoes of varying hues and sizes, chillies, beans, eggplants, courgettes, assorted herbs and salad leaves. Along with these, pots of honey produced by the aerial beehive are sold at the Brooklyn Flea - a Saturday farmer's market by the waterside, framed by Manhattan on the opposite shore.

Four youthful and energetic entrepreneurs are behind this commercial enterprise: Ben Flanner, the chief farmer, and his partners Gwen Schantz, Anastasia Cole and Chase Emmons. They have impressed their current landlord so much with their zeal and vision to green further rooftops in New York that word has got around the city and they have recently secured a second roof of a similar area above Building 3 at the Brooklyn Navy Yard. With work due to commence in the spring of 2012 to install a protective green roof membrane and lay more than a million pounds of light-weight topsoil, the team hopes to entice corporate events to their garden in the sky to further boost their revenue.

Beautiful and tranquil though the farm appears, the thrum of air conditioning plants, radio interference from cell phone towers, the sound of jets taking off from nearby La Guardia airport and the subway rumbling down below, posed a few challenges in the sound department which is my domain apart from the pictures.   

Fortunately for me, life for the Brooklyn Grange Farm entrepreneurs is not all at roof height.  At street level I attempted to keep up as they rushed daily deliveries of fresh-off-the-farm vegetables to chefs preparing dishes for evening service in restaurants in Soho and Brooklyn; tended a bee-hive at a partnering restaurant also keen to have a culinary use for their roof; erected stands for their produce at the Saturday farmers' market; paid a site visit to their future rooftop farm to eye the lie of the land; as well as spreading the word about the positive value of aerial farming to both the environment and the local community.

The nutritional benefits of organic produce nurtured by a healthy mix of natural compost are conveyed to the many parties of schoolchildren who arrive wide-eyed from their elevator ride to the garden in the air where they gleefully hunt for worms in the steaming and organic-smelling compost heap.