Green Things Are Sprouting High In The Sky In The Joburg Inner City
Green Things Are Sprouting High In The Sky In The Joburg Inner City
Those things are spinach, basil and lettuce, planted in hydroponic farms on skyscraper rooftops in a project called the Urban Agriculture Initiative (UAI).
The UAI has been developed by the Johannesburg Inner City Partnership (JICP) with support from the City of Johannesburg, the Department of Small Business Development, the Small Enterprise Development Agency, and SAB Kickstart.
“The JICP has played a role in incubating, facilitating, and enabling this project. It is this work that has been initiated in the inner city with a view to perfecting it there and then replicating it elsewhere in the city and indeed in the country,” says Anne Steffny, a director at JICP.
Story and picture by Lucille Davie
“I would like to thank you and the members of the JICP, on behalf of the Executive Mayor, for your constructive engagement with the City and their shared commitment to reclaiming the Inner City,” says André Coetzee, the Director: Policy & Research in the Executive Mayor’s office.
The JICP has signed a Memorandum of Understanding with the City’s Department of Social Development. They both have a common purpose, namely, creating jobs, developing youth, ensuring food security and resilience as well as providing access to entrepreneurial opportunities.
One of the initiators of the UAI, Dr Michael Magondo from business incubator Wouldn’t It Be Cool (WIBC) and a director of JICP, believes that the “UAI is not about putting the farm on the roof, it’s about the lives that can be changed.”
Thirty-three year-old Puseletso Mamogale grew 3 600 fledgling spinach seedlings in August - arranged in A-fame racks of 10 shelves – on the rooftop of a building at 1 Fox Street. She harvested them after four weeks, and sold them to a local restaurant. She is now planting basil seedlings, a more lucrative crop.
The plants are grown in a medium that holds them upright while their roots reach through the pot into a tray below, filled with nutrient-rich water. Plastic sheet-roof tunnels keep them warm in winter, and protect them from storms and hail in summer. The sheeting can be rolled back to release heat.
Hydroponic farms of 300m² can produce the equivalent of one hectare of open farm production. Water costs are between R70 to R200 monthly, up to 95% less than conventional farming. This means that the hydroponic farm has 26 annual crop cycles, compared to four to five crop cycles with open-field farms.
Mamogale is a graduate of the WIBC, a programme that seeks to take young people aged 18 to 35 and to turn them into entrepreneurs. So far 13 farm entrepreneurs have been trained, and 25 are about to receive training. It has as its mission to “foster job creation through the creation of an urban agricultural entrepreneurial ecosystem supporting young black, urban farmers”.
It was launched in October 2017 with Nhlanhla Mpati’s farm, bursting with lush basil, on the roof of the Minerals Council South Africa building in Main Street. He started with 300 plants and in just over six months he had 1 000 plants eagerly waiting delivery to nearby restaurants. He calls his enterprise Gegezi Organics, and in just 66m² of rooftop space and 21 days he has produced 110kgs of basil. Another rooftop farmer is Mapaseka Dlamini, whose garden overflows with gourmet lettuce and basil plants. She now employs four people and supplies restaurants in Maboneng.
Other farms are in Hillbrow and Newtown, with rooftops supplied by the Outreach Foundation, the Jozi Housing Company, and the Joburg Land Company. There are two farms on the rooftops of FNB Bank City in the CBD. The training that entrepreneurs undergo is intense. Before they are given their starter packs of seedlings, pots, irrigation systems and pumps, they have to present a business model, including potential customers for their produce. They are given financial support from the WIBC, with an interest-free loan.