Brownstein: Montreal's Lufa Farms Reaches New Heights
The fourth Lufa rooftop installation — this one the size of three football fields — is to open in March in St-Laurent.
BILL BROWNSTEIN, MONTREAL GAZETTE
November 21, 2019
Airplanes are buzzing above. Gridlock has set in below. One couldn’t possibly imagine a more unlikely agricultural setting, yet on top of a non-descript office building in St-Laurent, within a tomato’s throw of the Place Vertu mall, construction is underway on the world’s largest urban rooftop farm.
This will be the fourth Lufa Farm around Montreal, and when it opens in March, it will measure nearly 164,000 square feet, or roughly three football fields. That’s a whole lot of tomatoes and eggplants.
The Lufa mantra is: “We grow food where people live, and grow it more sustainably.” And that it does.
The plan is that this gi-normous greenhouse will double Lufa’s growing capacity and the four farms combined will allow it to feed two per cent of Montreal with fresh veggies. The St-Laurent farm is intended to meet the ultimate standard in energy-saving greenhouse technology. And like the other farms, it, too, will operate without use of synthetic pesticides.
In addition to the produce, St-Laurent borough mayor Alan DeSousa is also pumped about the rooftop farm’s ecological benefits: “It will make it possible to fight against heat islands in our district, where more than 70 per cent of the surface area is devoted to industrial and commercial activities.“
The bottom floor of the St-Laurent office building serves as a distribution centre, wherein individual boxes of vegetables, fruits, breads and cheeses, among other goodies, are prepared for Lufavores, Lufa’s member individuals and restaurants. About 17,000 boxes are shipped every week to Lufavores at hundreds of pickup points around the city. Lufa also provides home delivery by, natch, electric-powered autos.
“We like to think of the distribution centre as a giant online farmers market,” Lufa co-founder and greenhouse director Lauren Rathmell says.
Rathmell and her husband, Lufa co-founder and CEO Mohamed Hage, started germinating their business 10 years ago. Their first farm sprouted in Ahuntsic. Then came rooftop farms in Laval and Anjou. The company now has 327 employees — and counting.
While allowing that the Ahuntsic farm cost $2.2 million, Rathmell is tight-lipped about the budget for the St-Laurent greenhouse, which is five times the size of the former. She does, however, note that Lufa Farms has been profitable since 2016 and is not ruling out more expansion, in Montreal and elsewhere.
“Our goal is to be ecologically and economically sustainable,” says Rathmell, a Vermonter who moved here to study biochemistry at McGill and stayed on after meeting Hage.
“Our first site was the world’s first commercial rooftop greenhouse. There are ground-level greenhouses and farms, but this concept had never been done — taking an industrial space and repurposing it for food production. There’s still not many doing what we’re doing. We wanted to create a local food engine, and to do so by following tenets of responsible agriculture with hydroponic farms and reducing our footprint in the process.”
The trick was in finding rooftops around Montreal that would have enough room and that would be structurally able to support a greenhouse.
“We literally surveyed the entire island of Montreal on Google maps to find the rooftops.”
Lufa, incidentally, is a squash/cucumber-like vegetable indigenous to Lebanon, where Hage was born. While the Lufa farms grow almost every kind of veggie, they don’t yet produce a lufa. “We probably should soon.” Rathmell concedes. “It’s very practical. You can eat it. It’s hollow inside, and when you dry it, it turns into a sponge that grows on walls and rooftops.”
The hustle-bustle of St-Laurent’s distribution centre is in marked contrast to the laid-back vibe of Lufa’s Laval rooftop farm.
Of course, like Lufa’s other facilities, one might be hard-pressed to spot the Laval farm, situated atop another nondescript office building, off a fairly gridlocked highway.
But once inside the sprawling, 43,000-square-foot Laval greenhouse, one is transported from the grey and the cold and the snow to a near-tropical setting. There is a glow hanging over the place and with temperatures in the low 20s, cheery-faced farmers, mostly attired in T-shirts and one even in shorts, are planting and harvesting tomatoes and eggplants. A couple of them appear to be actually whistling while they work. It is almost surreal.
It’s more than just talk about reducing footprints. In touring the Laval greenhouse, Rathmell points out how all the water employed is re-circulated and reused. Rainwater is also collected off the roof. And considerable energy is saved simply by being on a rooftop.
“Being on a rooftop also means we’re not using new land, and also keeping us as close as possible to urban centres,” Rathmell says.
On the other hand, trying to convince prospective landlords on setting up rooftop farms was initially difficult.
“It’s become much easier with proof of concept,” Rathmell says. “When we approached the owners of that first building in Ahuntsic, in their minds it was cows and soil and tractors and whatever. We were able to convince them that wasn’t the case. Plus that the greenhouse would be fully contained and help insulate their building. And that we’d take care of the construction and electricity.”
And, oh yeah, the landlords would also be able to feast on the freshest produce around.
Tomatoes in lieu of cash for rent?
Quips Rathmell: “That’s the next deal.”
For more information about Lufa Farms or becoming a Lufavore, go to montreal.lufa.com.