JetBlue sprouts a potato farm at New York JFK

It already has a performance stage and a post-security rooftop terrace with a dog walk.

Now JetBlue Airways’ Terminal 5 at John F. Kennedy International Airport has an outdoor farm.

Designed to promote New York agriculture and add a bit more green space to the airport, the 24,000-square-foot T5 farm is growing produce, herbs and the same blue potatoes used to make the Terra Blues potato chips JetBlue offers year-round as complimentary snacks to passengers during flights.

“In today’s world of genetically modified and franken-foods, it is very important to know where your food comes from,” said Brian Holtman, JetBlue's manager of concession programs, at a farm “reveal” on Thursday. “By creating a farm at T5, we can show crew members and customers exactly where their food is coming from.”

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Located on the curb outside the departures level of T5, the farm — which is actually a big urban garden — has raised beds made out of 2,300 black plastic milk crates bolted together and then bolted to the ground to ensure that, should an earthquake or a Katrina-strength hurricane occur, the garden stays put.

“That was one of the hurdles we had to deal with in making a farm outside our JFK terminal,” said Sophia Mendelsohn, JetBlue’s head of sustainability. “We also had to space the crates to make sure there were emergency exit lanes and plant crops that would attract butterflies and bees, but not birds.”

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The T5 farm is expected to produce two harvests of blue potatoes a year, generating more than 1,000 pounds of potatoes per harvest. In addition to potatoes, JetBlue farm manager Katrina Ceguera, a veteran of the urban farming movement, will tend to more than 1,000 herbs and vegetable plants, including arugula, beets, mint, fennel, rosemary, sage, basil and kale.

The plan is for the farm to provide herbs, produce and potatoes for some of T5’s restaurants and eateries and for donations for local food pantries. Area students and, eventually, passengers will also be able to visit the T5 farm to learn about urban gardening.

And someday, the blue potatoes grown at the T5 farm may even be used to make some of the blue chips you eat on JetBlue planes.

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Day to day, the plants will be watered by drip irrigation, said Ceguera, and draw most of their nutrients from the soil. And they will not only look nice and produce food. “Because they take in CO2 and release oxygen, they’ll improve the air quality around the terminal as well,” she said.

In a nice twist, the soil in the crates started as leftovers from some T5 restaurants. According to JetBlue, about 300 pounds of food waste is taken daily from T5 to an organic farm in the Hudson Valley region of New York for composting and, when needed, organic soil from the farm was trucked to JFK for use in the T5 garden project.

“Many of us come to airports to get away from the earth," said Marcel VanOoyen, executive director of GrowNYC, an environmental nonprofit that is one of the T5 farm partners. “This is a chance to really dig in and get to know it.”

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In addition to GrowNYC, JetBlue’s farm partners include the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey and Terra Real Vegetable Chips (part of the Hain Celestial Group), which is the company that supplies JetBlue with 5.8 million one-ounce bags of Terra Chips each year. Most of those potatoes are grown on a farm in Maine and processed into potato chips at a plant in New Jersey.

Harriet Baskas is a Seattle-based airports and aviation writer and USA TODAY Travel's "At the Airport" columnist. She occasionally contributes to Ben Mutzabaugh's Today in the Sky blog. Follow her at twitter.com/hbaskas.