Michael Grady Robertson, the agricultural supervisor (a.k.a. head farmer) of Queens County Farm, is late for our meeting in Long Island City. "I just have to round up these chickens," he explains over the phone. "They're giving me a little bit of trouble." Robertson is transporting more than a dozen fowl from the 47-acre public farm in Floral Park, Queens, to the P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center in Long Island City. For the past few months, he's been sharing his knowledge, crops, and livestock with the urban farm project P.F.1, which was the winning design by the Work Architecture Company (WORKac) duo Dan Wood and Amale Andraos for the annual competition co-hosted by MoMA and P.S.1 Young Architects Program.

After half an hour on the Long Island Expressway, Robertson's pickup truck loaded with hay and squawking chickens arrives at P.F.1. He has the kind of suntan only retired investment bankers can afford in New York City but, at 33, he wears it a little better. Walking through P.F.1's many rows of vertically slanted planting tubes, Robertson points out which crops are already "bolting" and informs a volunteer what the chickens will need to feel at home.

Robertson learned about the P.F.1 project from a February New York Times article and thought he might be able to help. He offered his services as a planting consultant (not just anything will grow in Queens), and his farm's greenhouse to aid in cultivating the crops. "Without this encounter," Andraos says, "we probably would have had an impossibly steep learning curve and many more disasters!" Now Robertson spends his days shuttling back and forth between the largest and oldest (1697) tract of undisturbed farmland in New York City and one of the newest and most innovative farm projects in the United States. "Michael is a farmer and also a philosopher," Wood explains. "He has been thinking about the possible relationships between cities and farming in a similar way that we have."

As incongruous as it is to be a farmer in New York City, Robertson's path was even more surprising than one might guess. When he was 14, in suburban Kansas, he taught himself computer programming and ended up involved in the nationwide computer hacking network that was busted under the infamous Operation Sundevil. "I was dumpster diving for stolen credit cards. I wore a black turtleneck and big black glasses. I was a total punk," he says, shrugging. After cooperating with police, Robertson avoided charges and went on to graduate as a philosophy major from Boston University. Unfortunately, he chuckles, "My career prospects were fairly dim." His computer skills led him to a dot-com, but he found that the joy of working with computers was gone. "There was nothing subversive about it at all," he says. "Maybe there's something subversive about being a farmer in Queens."