07/04/2011

Concerns over the impacts of conventional agriculture, the inefficiencies and associated environmental degradation of which have been much maligned in the press this year, have led some aspiring agriculturalists to attempt a novel method of shortening the supply chain and securing fresh produce for their communities.

29 year old grower Mohamed Hage this week celebrated the successful launch of Lufta farms in Montreal, which is being billed as the World’s first commercial rooftop farm. Hage farms 3000sqm on the roof of an office building in the busy city. This first farm alone aims to provide 1,000 families with a veg box once a week throughout the year.

The first crop was sold out before it was ready to harvest, as eager customers signed up online to receive the organic veg boxes available at distribution points throughout Montreal. The project received support from McGill University in Montreal; nutritionist Professor Stanley Kubrow lauded the farm’s achievements in bringing nutritious food with a low carbon footprint to city-dwellers, saying, "A large selection of fruits and vegetables is best in terms of nutrition for consumers and if it tastes better than trucked-in produce, people will buy and eat more of it."

Lufta Farms already has designs on other suitable buildings around the city, and is in the process of setting up a second greenhouse five times larger than the first on another rooftop. Hage has revealed ambitions to set up a multitude of such farms, he said, "You can imagine how many people we can feed with the small percentage of the roofs in Montreal. Our vision is a city of rooftop farms". He revealed that he came up with the concept in answer to concerns over the impact of conventional agriculture on the environment and on food safety.

The rooftop greenhouse employs controlled-environment agriculture, the efficiencies of which, Hage said, make the farm’s yield as high as a conventional farm 10 times its size. Furthermore, the farm’s water impact is reduced, as rainwater is collected and water used for irrigation is recirculated. All of the produce is organic, relying on bees for pollination and ladybirds instead of pesticides.

However, setting up such a space was no mean feat; Montreal’s outdated zoning laws and government regulations made it difficult to set up a commercial garden on a rooftop; it took city authorities a year to amend its zoning laws to allow farming. Hage explained, "A lot of trades had to come together – engineers, architect, lawyers. A lot of cities and governments don't make it easy to get into this space."  

Food from the Sky project sees Londoners grow

In London, the Food form the Sky project is approaching its one year anniversary. Set up last may, the non-profit project currently sells produce from its 450sqm "farm" atop the Crouch End Budgens, which occupies the shop below. The project grows organic vegetables, recycles rainwater to irrigate and composts garden waste and waste produce from Budgens. Proceeds from selling the produce are either put back into the garden or go to running workshops on urban growing on rooftops or balconies. It has been described as both “A wonderful antidote to city life," and “A new template for our future.”

Azul-Valerie Thome, who pioneered the Food from the Sky initiative, said the project’s importance lies in its drawing attention to the wealth of urban spaces where people can grow sustainable food with a small carbon footprint through reduced chemical use, packaging and transportation. She told Farming Online “One of the focuses of Food in the Sky is to create a template which can be replicated. We need to use all our space.” She said the amount of suitable and available flat roof in London could feed a substantial percentage of the capital’s residents.

The rooftop garden is also working in partnership with the Heritage Seed Library to grow a number of species of endangered vegetables, “from white tomatoes, blue potatoes, black potatoes to purple carrots; all the old varieties that haven’t made it into the supermarkets.”

Thome explained that the project’s successes show that facing up to food security issues does not necessarily mean creating ever expanding high-tech systems, but that there is a role to play for integration, efficiency and diversification in teaching people about sustainable growing and involving communities. According to Azul-Valerie, “[A project like Food in the Sky] needs to work in partnership with education, so it’s not just about supplying food, but also bringing in new people; we have 600 children per year come up to the rooftop.” She said, “At the moment we are creating the most local food available in any supermarket!”

In her book Hungry City, Caroline Steele advocates vertical farming; growing food on or in tall buildings as a means of supplying at least part of the food for dense urban areas, she says, “The capacity of cities to grow at least some of their own food is beyond question.” However, she also explains that “cities as open textured as those in Britain could not only produce a significant proportion of their own fruit and vegetables, [they] could create valuable new recreational space for local communities.”

The methods pioneered by Thome and Hage in cities could well play a part in future production methods as an increasingly urbanised public has regained an interest in growing food in recent years and public perception of controversial industrial farming methods such as factory farming and genetic modification remains negative.