Urban Farming Initiative To Provide Long-Term Security For Local Green Spaces

Urban Farming Initiative To Provide Long-Term Security For Local Green Spaces

By KATHLEEN J. DAVIS • August 23, 2017

Two local nonprofits are partnering to preserve the city's urban farms.

CRISTINA SANVITO / FLICKR

In a new venture, nonprofits Grow Pittsburgh and the Allegheny Land Trust are teaming up to preserve the city's urban farms. The Three Rivers Agricultural Land Initiative will give long-term support to select a handful of garden projects in the community.

The Three Rivers Agricultural Land Initiative will buy the land of existing projects, which will be chosen by a committee consisting of members of Grow Pittsburgh, the Allegheny Land Trust and the community. Allegheny Land Trust President and CEO Chris Beichner said this step will ensure the land will be protected from future developments.

"There's no formal land agreement in many of these cases, and at any time the developer or private owner of the land could say, 'We have another use for this land now, and we want you off,'" Beichner said.

Pittsburgh is home to several food deserts, areas where fresh fruits and vegetables aren't easily accessible. Beichner said there are more than 80 urban farms in the city, and that they're a sustainable way to bring these foods to a community.

"By being able to come in and permanently protect these lands and give the volunteers and farmers the support to grow these farms, they can turn to their families and neighbors and offer these fresh foods," Beichner said.

Grow Pittsburgh is a nonprofit that "shows that food growing activities are one of the keys to building a healthy, sustainable and equitable community," said executive director Jake Seltman.

Allegheny Land Trust is a conservation land trust that acquires and protects green spaces. As a joint project, Seltman said that it was essential the community was involved in the Three Rivers Agricultural Land Initiative's decision making process, as it's often their labor that could use protection.

"We owe it to community members and to our city to make sure that the gardens can survive and thrive for many generations."

Seltman said he hopes the committee will be finalized by next growing season, so the farms can be chosen. He said the land initiative will likely prioritize farms that are currently feeling development pressure.

(Photo Credit: Cristina Sanvito/Flickr)

Will Zeal For Profits Hinder High-Tech Farming From Feeding People?

AUGUST 22, 2017 | NINA SPARLING

Will Zeal For Profits Hinder High-Tech Farming From Feeding People?

Part of the Sustainable Urban Masterplan for Shanghai, China by Except. Photo credit: Except / Flickr (CC BY-SA 2.0)

Vegetables grown on modular indoor farms in the hearts of cities may soon give roadside you-pick farms a run for their money. From produce ordered on-demand from smartphones to retrofitted shipping containers growing baby kale in the dead of urban winters, the future of farming looks ever more high-tech.

So-called vertical farming appeals to consumers devoted to clean eating and sustainable futures. Its potential to mitigate impending crises in the food system, like climate change, malnutrition and the challenge of feeding growing urban populations as the number of farmers drops worldwide, has attracted an array of investors and entrepreneurs. But can these typically venture-capital-backed businesses — which currently grow a tempting array of greens and herbs but little else— disrupt the massive and influential reach of big agriculture? That is far from certain.

An Urban Forest of Food

.In the future envisioned by Dr. Dickson Despommier, author of Vertical Farming: Feeding the World in the 21st Century, cities and the surrounding communities will house intensive agricultural production.

“They liken Manhattan to a forest of skyscrapers,” he told WhoWhatWhy, “I love that image because, yes, let’s make Manhattan imitate a real forest!”

He sees skyscrapers where basements harbor aquaculture tanks filled with tilapia, swimming laps under beds of microgreens whose roots take up the nutrients the fish waste provides. Heirloom tomatoes, sugar snap peas, and scotch bonnet peppers will grow on upper floors in beds programmed to provide ideal conditions through meticulous micronutrient dosage, light exposure and humidity controls.

A central column will house a massive freight elevator and utilities that allow the building to recycle the vast majority of its water. The behemoth will run on renewable energy. Vertical farmers share a common sentiment to, as Dr. Despommier put it, “get the hell off the grid.”

Investors and venture capitalists in the indoor agriculture space share his conviction. Many of the same companies that funded giants in the app-driven technology space underwrite vertical farm ventures: Bezos Expeditions, part of the empire of Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, has invested in Plenty, a Silicon Valley-based vertical farming company. In June 2017, Plenty purchased Bright Agrotech, producer of the leading vertical farm hardware, the trademarked ZipGrow tower system. Square Roots, a Brooklyn vertical farm incubator and entrepreneurial space, is led by founder Kimbal Musk, the younger brother of Elon Musk of Tesla and SpaceX fame.

But the dream of this type of farming clashes with the way farming actually operates today. Agribusiness, supported by the federal government, is focused on raising a few cash crops. Of the $25 billion spent yearly on farm subsidies, 75 percent goes to just 10 percent of farmers. That 10% represents large scale commercial farms growing commodities for the global marketplace, raising livestock on feedlots, and turning considerable profits.

“People aren’t farming to raise food for people,” Despommier said, “they are raising crops to make money. It’s all about which crops the world needs rather than us.”

Federal support for agriculture was born in the 1930s to maintain a degree of stability in the business of farming commodity crops. A powerful lobby and a revolving door between industry and public office has reinforced this relationship between the government and agribusiness. The industry’s profits come both from turning heavily subsidized commodity crops like corn and soybeans into value-added goods like high fructose corn syrup and soy milk, and from exports into the global commodity marketplace.

This has been instrumental in creating a food system saturated with highly processed goods lacking in nutritional value. It does a poor job of nourishing people while providing an abundance of cheap calories. Moreover, it pads the pockets of a minority of farmers and transnational corporations like Bayer and ConAgra.

Inside AeroFarms

.Can the vertical farming industry challenge this hegemony? To see one of the new farms up close, I scheduled a visit to AeroFarms, a 78,000-square foot facility in Newark, New Jersey. I arrived at the site early in the morning. I found a landscape where nothing was growing. A massive off-white box constructed of corrugated metal siding sat set back from the sidewalk. It was unmarked.

Adjacent to the site at 212 Rome Street is US Route 1, the eastern boundary of Newark’s Ironbound District — named for the two railroads and two highways that define its limits. Behind the big white box was a massive shed filled with dirt, a wall covered in graffiti, and nothing else. Across the parking lot was a cinderblock bungalow with yellowed glass windows and an AeroFarms logo on the door. I peered through a window but saw no one.

Around the back of the sheet metal structure was an unmarked door. I opened it and found myself in a small room that welcomes workers and visitors alike. There I was greeted by Marc Oshima, the chief marketing officer of AeroFarms.

Before I could enter the heart of the operation, Oshima had me take off all jewelry, sign a food-safety compliance form, don a hairnet and navy-blue disposable lab coat, pass through a clean room, like the ones found in computer-chip factories, walk over rubber mats doused in sanitizer to remove harmful bacteria from the soles of my shoes, and finally wash my hands.

The procedure was an everyday routine for Oshima, the kind of executive who wears Oxfords with brightly colored laces and skips a tie. Several employees were getting to work around the same time and followed the same steps. We filed through a set of swinging doors and into one of the grow rooms.

Pictures of vertical farms often feature an array of magenta and cobalt-blue LED lights more reminiscent of a nightclub than a farm. These are for demonstration only: In reality, the beds are lit with LED light that appears bright white to the human eye, but in fact emits the pink and blue wavelengths that fuel microgreen growth. A few of the beds were unlit. The lights aren’t on all the time, Oshima explained. The grow room stays at an ambient 70 degrees. Huge fans whir in the background; nevertheless, the room smells like an aquarium and the air is similarly humid and dank.

The crops are planted in beds about 80 feet long and 5 feet wide. Farmers — who wear starched white lab coats — germinate the seeds in a reusable fabric. The seeds nestle into the off-white fleecy fiber that strikes a balance between breathability and structural integrity.

In newly-seeded beds, the sprouts perk up every half inch or so, stimulated by the intense light. When the greens are ready for harvest, the surface of the bed resembles a sea of green leaves. The plants’ roots dangle into a basin below, treated with a nutrient-dense mist and oxygen delivered through aeroponic technology. The mechanism that releases AeroFarms’ signature mist is hidden from view inside a black plastic tub called the solutions chamber.

The beds stack on top of one another into towers 12 stories or 36 feet into the air. Each vertical unit has its own computer that monitors all aspects of the plants’ growth. A control-panel box houses the wires, cables, and connections that feed into a touch screen displaying data for every inch of every bed.

Accordion platforms lift employees inspecting greens up into the air, where they perform maintenance tasks in response to computer-generated warning signs. This allows for directed and efficient crop management; human observation complements the digital monitoring. A machine harvests and packages the greens once they’ve reached baby maturity.

Infrastructure and Investment

Four external factors have driven investors’ interest in such plant factories: climate change, insecurity in the labor force, food safety, and increasingly urban populations. AeroFarms and its competitors claim to provide a comprehensive fix.

Given access to ample renewable energy to power the LED lights, the grow system can function with a great deal of independence from the environment. Its computer-controlled grow systems and automated harvesting and packaging chains mean the food supply need not rely on an uncertain workforce. The food safety measures that control who and what enters the growing facility reduce the risks of contamination and foodborne illness. AeroFarms — and its competitors — do not use agrichemicals such as pesticides and herbicides. And vertical farms can bring food production to the inner city.

Among indoor farmers, Dr. Despommier is a guiding light — but the vertical farms in operation today have yet to fulfill his vision. The kind of multi-use and agriculturally-diverse buildings he envisions would require significant investment to design and build. Estimates for multistory buildings hover in the hundreds of millions; retrofitting existing structures is cheaper but still represents a substantial investment.

AeroFarms’ beds may be vertical, but the entire operation sprawls out horizontally. It is, for now, more indoor farm than vertical farm. Its Dream Greens grow in the heart of Newark — a city that still rumbles with the aftershocks of deindustrialization and the environmental threats of industry — but funnel into distribution networks up and down the Eastern Seaboard. It doesn’t quite fit Despommier’s zero food-miles vision.

Leafy greens have become the poster child for efficient urban indoor agriculture. Unlike most other crops, farmers can sell the whole green plant, except for the roots. By contrast, a cherry tomato requires growth of the entire plant (stem, leaves, blossoms) before bearing fruit.

Whether indoor farming will prove viable for a range of crops is a basic, and unanswered, question. Imagine growing wheat, rice, corn, or soy in a system where photosynthesis (via artificial light) is expensive.

Getting Off the Grid

.

Solving the renewable energy problem is at the forefront of development for vertical farmers. AeroFarms uses hydropower and solar energy — it even has a farm in Saudi Arabia that pulls water out of the air through reverse-osmosis technology. But before cities can become energy-efficient urban jungles, engineers have to produce the means to get off the grid.

A rendering of what vertical farming might look like on Mars. Photo credit:  NASA / Wikimedia

The drive to render indoor farming entirely independent of its environment has pushed the concepts behind vertical farming to the stratosphere — literally. Freight Farms, a company that upcycles shipping containers into portable vertical farms, just announced a partnership with Clemson University to explore deep-space applications of its technology. The collaboration is made possible through a NASA grant to explore a “Closed-Loop Living System for Deep-Space ECLSS with Immediate Applications for a Sustainable Planet.”

While container farms reach for outer space, cities will continue to urbanize at unprecedented rates. The droughts, floods and climate inconveniences that have already begun to exert pressure on commercial and family farmers alike will intensify.

Meanwhile, most of the the farmers raising food for people are small, conventional operations that struggle with minimal public support in a low-margin, high-risk business. Research and development funding for the majority of American farmers growing fresh fruits and vegetables is virtually nonexistent — families or individuals own almost 83% of the farms growing vegetables in the US.

The 2014 Farm Bill inaugurated microloan and grant programs for small and beginning farmers: whether funding for these programs will continue is up for debate as Congress considers the 2018 Farm Bill. Sonny Perdue, the current Secretary of Agriculture, is an agribusiness veteran.

Vertical farmers see themselves sidestepping both the vice-like grip of Big Ag and the insecurity of small-scale farming. They bring fresh, unprocessed foods to the hearts of cities independent of the industry lobby or the inconsistencies of farmers’ markets. Production is controlled and abundant enough to tap into existing supply chains. By distributing to supermarkets and online delivery platforms, they eliminate the distribution challenges many small farmers face. And, at least for the present, they receive ample funding from venture capital and private equity, untethered by the limits of public support.

Given the looming threat from climate change and ever increasing urban populations, it’s clear that both the current farm-to-table system and Big Ag fall short. Yet the new money from venture capitalists brings its own constraints. In fact, Despommier’s condemnation of agribusiness may best describe the conflict: behind their presentation as mission-driven companies passionate about making good food widely available, they are in it to make money.

There is little precedent for how the model will behave as companies scale up and diversify. Public investment in research and development could provide some answers. Calls to action range from implementing new urban agriculture and technology programs at universities to reworking city tax structures to support the new urban farmers through subsidies and tax credits. The growing urban and climate-insecure populations that vertical farmers hope to feed will need more than the production of leafy greens. But for now, the logic among vertical farmers amounts to a hale and hearty Let them eat kale.

Related front page panorama photo credit: Adapted by WhoWhatWhy from building (Cjacobs627 / Flickr – CC BY-SA 3.0) and VertiCrop System (Valcenteu / Wikimedia – CC BY-SA 3.0).

This Vertical Farming Startup Is Valued At $27.5 Million

This Vertical Farming Startup Is Valued At $27.5 Million

By Daniel Lipson  2017

What's vertical farming? In Bowery Farming's first indoor farm, located in a warehouse in New Jersey, proprietary computer software, LEDs, and robotics are able to grow leafy greens without any pesticides, using 95% less water than traditional farms. CEO Irving Fain describes his company as a tech company "thinking about the future of food."

Their indoor farms can be located near city centers and will be able to cut transportation costs and help curb the environmental impact of the industry. By being located indoors, they're unbeholden by weather and can produce 100 times more greens than a traditional outdoor farm of the same size. Fain sees it as a way to answer global population growth, shrinking farmlands, and an influx of people towards urban areas. The farms are enabled by recent technological advances in data analytics and lighting and are poised to scale up in the coming years.

YASUYOSHI CHIBA/AFP/Getty Images

Fain started his career as an investment banker at Citigroup, ran marketing at iHeartMedia, and co-founded loyalty marketing software firm CrowdTwist before venturing into food. They raised first round funds of over $20 million from a list of investors that includes Blue Apron CEO Matt Salzberg and celebrity chef Tom Colicchio as well as GV (formerly Google Ventures). The company has experimented with over 100 different crops and sells six varieties of leafy greens to Whole Foods and Foragers. They plan to use the extra cash to hire more workers and move towards other types of produce. For the long term, they are eyeing China and other emerging markets where food security is an important topic.

Bowery isn't the only one trying to do vertical farming. Competitors AeroFarms and Plenty United are also farming indoors with the capacity to produce millions of greens, and AeroFarms has already raised $100 million, while Plenty United has billionaire backing from Jeff Bezos and Eric Schmidt. The technology enables vertical farmers to convert old warehouses and factories into agricultural centers. All of them benefit from advances in LED lighting that can mimic natural sunlight, as well as lower costs for industrial-scale lighting setups

Lean Plate Club Blogger Sally Squires On The Rooftop Farming Trend

Lean Plate Club Blogger Sally Squires On The Rooftop Farming Trend

In D.C., there's the equivalent of about an acre of rooftop farming spread out across the city. (Thinkstock)

By Bruce Alan | @BruceAlanWTOP  |August 22, 2017

WASHINGTON — A recent trend in farming means your fresh produce may not be coming from fertile fields miles away. It could be coming by elevator from just a few floors away.

Sally Squires, who writes the Lean Plate Club™ blog, describes vertical farming as simply farming on rooftops. And though that’s a pretty modern idea, the core concept of vertical farming is not new at all.

Indigenous people in South America have long grown things this way, using tiered or terraced fields at high altitudes. The rice terraces in Asia use a similar concept.

The actual term vertical farming was coined back in 1915 by American geologist Gilbert Ellis Dailey.

In D.C., there’s the equivalent of about an acre of rooftop farming spread out across the city, overseen by an outfit called Up Top Acres. The first Up Top Acre farm was on the roof of the building where chef Jose Andres runs Oyamel in Chinatown. There’s more rooftop farming coming to The Wharf project along the Potomac.

So what plants and veggies thrive on the roof?

Lettuce and herbs are great for rooftops, as are eggplant, zucchini, carrots and even watermelon, Squires says. Grains don’t really do well in that setting, and neither does corn, she says.

Vertical farmers should be prepared for a lot of picking by hand — although there are small, mechanized farm tools available, Squires says.

If you’re going to put a garden on a rooftop, be careful not to puncture the roof and make sure it’s strong enough to take the extra weight, which can be considerable, she said. And you’ll want to be sure to use special soil that won’t retain the water during a heavy rain and turn into a muddy bog.

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He’s Spent Most of His Life Perfecting Lettuce

He’s Spent Most of His Life Perfecting Lettuce

Pieter Slaman in the greenhouse at Little Leaf Farms.  |  JONATHAN WIGGS/GLOBE STAFF

By Cindy Atoji Keene GLOBE CORRESPONDENT  AUGUST 17, 2017

Why should a greenhouse worker be granted an 0-1 Visa? The document is granted by the US government only to noncitizens who demonstrate “extraordinary ability or achievement.” For Dutchman Pieter Slaman, it’s because he had proprietary knowledge of commercial horticulture that was needed for a new high-tech lettuce farm in Devens. Slaman is a fourth-generation grower from the Netherlands, where over a century of experimentation has made the Dutch experts in sustainable-agriculture practices. He hails from near the Hague, where an industry cluster of greenhouses gave the area the nickname “Glass City.” Slaman, 50, grew up “between the tomatoes,” starting his first greenhouse when he was just 17 years old. Now he uses his “green fingers” to grow 4 million plants in a 3-acre greenhouse at Little Leaf Farms, an agribusiness that produces arugula and other greens on a relatively small footprint. While the majority of lettuce is shipped in from the West Coast, Little Leaf Farms produce goes from harvest to supermarket shelf within a day of harvest. The Globe spoke with Slaman about how he’s making a life out of lettuce.

“Both of my grandparents and many other relatives had a greenhouse in the Netherlands, so it’s in my blood. One grew lettuce, and the others, flowers and bulb plants. Dutch farmers have been growing indoors for years, using sunlight and rainwater to compensate for our agriculturally challenged geography.

“I heard stories from my dad about the World War II resistance and how my family hid escaping Jews under the greenhouse floor. The region was the biggest horticultural producer in the world, providing the whole of Europe with vegetables. But times have changed, and I wanted to travel the world to see if I could grow things elsewhere.

“Little Leaf contacted me and said they needed a Dutch grower. They had a greenhouse they were building in New England and wanted to do it ‘right’ — no pesticides, collecting rainwater for irrigation, LED lights.

“When I first arrived in Boston, it was the second week of February, minus 20 degrees Celsius, and very cold and snowy. The first couple of months, I’m thinking in Dutch and talking in English. There were many cultural differences. I had to adjust to working with a Mexican crew instead of a Polish one. I missed having a neighborhood of other growers around me.

“And I quickly learned that if something broke, I couldn’t just jump into the car and go to the nearest greenhouse supplier, especially with metric parts. I had to order and wait, and this could be a problem because a crop can die within six hours without water.

“But we were able to set up a highly advanced, automated hydroponic system. Even with that, it’s not easy to grow lettuce in New England’s erratic weather. But in the end, growing is nothing more than taking the stress away from the crop.

“An expert’s eye, the many years of experience, and a grower’s passion make the difference and can never be taken over by a computer and data. I can just step into the greenhouse and instinctively know whether the humidity or temperature is too high or low. I spend many hours a week, just walking, scouting, and turning over leaves to see what kind of bugs I can find. This is something I’ve been doing my whole life.

“After all, everything around us has a connection. That’s why I pray in the greenhouse and do yoga in my free time. It’s all about time and balance. And that’s true for plants — and for humans.”

Cindy Atoji Keene can be reached at cindy@cindyatoji.com.

Next Gen Urban Farming Is Here to Stay

Next Gen Urban Farming Is Here to Stay

By Dawn Allen - Aug 16, 2017

A combined fence, recycled-tire trellis and clothesline at the Earth Works community garden in Detroit. Photo by Jessica Reeder, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 2.0.

Urban farming seems so 2010. That’s when you couldn’t swing a hydroponically grown tomato vine without hitting someone who was, wanted to be, or talked about urban farmers being the Next Big Thing. However, cities and suburbs are full of people who need to eat, so urban farmers are still busy growing food and a bumper crop of them are innovating new ways to bring nutrition and social justice to their neighbors.

People in Atlanta, GA, are about to gain access to more fresh food thanks to a $50,000 grant from the National Association of Conservation Districts. This money will go towards converting three utility easements into fifteen acres of urban agriculture. The Mayor’s Office of Resilience sees urban farming as a way to bring healthy food within half a mile of 75% of the city’s residents by 2020.

In Buffalo, NY, they’re starting to take the idea of “grow food, not lawns” seriously. Fleet farming, which took off in Orlando, Florida in 2013, is a decentralized urban farming model where homeowners provide all or part of their yard to pedal-powered farmers who maintain a series of gardens throughout a roughly five-mile radius. The food is then sold in farmer’s markets and restaurants in the area. Growing and transporting food this way solves many problems, from the need to mow wasteful lawns, to avoiding fossil fuels, to helping the local economy.

During the California drought, one innovative urban farmer in the Bay Area produced fish and greens using far less water than traditional farms. Ken Armstrong of Ouroboros Farms was inspired by watching a YouTube video about Will Allen, who brought urban farming to Milwaukee, and decided to take up aquaculture. Cycling water through a system of fish tanks and pebble-filled beds of greens provides nutrients for the plants while cleaning water for the fish. On just a third of an acre, Armstrong produces five acres’-worth of lettuces using 2/3 of a gallon of water per head, compared to 12 gallons for traditionally farmed lettuce.

Will Allen has been a professional athlete and worked in corporate America. Still, he says, being a farmer is the biggest and most rewarding path he could have chosen. Will is the founder of Growing Power, an organization dedicated to teaching people in urban Milwaukee how to grow good food.

Urban Farmer Starting His Own Revolution, posted by the Oprah Winfrey Network

Since the urban farming trend has been catching on for several years now, people are becoming more hip to the value of having high quality, local food readily available. The next wave of urban farming may be the “agrihood.” Agrihoods are planned communities that include both residential areas and agricultural land. Residents take part in the process and enjoy the fruits of their labor. One such agrihood, in Detroit, concentrates on resilience through sharing resources, sustainability, and forming community connections. Another, a more upscale development in Las Cruces, NM, sits among custom built homes and optimizes for unusual produce and aesthetic land use. Either way, agrihoods are an old way of life that people are rediscovering in new times.

Finally, out of Dallas, TX, comes a story about the big Texan heart. Big Tex Urban Farms, at the site of the Texas State Fair, is less about profit and more about feeding the hungry.The State Fair is the big annual fundraiser for the urban farming venture, but that means that the entire farm has to move during the September fair season. That’s why they designed the mobile planting boxes that also form the heart of their urban farming outreach. Those gardening boxes are distributed to schools and community organizations, along with soil and seeds suitable for the Dallas climate, as a way of letting people try their hand at growing food risk-free. If everything works out, new urban farms hive off of Big Tex. And if they don’t, the boxes can be returned to the state fairgrounds.

As Owen Lynch of Big Tex Urban Farms says, “A food desert is a health desert is a job desert is an infrastructure desert.” Next generation urban farming is taking root, contributing to communities at the grassroots level, where people are learning to take care of themselves – and each other.

Canadian Retailer First Of Its Kind To Install Rooftop Garden

Organic Produce Is Sold In The Store

Canadian Retailer First Of Its Kind To Install Rooftop Garden

Green roofs aren’t necessarily new, but when a grocery store chain decides to install a rooftop garden on one of its stores, that is refreshingly unique. The IGA in Montreal’s Saint-Laurent region officially launched its rooftop garden July 19. The project is managed by Ligne Verte (The Green Line) and has a year-round fulltime staff of two and a six-month contract position to supplement busier times. “It’s the largest commercial rooftop garden in Canada,” says Tim Murphy of Ligne Verte. Moreover, it’s the first of its kind in the country. Over 30 kinds of vegetables and greens are grown and harvested on a half-acre, grown in just six inches of soil. “A green roof garden allows us to nourish our passion for food while reducing our environmental footprint, something that is particularly important to us. We are happy to give life to this innovative project and hope it encourages other companies to follow suit,” said Richard Duchemin, co-owner, IGA extra Famille Duchemin.

Innovation for Canadian retail

It’s a big step forward on many fronts since green roofs, the focus of Ligne Verte’s company, produce multiple benefits. A green roof can cool a building in the summer. It’s also the first store to use an irrigation system with water recovered from its dehumidification system. Plus, it creates habitat. “To that we get to add local food production,” he says. “And, just after one year we have some birds nesting in the garden, we have sandpiper and ducks nest in the spring.” Pollinators also play a part; there is also a rooftop apiary of eight hives, run by a separate company. The honey is also sold in the store. 

Seasonal produce; comparable pricing

Murphy says that even though in the grocery store world the rule is to never run out of stock on something, growing seasonal items obviously means they’re only available for a certain amount of time. “It’s a bit of a re-education for both the grocer and the shoppers but I think they’re enjoying it. It’s been an overwhelming success. We’re selling out,” he says. There’s a camera on the roof so shoppers can see what’s happening while they shop. “I think it’s attracting more for local organic.” Prices remain reasonable also, since there are no transportation costs, although Murphy remarks that expenses are weighted towards labor because everything is done by hand. “Our product is definitely comparable (pricewise).”

Introduction of other produce

As far as plans for other produce, Murphy says the strawberries they’ve planted will yield next year. “That’s probably the main (fruit) that we think we can succeed at. We’re going to give ground cherries a shot next year.” He has also expressed interest in growing mushrooms and definitely increase compost production so it can all be produced in house.

Hopeful for expansion

Murphy is optimistic about creating more rooftop gardens. “I’m optimistic. We have gotten a few calls from other smaller grocers that would be willing. We can also do the same thing on another roof that’s not necessarily a grocery store. If a building wants to put in a green roof and grow vegetables we can come in and rent space,” he notes. “We’re excited at how it’s turned out.”

For more information:

Tim Murphy

Ligne Verte

Tel: (514) 442-4381

www.ligneverte.net

Publication date: 8/15/2017
Author: Rebecca D Dumais
Copyright: www.freshplaza.com

Jesse Leadbetter Grows a Local Urban Food Business From Scratch

Jesse Leadbetter shows off his fresh hops. (Photo by Alison Leininger)

Jesse Leadbetter Grows a Local Urban Food Business From Scratch 

Hip Hop Gardening

By Alison Leininger

We are living in a food paradox. Our current culinary trends emphasize ultra-fresh, clean, local food, preferably directly from the farmer. But whether you're a hard-partying hipster, or an overscheduled parent, who has the time to spend on Saturday mornings trawling the farmers market for kale and kohlrabi?

Outside of Charlotte's thriving farmers markets, there is additional demand for high-quality ingredients, boosting the popularity of meal and grocery delivery services like Instacart and Blue Apron. That's the market Jesse Leadbetter hopes to tap with his local-food delivery service Freshlist.

The fledgling company aims to pair the convenience of home delivery with the quality and freshness of locally-grown ingredients. "Amazon, Blue Apron — none of those people can compete on that kind of level," Leadbetter says. But that's not at all where the self-described corporate refugee expected to find himself.

Leadbetter, a fresh-faced entrepreneur with a trim, ginger beard, grew up in Texas, went to Oklahoma University for a degree in marketing, and landed in Charlotte seeking "somewhere different that wasn't flat and hot." He worked for eight years in the sports collectibles industry before realizing he wanted more.

Cascade hop buds. (Photo by Alison Leininger)

"I've always had that kind of entrepreneurial spirit, and I knew I was going to wake up one day, at 60, and regret not at least trying to do something a little more meaningful," Leadbetter says. He's standing beside a small chicken coop in his oversized backyard garden where he grows a variety of crops largely for local breweries — jalapeños for Birdsong; lavender, Thai basil and peaches for Heist; and of course, hops. "That was the easy part, realizing I was unhappy," he continues. "The hard part was figuring out what I actually wanted to do."

As it turned out, Leadbetter only had to look out his back door. He and his girlfriend had moved into their home in the Belmont neighborhood in 2009, and started a few small garden beds the next spring. His limited gardening experience came via his grandmother — a circumstance he's found common among his peers.

"I feel like our generation's grandparents farmed or gardened, all of them," Leadbetter says. "And it only took one generation for us to be completely removed from that."

Today, Leadbetter's garden beds have morphed into a small urban farm dubbed Soulshine Organics, spread across an adjacent lot purchased with neighbors in 2012. His interest in clean, fresh food grew along with it, while burgeoning contacts in local agriculture led to learning about the complexities of America's farming industry and fostered an urge to help local growers and chefs.

In 2013, Leadbetter dreamed up the first iteration of Freshlist, enlisting friends as financial backers and logistical consultants.

"We wanted to create a platform where farms list their inventory and chefs could log on and buy it," he says. "We didn't want to be a middle man, we didn't want to handle logistics; we just wanted to keep chef Paul connected directly with [any given] farmer."

But after leaving his job in 2014 and launching the Freshlist website in 2016, he quickly heard calls for expanded service.

"We realized that all these restaurants that don't have time to go to farmers markets on Saturdays needed something a little more like the Sysco service they had, where if they needed delivery on a Tuesday, they can get it," Leadbetter says. So this summer the company bit the bullet and purchased a Dodge ProMaster delivery van.

Leadbetter's backyard garden in Belmont. (Photo by Alison Leininger)

For the moment, the Freshlist van hits the streets twice a week, bringing Tega Hills lettuces and microgreens to 25 customers around Charlotte. Farmer Mindy Robinson says handing over deliveries will allow her to make better use of her own staff.

"Now that Jesse has entered the picture, it lets me shift my people here," Robinson says. "Everything flows a lot smoother when everyone's on the farm."

Leadbetter plans to add other growers' products, with the goal to expand the number of participants on both sides of the service. "Aggregating from different farms to help the bigger restaurants was the piece that we really needed to have in place," he says. "The van is a big step in that process."

It's also the reason we civilian shoppers should sit up and take notice, because, as Leadbetter says, "If we have a van, we should do home deliveries."

Beginning Sunday, August 27, Freshlist will offer its services to residents in select zip codes in Charlotte. Customers will place their orders by Thursday at Freshlist.com, choosing from produce, meats, seafood, even baked goods, condiments and coffee — "anything you'd see in a grocery store, as long as it's being done locally."

Sundays will find purchases dropped at front doors in insulated containers designed to "preserve the cold chain" for up to 48 hours, even on hot Carolina afternoons. As Freshlist finds its feet, coverage will expand further toward the outskirts of the city.

This service wasn't at all in the plans Leadbetter originally developed, as he was fearful of "scope creep," or uncontrolled growth, spreading the Freshlist concept too thin.

"It wasn't until we realized that it was going to be good for the farms," Leadbetter says, "If we did something like getting local groceries delivered, or a meal kit with local ingredients put together with a local chef."

Those meal kits are part of his plans for growing organically as the market builds. He'd also like to include local wines, beers and spirits, and he's talking to New Appalachian, a wholesale distributor based in Ashe County.

A multicolored pepper plant. (Photo by Alison Leininger)

"When stuff's out of season here because it's too hot, we can move [sourcing] out to the mountains," Leadbetter says, explaining that he doesn't necessarily define "local" in terms of miles. "For us, it's as local as possible, as long as the grower is transparent," he adds. Transparency features heavily in Freshlist's policies, and is only one criteria in selecting vendors. "One of our standards is that the producers have to contribute to the community and pay fair wages," Leadbetter says.

Regardless of whether he is helping farmers move a bumper crop, chefs streamline their orders, or area residents fit local food into their busy lives, it all comes down to community for Leadbetter. "When people think about local food, they think it's important because it's fewer food miles," he says. "For me, local food is about the strength of your local economy."

One day Leadbetter hopes to transplant his model to other cities around the U.S., with an eye toward his old stomping grounds in Texas. When that day comes, we can tout Freshlist as another great food idea grown in North Carolina — all thanks to a corporate refugee and his backyard.

Atop a Parking Garage in a Staten Island Residential Development, an Urban Farm Builds Community and Thrives

Atop a Parking Garage in a Staten Island Residential Development, an Urban Farm Builds Community and Thrives

August 14, 2017 | Charli Engelhorn

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Empress Green Inc. co-founders Zaro Bates and Asher Landes at their farm stand. Photo courtesy of Empress Green Inc.

Sometimes, the best laid plans do not always work out, and for Zaro Bates, co-founder and proprietor of Empress Green Inc., this small deviation from her plan would come to encapsulate her life in every facet.

Empress Green Inc. is an urban farming business specializing in organic food production, education, and consulting. Bates and her husband, Asher Landes, started the company in 2016, shortly after moving into the residential development Urby, a 500+ apartment complex that sits on the north shore of Staten Island, New York. The couple built and now maintain a 4,500-square-foot urban farm on top of one of the complex’s parking garages between two of the main buildings.

“During a 3-year development consultancy, we evolved several green roof and urban farm concepts that would be attractive shared amenities for the residents,” Bates says. “We decided on an intensive green roof urban market garden with a Farmer-in-Residence to manage the farm and run workshops and events for the community.”

None of this, however, would have happened if Bates had followed through on plans to travel to South America following a brief employment on a traditional farm in Massachusetts. According to Bates, an opportunity to apprentice with Brooklyn Grange, an urban farming and green roof consulting agency that operates the largest soil-based rooftop farms in the United States, caused her to delay her intentions.

The chain of events that followed included training and mentorship regarding a rooftop urban farming operation, meeting her husband, and being introduced to the developers of Urby.

“The Brooklyn Grange was a big influence in the development of Urby Farm. Having apprenticed there, I liked the green roof intensive ag model and wanted to try it out in a residential context,” says Bates. “At the time that I met the developers behind Urby, there was an opening for me to share this residential urban farm proposal, and they were very excited about the concept.”

Bates says the developers wanted to create an environment where traditional values of community, such as relationships with neighbors and positive communal spaces, could be incorporated in an urban setting. The farm was seen as a possible way to accomplish those goals.

Not only has the farm at Urby helped create some strong community relationships, but the residents also enjoy being part of something natural and special.

“The residents are generally excited about the farm,” Bates says. “There aren’t many opportunities for urbanites to get close to food production, and having the farm in the complex lets [them] in on a very beautiful, primal dance that happens when sunshine and love turn seeds into food.”

Bates and Landes have sharpened their focus this year about what is best for the farm and community members. Beyond a management fee for keeping the farm in operation, the two generate income from farm products sold at the weekly community farmer’s market, CSA memberships, including both residents and non-residents, and a handful of accounts with local chefs. The farm mainly grows leafy greens such as arugula, baby kale, spinach, and mixed lettuces, and also offers herbs, roots, fruits, fruiting vegetables, and flowers.

Workshops and events also help support the organization by increasing the visibility of the farm and educating the community about urban farming and local foods. These workshops offer a variety of topics of instruction, including learning how to grow your own microgreens, how to tend to a farm, and the basics of beekeeping, made possible with the apiary Landes built on one of the adjacent rooftops. Events include farm-to-table dinners and first Friday happy hours on the property, where guests have an opportunity to taste some of the crops and meet each other.

“We have a better idea of what works on the farming side and also on the workshops/events side, and we are constantly seeking new ways to improve our offerings and meet the demands of the community.

“We see our number one niche as urban farmers to raise awareness of agriculture and the food system, and eventually, we would like to serve as conduits for regional producers,” Bates says.

This motivation is part of what Empress Green found advantageous about the urban farming model over the traditional model of acreage farming.

“When we consider whether to operate in the urban landscape or go rural for more acreage, the consideration for us is about the opportunity for social impact, not simply financial solvency,” says Bates.

Bates and Landes already have made an impact with Empress Green, as evidenced by the number of residents who introduce themselves and explain that the farm was the main reason they moved to Urby. The pair hope to continue encouraging strong ties between the farm and the local community, as well as between society and locally grown foods. They hope to expand their operation in the future to meet the growing demand for fresh produce.

Nabeela Lakhani Grows Hydroponic Kale In A Box in Brooklyn

August 14, 2017  |  By Nina Bahadur

Nabeela Lakhani Grows Hydroponic Kale In A Box in Brooklyn

These greens are so local they have a subway stop.

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David Urbanke. Wardrobe Styling by Rika Watanabe. H&M by Holly Gowers using La Prairie and Alterna for Atelier.

Nabeela Lakhani spends up to 20 hours a week inside a shipping container in a Brooklyn parking lot. Bathed in hot pink lighting, Lakhani grows greens. Tuscan kale and scarlet kale and red Russian kale, a Japanese variety of mustard greens, and rainbow chard.

Inside her designated "Leafy Green Machine," her crops grow in verdant columns stretching 9 feet from the metal floor. Outside, nine identical containers shelter highly efficient, humidity- and temperature-controlled Freight Farms that make it possible to cultivate produce anywhere, all year long.

Lakhani, 23, is one of ten farmer-entrepreneurs in the pilot program of Square Roots Grow, an urban farming accelerator launched by Tobias Peggs and Kimbal Musk (brother of Tesla founder Elon Musk). Each entrepreneur grows their own crops, and works with the program to sell greens at farmer’s markets and through a delivery service. Lakhani was drawn to the program because of the focus on hyper-local, pesticide-free food grown by individual farmers.

“I had studied nutrition in school, and I didn’t feel that it was solving the issues I really cared about,” she tells SELF. “One of the biggest problems I have with the current industrial food system is that it has stripped food down to a profit-making commodity, driven by money and power rather than nourishment, sustainability, and community—the core of what food should do. Food is so much more than a commodity. It's such a rich, important part of our biology, our culture, our identities, and our planet, and I can't stand that the industrial food system does not maintain that integrity of food.”

She was troubled by the disconnect between people—especially people living in cities—and the food they eat. Who grew it? What was it fed with? When was it harvested? Without knowing the answers these questions, how can a person possibly make informed decisions about what they put in their body to achieve optimal health?

“Everybody is affected by food,” she explains. “Everybody eats. We have this industrial food system that affects everybody.…You realize that a lot of our policies in place are benefiting the industrial food system rather than the health of our nation.”

She joined Square Roots Grow as one of its inaugural class of young urban farmers in November 2016 to help make agriculture less distant and more transparent.

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David Urbanke. Wardrobe Styling by Rika Watanabe. H&M by Holly Gowers using La Prairie and Alterna for Atelier.

The crops thriving inside the 45-foot long metal boxes in Brooklyn are fed hydroponically, using a liquid nutrient solution instead of soil. The LED lighting inside is tuned to sun-like wavelengths that are perfect for photosynthesis. Each container uses just 8 to 10 gallons of water a day. All in all, each shipping container can grow up to 50 lbs of greens every week.

Still in the early stages, the technology is too expensive for most aspiring famers. Each shipping container farm costs $85,000, and annual operating costs run to the tune of $13,000. Square Roots Grow currently sells single packs of leafy greens for $5—$7 if you want it delivered. The hefty pricetag on the produce “hurts all of us inside,” Lakhani says. But she knows this is just the start. Supporters believe there will be opportunities to scale up (and lower prices) as the technology becomes cheaper, more reliable, and more accessible.

“What we have to come to terms with is that this is a really long-term process. The first round of converted people…will be people are looking for local organic food," and who can (and are willing) to pay $5 for a handful of chard. "It’s going to start with people who have the ability to access it.”

Her hope—and the hope of the project’s backers and other urban farmers—is that the technology will usher in a new age in which people will increasingly gravitate toward hyper-local crops as their main form of nourishment.   “All we are looking for," she says, "is food that you can trust.”

When Entrepreneurship Meets Agriculture, You Get An ‘Accelerator’ Teaching ‘Vertical’ Farming

When Entrepreneurship Meets Agriculture, You Get An ‘Accelerator’ Teaching ‘Vertical’ Farming

(iStock )

By Gene Marks August 24 at 3:10 PM 

Flush from raising $5 million, a “vertical farm” accelerator is getting ready to conquer the world.

The company, according to this Fast Company story, is called Square Roots and it has a “campus” in Brooklyn made from climate-controlled shipping containers where 10 urban farmer entrepreneurs have learned the ins and outs of growing food over the past nine and a half months. The goal: compete against the large industrial farmers that dominate our food chain. The 10 initial student entrepreneurs are all on track to graduate in October and the company is planning to use its recently raised capital to expand to other cities.

“We wanted to come up with a model that scaled small urban farming, so literally every consumer of food can have a direct relationship with a farmer,” Square Roots co-founder and chief executive Tobias Peggs told Fast Company (the company’s other founder is Kimbal Musk, whose brother is…yes, that guy).

How hard is urban farming? Seems pretty hard. To graduate from the program the entrepreneurs each need to learn how to grow food in glorified shipping containers, complete with irrigation systems and LED lights. The accelerator provides them with coaches and experts to help them with the process, and to teach them business building skills so that ultimately they can start up their own urban farming enterprises. “The hope is there will be tens of thousands of new businesses that end up being formed,” Peggs says.

It’s not all about selling food. Some of the entrepreneurs are working on a farm-to-desk delivery program while others are working on projects that cover everything from growing fresh greens for low-income neighborhoods to developing better lighting for indoor farming.

The accelerator makes its money by taking a cut of the entrepreneurs’ sales. The strategy gives both the entrepreneurs and the people at Square Roots the motivation to succeed. Peggs says his business is successful if the farmers are successful and that he and his staff wake up every morning thinking of ways to help his students profit.

Interested in becoming an urban farming entrepreneur? Square Roots is taking applications for its next class right now. It’s a hot field. In 2016, 500 applicants applied to the company for just the 10 spots.

Gene Marks owns the Marks Group, a Bala Cynwyd, Pa.-based consulting firm that helps clients with customer relationship management. Marks is an author and a certified public accountant, and he writes regularly for The Post’s On Small Business blog.

For more about Marks, visit  genemarks.com.

Follow @genemarks

This Midwestern Greenhouse Has Perfected The Art Of Growing Quality Tomatoes Year-Round

This Midwestern Greenhouse Has Perfected The Art Of Growing Quality Tomatoes Year-Round

No more ruining deli sandwiches–and no more shipping bad tomatoes across the country. MightyVine’s hydroponic technology produces ripe, red tomatoes, on land close to the city.

“Until someone invents a robot that can gauge which leaves to pluck off and when, there’s going to be a strong human element in tomato growing.”

BY EILLIE ANZILOTTI

A few years ago, as a food industry entrepreneur in Chicago, Gary Lazarski started to notice something that bothered him. “My office back in 2010 was in the Loop; there were a bunch of different lunch places around there, and every sandwich and every salad you bought would have these tomatoes on them,” Lazarski tells Fast Company. “They were terrible. You’d see people sitting on a park bench, and without fail, they all do the same thing: Open up the sandwich, look at that sad, orange disk, peel it off like it was a dirty sock, and throw it out.”

We all do it, Lazarski says; when a tomato is subpar, mealy-textured, and weak-colored, we don’t think of throwing it away as wasting food, but rather as salvaging an otherwise acceptable sandwich. But why, Lazarski wondered, could Chicago, a great food city, not equip its lunch options with tomatoes that actually tasted good?

“Open up the sandwich, look at that sad, orange disk, peel it off like it was a dirty sock, and throw it out.” [Photo: MightyVine]

Lazarski and his business partner Danny Murphy were, at the time, piloting a food-distribution company called Local Foods, which is still operational today. Through that enterprise, they connected with some Dutch business partners, Royal Pride Holland, and on trips to the Netherlands, visited their greenhouses. Royal Pride Holland has, since its founding in 1960, been a pioneer in greenhouse growing techniques; their many-acred structures use hydroponics and radiated heat to grow produce year-round. In one greenhouse, Lazarski and Murphy saw bright red, perfect tomatoes growing in the middle of winter. They began to wonder if a glass enclosure on the outskirts of Chicago could supply the city with the elusive, quality tomatoes that would not end up in the trash.

They pulled together around a dozen investors and $11 million to develop a greenhouse built with Royal Pride Holland’s glasshouse and hydroponic technology, where they would, once launched as MightyVine in August 2015, grow both cherry and large slicing tomatoes. In the Midwest, land-grown tomatoes enjoy just a brief season, from midsummer to early fall. The best tomatoes are those that are plucked at peak ripeness and delivered fresh, but the tomatoes populating grocery store shelves in Chicago through the winter have been plucked prematurely to survive a long trip cross-country from warmer climates. MightyVine, with Lazarski as CEO, can grow and ship ripe tomatoes year-round; the produce is grown without pesticides, and the tomatoes can linger on the vine until they’re ready to be plucked. Lazarski knew the operation would fill a void in the Midwestern produce scene, but they needed land to be able to pull it off.

“It’s well suited to get us up into Wisconsin, into Iowa, and into the city itself.” [Photo: MightyVine]

Rochelle, Illinois, a small city 80 miles west of Chicago, was where Lazarski and Murphy landed. “It’s well suited to get us up into Wisconsin, into Iowa, and into the city itself,” Lazarski says. While it would have been appealing for marketing purposes to locate the greenhouse in Chicago proper, logistically speaking, it would’ve been a nightmare, Lazarski says; space constraints would make it difficult to scale, and visions of tomato trucks attempting to navigate the Dan Ryan Expressway during rush hour were enough to cement the founders’ decision to locate on the outskirts.

Rochelle was a city that was poised, in the years leading up to the recession of 2008, for great economic growth, as it sat at the intersection of a number of roads that fanned out into other Midwestern economic centers like Chicago and Milwaukee. When Lazarski put out an RFP to the state of Illinois, seeking a place to site a 15-acre tomato greenhouse, he learned about a parcel that had been bought up by CenterPoint Properties, which intended to build a network of warehouses on the site. They built one, then the recession hit, and they abandoned the plans and sold the property back to its original owner, a local farmer. “You hear a lot of talk about shovel-ready projects around the recession,” Lazarski says. “This was literally shovel ready–CenterPoint had already stripped the topsoil off and run roads, water, and electricity out to the site.”

Because it was already treated for development, the land could not be farmed. When Lazarski and Murphy approached the farmer who owned the property, and explained their idea–to build a greenhouse on top of the wasted land–he was immediately on board; the farmer is now an investor and board member for MightyVine.

“What we found is if you offer people a good tomato, they’re willing to pay for it.” [Photo: MightyVine]

The greenhouse leaves a light enough environmental footprint to allow the farmer to continue working his plots of land around MightyVine’s facility. The Dutch glasshouse model includes rainwater capture capability, which prevents runoff into the field; that rainwater is then used to feed the tomatoes growing inside; MightyVine uses around 10% of the water of conventionally grown tomatoes. And because the tomatoes are distributed only around the greater Chicagoland region, the company is cutting down the carbon footprint associated with long-haul shipping.

Since October 2015, when MightyVine collected its first harvest, it’s been growing continuously. At first, only half of the greenhouse was being used, but the company, in response to demand, brought the other 7.5 acres into production this January. In a given week, MightyVine will harvest and deliver around 120,000 pounds of tomatoes. The approval of well-known chefs like Frontera’s Rick Bayless, who told Modern Farmer that he hasn’t been “so excited about a local product in a long time,” has contributed to MightyVine’s growth.

While indoor vertical farming companies like Bowery and AeroFarms are perfecting automated, data driven hydroponic models that consistently deliver large quantities of leafy greens with minimal labor, tomatoes, Lazarski says, are a more difficult product. “With lettuce, you have to get the nutrient mixture and the lighting down, but once that’s set, they will pretty much grow on their own,” Lazarski says. Tomatoes require constant pruning; there’s a lot of fussing that has to occur around a vine to ensure it grows correctly. “Until someone invents a robot that can gauge which leaves to pluck off and when, there’s going to be a strong human element in tomato growing,” Lazarski says. MightyVine has hired and trained around 80 local people, who have taken to the working conditions, Lazarksi says: The greenhouse is consistently 70 degrees, and because the tomatoes are grown in standardized hydroponic structures, they’re plucked at waist height, negating the need for injury-inducing stooping.

In order to be able to pay their workers a good living wage and benefits, Lazarski says the tomatoes are priced at a premium; while standard tomatoes retail for around $1.24 per pound, MightyVine products sell between $2.99 and $3.99 per pound. “But what we found is if you offer people a good tomato, they’re willing to pay for it,” Lazarski says. Local high-end grocery stores consistently sell the tomatoes (Local Foods, Lazarski’s and Murphy’s original venture, oversees the distribution of the produce), and some of Chicago’s most prominent restaurateurs are sourcing from MightyVine. While Lazarski cannot testify to the fate of the tomatoes once they reach people’s plates, one can only assume that they land in the trash at a much lower frequency than their pale orange competitors.

A Nonprofit Farms Rooftops of Nation’s Capital with Triple Bottom Line in Mind

A Nonprofit Farms Rooftops of Nation’s Capital with Triple Bottom Line in Mind

August 7, 2017 | Trish Popovitch

Located in the Washington D.C. metropolitan area, Rooftop Roots is a social enterprise taking the restrictive needs of a city littered with zoning laws and height restrictions as a challenge worth going vertical for. Designing, installing and maintaining custom gardens on rooftops, and creating community gardens across the city, Rooftop Roots is helping to build the conversation on how the nation’s capital utilizes its green spaces.

“We’re a nonprofit landscaping company but instead of mowing lawns we build gardens and maintain gardens for residential, commercial and community partners,” says Thomas Schneider, Executive Director of nonprofit Rooftop Roots.

After discovering their dream of office buildings with built up gardens on top was practically impossible to achieve with D.C.’s height restrictions, Rooftop Roots had to rethink its business plan. “We won’t only put gardens on roofs but we’ll put gardens in every nook and cranny and urban landscape we possibly can,” says Schneider.

Schneider wants to keep the company firmly positioned on the three legs of the sustainable business model and navigate the organization through the triple bottom line approach popular among urban agriculture startups. “We’ve always held true to the three pillars of sustainability. The idea is to a. provide jobs; b. increasing produce for communities in need and then c. increasing ecologically productive roof cities,” says Schneider.

By providing custom gardening services and using the monies earned to fund community garden projects in underserved communities, Schneider hopes to spread the cause for urban soil and educate people on the importance of and the logistics involved in growing their own food.

Rooftop Roots, which was founded in 2011, enjoys a growing client base. “We haven’t even kicked it into full gear yet and we have more work than we can handle,” says Schneider. Word of mouth has served the small company well so far, but the off season will be devoted to creating a comprehensive advertising system.

Recognizing that not every green space in the cityscape is a potential vegetable garden, Rooftop Roots also offers clients native plant installations. The hope is to encourage pollinators to populate the area and compensate for any loss of plant diversity brought upon by decades of homogenous landscaping practices, i.e. picking the same three or four plants for every professional landscape job in a given area. The native garden beds will bolster the efforts of the company’s soil remediation practices and allow the vegetable gardens to flourish.

Similar to findings on the west coast, Schneider is aware that some choose a vegetable garden installation for its trending aesthetic rather than to grow and harvest food. When this happens, food is often wasted and rots on the vine.  “It happens all over. It happens here too. It’s one of our biggest challenges,” says Schneider.  “It’s a huge educational effort to educate individuals. Like you’ve got to use it, it’s not going to get better; certainly a commonality for sure.” Aware of the issue, Rooftop Roots is taking steps to build out their harvesting contracts and get the food to those who will use it.

Rooftop Roots uses some of the money that it earns from creating rooftop gardens to initiate environmental literacy programs at local schools. By partnering with local social organizations, the company is able to provide educational programming on food growth and affordable cooking.

Future plans for Rooftop Roots include expanding the native plant and pollinator habitat promotion side of the business, hiring additional staff, building partnerships with local nurseries and continuing to keep the issue of local food firmly in D.C.’s sight.

Hydroponics: the future of farming

Hydroponics: the future of farming

AUG 16 2017

hydroponics uses mineral nutrient solutions to feed plants in water – without the need for soil.

In 2015, the United Nations predicted that the world population will grow to 9.6bn by 2050 and 70% of the population will live in cities.

For anyone in the UK wanting to give the technology a try, Ikea introduced a line of indoor hydroponic garden products earlier this year, as part of the Krydda/Växer collection.

In 2015, the United Nations predicted that the world population will grow to 9.6bn by 2050 and 70% of the population will live in cities.

However, such a population increase comes hand in hand with the need to produce more food to feed them. Some estimates suggest 70% more food will be needed. But with 80% of cultivated land already in use and the rapid urbanisation of countries set to continue, the challenge of producing more food in a sustainable way will become ever more pressing.

One solution is hydroponic technology, a niche method of food production that allows producers to grow plants without soil. A subset of hydroculture, this method uses mineral nutrient solutions to feed plants in water without the need for soil.

Hydroculture subset: what are the benefits?

The earliest published work on growing plants without soil was Francis Bacon’s 1627 book Sylva Sylvarum. Water culture quickly became a popular research technique following the publication, but it was not until the 1920s that the idea really took hold.

In 1929, William Frederick Gericke of the University of California at Berkeley began promoting the idea that solution culture could be used for agriculture crop production. Gericke was able to grow tomato vines to a height of 25ft in his garden using mineral nutrient solutions instead of soil. In the present day, this technology is being used worldwide.

Using hydroponic technology to produce plants has a number of benefits when compared with traditional cultivation methods. In hydroponics, the roots of the plant have constant access to an unlimited supply of oxygen, as well as access to water. This is particularly important as a common error when growing food is over or under-watering. Hydroponics eliminates this error margin, as quantities of water, mineral salts, and oxygen are controlled.

Other benefits of hydroponic technology include the ability to better control the plant’s nutrition, a visible improvement in quantity and yields, a shortening of the growth interval for many plants, a high propagation success rate, savings on fertilisers, the absence of pesticides and herbicides, and a more efficient use of space. As the world’s population continues to grow, it is this last point that makes the technology such a useful one.

Carbon footprints: sustaining the population

Hydroponics has the potential to sustain a large proportion of the world’s population and to allow third world countries to feed their own people, even in places where soil is poor and water is scarce. The technology can also be used as a valuable source of food production in places where space is scarce.

In Guangzhou, China, 14 hydroponic tanks have been installed on a rooftop measuring 1,600ft², producing hundreds of pounds of vegetables every year. The tanks are part of a study that is trying to show residents and developers in the Chinese city that their rooftops have the potential to produce a steady supply of vegetables that may even be cheaper than store-bought alternatives. Published in July in the journal Agronomy for Sustainable Development, the results of the study outline a comprehensive business model for hydroponic rooftop farming, a method that is already in use across the US, Canada, and Europe.

By 2020, Guangzhou’s population is expected to almost double, from 9.62 million in 2010 to 15.17 million. With this population expansion comes the need to produce more food, create jobs, and reduce the carbon footprint of transporting food into cities.

Research associate at the Worldwatch Institute Wanquing Zhou was quoted by Quartz as saying: “There is a need for rooftop farms not only in Chinese cities, but all major cities that have the resources (rooftop spaces, water, sunlight) and yet are heavily dependent on food produced long distances away.”

Being able to grow and produce food within cities for urban populations eliminates the carbon footprint generated through the transport of food from rural areas to city centres.

Food production: growing a garden

On the other side of the Pacific Ocean, the cities of New York, Chicago, and Montreal have all seen some success with rooftop hydroponic farms. Gotham Greens has four rooftop hydroponic greenhouses in New York and Chicago, which produce leafy greens, herbs, and tomatoes. Canada-based company Lufa Farms was credited with opening the world's first commercial rooftop greenhouse in 2011 and now boasts a second greenhouse in the city, which yields 120tn of produce every year.

As consumer demand for sustainably produced (and sourced) food continues to grow, rooftop hydroponic farms like these ones in North America should continue to pop up in cities across the world. Rapid urbanisation in countries such as China and the resulting decrease in land available for agricultural activities will force populations to come up with novel ideas and technologies to cater for larger populations in smaller spaces.

The progression of hydroponic technology since Gericke first promoted the idea in the late 1920s has made soilless farming possible within urban environments. This simple but effective method is key to addressing the issue of sustainable food supplies as the world’s population continues to expand.

For anyone in the UK wanting to give the technology a try, Ikea introduced a line of indoor hydroponic garden products earlier this year, as part of the Krydda/Växer collection.

Ikea's website claims: “Anyone can grow a garden”, and the collection has everything you need to get your fingers green and start growing your own herbs and lettuces.

Why Suburban Lawns Are Becoming Farms

The Leonard Lopate Show

Jim Adams and Linda Borghi discuss using suburban lawns to grow crops.

Why Suburban Lawns Are Becoming Farms

Aug 16, 2017

New York City isn't known as a farming destination, but green thumbs in Long Island have come up with a creative way to grow crops by turning their front yards into farms. Jim Adams, co-founder of Lawn Island Farms, joins us to talk about this new movement. He was recently profiled in the New York Times piece "For Farmers Without Land, a Long Island Lawn Will Do." He's joined by Linda Borghi, founder of Farm-A-Yard, an organization that trains people on how to use their yards to grow crops.

In The Future, Your Grocery Will Likely Come From The Building Next To You

In The Future, Your Grocery Will Likely Come From The Building Next To You

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Tyagarajan S August 8, 2017

The green spires rise up like monstrous trees. Inside the climate regulated indoor farm, drones and robots fuss over walls of green, while self-regulating systems maintain humidity and nutrients. When they are ready to be harvested, automated delivery systems bring these fresh produce to tables in a matter of an hour or two. This self-contained farm is one of many hundreds, spread throughout the city, supplying food to those living around it.

This could be the future as mounting constraints on modern agriculture pushes us into exploring alternate ways to produce food to feed the urban mega-cities of the future. One growing movement offers to bring change nearly 10,000 year-old fundamentals of farming.

Can Farming Really Move Indoors?

Agtech Floating
Indoor vertical farms are trending. The largest agtech investment till date is a $200 million Series B funding, led by SoftBank and other investors including Bezos Expeditions, in a previously little known startup called Plenty.

In a 52,000 sq. ft. facility in San Francisco, Plenty grows various leafy greens on vertical panes. Although it is yet to sell its produce in stores, the startup (and the investors) believes that it has the technology to disrupt the market of ‘growing food’. With its new found financial muscle, Plenty wants to set up vertical farms all over the US, Japan, China and the Middle East.

Until Plenty came along, there was another company that hogged the farming revolution limelight — Aerofarms. A couple of months back, it raised a little more than $34 million as part of its Series D funding. Bowery, another indoor farming startup from New York, raised $20 million in funding soon after.

Aerofarms grows leafy greens, carrots, potatoes, etc. in its vertical farms and claims it is 130 times more efficient than a conventional farm. Source: Aerofarms

What’s all this money going to? Right now, into an experiment that lies at the convergence of the agricultural, industrial and technological revolution. Inside sterile, climate controlled buildings that resemble a chipset factory more than a farm, these startups grow produce without using soil.

In recent years, hydroponics, a technique that involves growing plants using nutrient solution and water as medium has gained popularity. But startups such as Plenty and Aerofarms use what they claim is an even superior technique called Aeroponics. The roots of the plants are suspended on a misty medium rich in nutrients.In either case, these indoor farms do away with soil and sunlight.

Farm computing
Perhaps a better term would be to call these “farm computers”.

LED lights enable photosynthesis and growth. The temperature is controlled and varied as required. Nutrients are added or removed and humidity is tightly regulated thanks to sensors that constantly monitor their levels. All of this is monitored and regulated by a farm operating system. Need less sodium in the leafy greens? Just tweak a few controls.

Japan, with limited arable land and fast dwindling workforce, is very interested. Spread, one of the country’s largest vertical farming companies, produces more than 20,000 lettuce heads everyday using hydroponics. It has set its sights on more than doubling its yield to 50,000 using automation and robotics. Fujitsu, an electronics giant, is converting unused semiconductor facilities into indoor hydroponic farms.

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When Spread opened its Kameoka plant in 2007, it had worked for six years before that to be able to scale its production. Source: Spread.

China, whose blistering growth left its farmlands toxic, is exploring indoor farming techniques as a way to feed its dense urban centers. A Chinese architectural firm is building a multi-story hydroponic vertical farm in Shanghai to grow leafy greens. In Singapore, a Panasonic-run vertical farm cultivates 40 different crops and 80 tons of veggies every year.

There have been small, niche attempts in India too. A small 1600 sq.ft. vertical farm in Goa cultivates about three tonnes of lettuce every month. Future Farms in Chennai is evangelising hydroponic farming with a handful of pilot farms although these are not indoor farms.

One projection estimates that the vertical farming market will be $4 billion by 2020. But how and why did they suddenly get so popular?

Fantasy to necessity
Over the last 10,000 years, since our foraging forefathers started settling down to farm, the fundamentals of agriculture hasn’t changed much. However, the explosion of demand and the resulting scaling up of this agriculture in our recent history has come at a price. Agriculture uses up nearly a third of our land mass (not including Antartica) and consumes 70% of all global freshwater.

Global population is hurtling towards the nine billion mark by 2050 putting a huge ask on our food production. Open arable lands are hard to come by for countries with low space (Japan, Singapore) or harsh climate (Middle East). In countries like India, climate change and poor planning have resulted in complete dependence on the vagaries of monsoon.

So when you hear Plenty claim that their technology can help produce 350 times the output of a conventional farm in the same area, you sit up and listen. Most indoor vertical farms also claim to consume about one-hundredth of the water required for conventional farming.

“Indoor farmers do not have to pray for rain, or sunshine, or moderate temperatures, or anything else related to the production of food crops, for that matter,” said Dickson Despommier who coined the term “vertical farm” when he wrote The Vertical Farm: Feeding the world in the 21st century back in 2010. It’s a promise that offers hope in the current scenario.

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Back when Dickson Despommier published the book in 2010, the concept of indoor vertical farm was being pursued seriously in few places. Today, the landscape has changed quite a bit. ©Picador

The vagaries of weather on farming is only set to get worse with the worsening effects of climate change. Countries seeking food security cannot rely only on uncertain climatic conditions to feed their growing populace.

Moreover, food production today is a black box today with increasing concerns on quality. A fifth of all arable land in China has more than the prescribed level of toxins for agriculture — the result of the industrial growth surge. As a result, the market for organic produce is surging ($60 billion market by 2020) despite the fact that the label is abused widely nor is it a guarantee that pesticides were not used. Produce grown in indoor farms promise a new level of quality. Bowery calls them “post-organic”, meaning they are grown with zero pesticides.

An indoor vertical farm in the thick of an urban center can also deliver fresh produce faster and with low delivery carbon footprint than traditional farms that need their produce to travel (sometimes) hundreds of kilometers adding to both economic and environmental costs. So, what’s holding them back?

Numbers trail the hype
In 2013, an economic feasibility study conducted to look at what it would take to supply fresh produce to 15,000 people demanding 2,000 kcal of nutrition per day, estimated that the vertical farm would need to be the size of a city-block, 37 floors high, use LED illumination and would be able to supply produce at around $3.40 to $4 per kilogram. In essence, vertical farms today can profitably cater to only high value produce for elites.

For the well funded vertical farm startups, the economics are yet to catch up with the valuations. The set-up costs are high and so are the running energy costs (climate control, LED lighting etc.).

In developing countries where power is more valuable and less reliable, the costs add up and pretty much make indoor farms out of reach for large scale adoption.

Navin Durai, chief marketing officer of Future Farms, told me a few months ago that the capital expense of setting up these farms in India is high since majority of components have to be imported (about Rs 1 crore per acre). And running them with artificial lighting pushes the set up costs even further up. Vertical farms farms relying on direct sunlight and using hydroponics will have operational costs that are a fraction of regular farms and could potentially recover initial costs in three-four years.

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Chennai based Future Farms uses hydroponics to cultivate leafy greens, tomato, bell peppers, broccoli, lettuce etc

But the dynamics are changing rapidly. The components to set up farms including sensors, regulators and the machine learning intelligence are all fast getting commoditized. For instance, the prices of LED lights have dropped by more than 90% in less than a decade. Energy prices could begin to drop if the cost of renewable energy continues to plummet. There could a case for these indoor vertical farms to become profitable in the short term and scale.

But economics isn’t the only hurdle. Google X, which works on moonshot ideas to solve large problems, killed their work on automated vertical farming project some time back. The reason: vertical farms cannot grow staples like rice and wheat that feed a vast majority of the world. Today, vertical farming can primarily produce leafy greens and some vegetables.

Countries that need to mass produce cheap food for its populations like India, China and large parts of Africa cannot still rely on indoor vertical farms to fulfill their needs. Even if the costs align, running these farms require complex expertise with a steep learning curve. These farms demand engineers, biologists, machine learning experts and data scientists.

Does this mean these farms will remain niche indulgences at best? Maybe not. The investments pouring into this could help scale up the technology and increasing commoditization could make these feasible very soon.

The future of your groceries
In a few decades, more than 70% of humanity will be living in a city. The rise of large mega-cities with millions of people and that are connected to each other through high-speed transit may be inevitable. More and more people will demand variety, quality and freshness in food. Meanwhile, climate change and pollution will continue to dwindle land available for agriculture. We’re rapidly running out of water too.

Inevitably, farms will have to get local, move closer to urban centers and be efficient in their use of resources. Detroit, once a symbol of industrial revolution that produced automobiles, is now seeing an agrarian revolution as entrepreneurs buy up old warehouses and abandoned factories and convert them into indoor farms that can generate fresh produce. In London, one startup is growing produce in the forgotten old tunnels beneath the city.

Indoor farms could become self-contained ecosystems that can just download “climate recipes” that enables simulating any climate. One could grow mangoes in Mexico and jalapenos in India. Open Agriculture Initiative by MIT Media Lab strives to do just that by bringing technology that makes indoor farming easy.

As automation increases, these indoor farms could potentially grow in size and scale. Spread is launching is fully automatic vegetable factory where all activities post seeding are done without human intervention. This will enable self-contained farm ecosystems to emerge and eventually get commoditised. Large living enclaves and communities may sport their own farms.

A smart food value chain will emerge, letting consumers order produce on demand fresh from these farms. The rise of on-demand grocery delivery service today is perhaps just the beginning. In the future, smart sensors could help track food from its origin until it reaches the consumer. Individuals may even be able to custom-grow food to their tastes. You could alter the sodium content in your leafy greens. Imagine getting food from farm to table in a matter of a minutes.

Perhaps this is the kind of grocery value chain that Amazon founder Jeff Bezos has on his mind. His personal investment fund Bezos Expeditions is one of the investors in Plenty. Earlier this year, Amazon purchased Whole Foods. It isn’t hard to imagine little automated indoor farms all across the country growing produce and then have a supply chain of drones and self-driving delivery vehicles moving groceries to the end consumers.

For when we eventually do colonize other lands, it’s likely that we’ll ship self contained farm-pods across space even before we set up large scale colonies. But much before we do that, we’ll likely get used to them on earth.

Urban Farms: Projects From Around The World

Urban Farms: Projects From Around The World

By: Henry J. Schumacher

AUGUST 6, 2017

As social entrepreneurs find novel ways to make agriculture an integral part of urban life, I would like to share 10 innovative approaches with you from around the world:

 

Philippines: Quezon City Vice Mayor Maria Josefina “Joy” Belmonte’s campaign, “The Joy of Urban Planting”

The city currently has 68 farms of various sizes found in barangays, public-elementary schools, day-care centers, parishes and non-governmental organizations. The city works with the Department of Environment and Natural Resources and the Department of Agriculture, which provide financial grants. Even if city farmers fail to bring their items to market, urban farming is still a win-win situation. “If they don’t produce [enough] for selling, as long as they can eat their products to decrease the issue of malnutrition, it’s already a triumph,” Belmonte said.

GrowUp Box, London, UK

Kate Hofman and Tom Webster are giving new meaning to the phrase “box lunch” with their reinvented shipping container, the GrowUp Box.
Inside the 20-foot container, tilapia are farmed in tanks especially designed to ensure there is enough room for fish to grow, while on top, greens are cultivated in vertical columns. The water from the tilapia tanks circulates through the columns, where the fish waste provides nourishment to about 400 plants. The fish and greens are sold to area restaurants.

The project’s parent company, GrowUp Urban Farms, consults with people looking to build their own boxes and is set to start building the first commercial-scale aquaponics farm in London, Hofman said. http://growup.org.uk/#%21for-schools-and-universities/c1v6f

Beacon Food Forest, Seattle, Washington, US

The Beacon Food Forest in Seattle is turning a piece of public land into an edible forest garden. Residents will be welcome to forage in the forest, a 7-acre plot­—adjacent to a city park—featuring fruit and nut trees, a pumpkin patch and dozens of berry bushes. The goal is to mimic a natural ecosystem, creating a space that requires less maintenance and offers higher yields, cofounder Glenn Herlihy says. http://www.beaconfoodforest.org/

Farmery, North Carolina and TBA, US

Benjamin Greene, founder of the Farmery, plans to make the journey from farm to store more efficient by eliminating it almost entirely.

The Farmery is an 8,000-square-foot market with food shopping on the lower level and mushrooms, greens and fruits growing on the upper level. Whatever is not grown on site will be sourced locally. http://www.thefarmery.com/

Sky Greens, Lim Chu Kang area, Singapore

Singapore, one of the most densely populated nations in the world, has little room available for farming. So inventor and entrepreneur Jack Ng created the Sky Greens system to grow more food in less space. Think of it as a plant skyscraper.

The equipment holds up to 32 trays of greens—including lettuce, spinach and a variety of Asian greens—on a tall, narrow A-frame structure. The plants slowly rotate, as if on a Ferris wheel, so each tray gets sufficient exposure to sunlight.

Sky Greens harvests and delivers vegetables to Singaporean markets every day. http://www.skygreens.com/

Brooklyn Grange, Brooklyn, New York, US

The Brooklyn Grange comprises two and a half acres of growing space high atop a pair of office buildings. “We’re looking at ways to increase food production without increasing agricultural footprint,” Spokesman Anastasia Plakias said.

The operation grows more than 50,000 pounds of food each year, which it sells through farmers’ markets, CSA subscriptions and wholesale accounts. In addition to boosting New York City’s local food supply, the farm also absorbs more than 1 million gallons of stormwater every year, reducing the load the city’s systems must manage. www.brooklyngrangefarm.com

Deu Horta Na Telha, São Paulo, Brazil

After 30 years of building urban gardens in São Paulo, agricultural technician Marcos Victorino started running out of cultivable land.

As part of his research work at local college Faculdade Cantareira, he designed a way to turn roofs, balconies and paved areas across the city into miniature farms. Victorino turns large roof tiles upside down, creating a long, V-shaped trough that can be filled with soil.

These tile beds are elevated, making them easily accessible to children and the handicapped. Because the tiles are watertight, they hold in moisture, allowing growers to make the most of an increasingly limited water supply.

Prinzessinnengarten, Berlin, Germany

The Prinzessinnengarten is an urban farm nestled in the shadow of the former
Berlin Wall, between unused subway stops, graffitied concrete walls and aging apartment blocks. Inside vine-covered fences grows a wide range of vegetables, all planted in easy-to-move containers—recycled Tetra Paks, rice sacksand plastic crates—that allow the entire operation to be moved if needed. Visitors can pick vegetables, learn about seed harvesting and vegetable pickling, or visit the café to enjoy snacks made from the garden’s produce. http://prinzessinnengarten.net/about/

Urban Organics, St. Paul, Minnesota, US

Located in a building formerly occupied by a commercial brewery, Urban Organics is an aquaponics operation that provides salad greens and fish to grocery stores and restaurants using just 2 percent of the water of conventional agriculture. Founder Fred Haberman, CEO of Minneapolis marketing agency Haberman, hopes the for-profit farm will prove the commercial viability of aquaponics and help spur economic development in the area. “If we can do that, I believe you’ll see more of these types of facilities popping up,” he said.  http://urbanorganics.com/

Lufa Farms, Montreal, Canada

The goal of Lufa Farms in Montreal is to create a “local food engine”, says the company’s greenhouse director Lauren Rathmell.

At the heart of the operation are two sprawling rooftop greenhouses—currently totaling 1.75 acres—that produce a range of vegetables: greens and herbs, peppers and eggplants. The produce is packaged with locally sourced goods like handmade pastas, fresh bread and dark baking chocolate, and delivered to approximately 4,000 customers each week. https://montreal.lufa.com/en/

Comments are welcome; contact me at hjschumacher59@gmail.com.

Grow, Eat, and Learn With Urban Roots

Grow, Eat, and Learn With Urban Roots

Want to learn more?

If interested in getting involved with Urban Roots, visit their website at urbanrootsgr.org or stop by their office and farm at 1316 Madison Ave SE Grand Rapids, MI 49507.

• #urbanroots #urbanfarm #community

Megan Sarnacki 
8/11/17 02:40pm - LOCAL LIFE

Founder and Executive Director of Urban Roots, Levi Gardner, shares his thoughts on what urban farming means to him and how the community can get involved.

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/Urban Roots

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 /Urban Roots

As Founder and Executive Director of Urban Roots, what does an average day on the job look like?

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/Urban Roots

I try to start most of my days with yoga if I can and then I have breakfast. I used to skip over those things and now I find that if I don’t do them in that order, my day doesn’t work out very well. After that, there’s no such thing as an average day. I could be spending some time with my staff imagining or executing programs or meeting with members of my board. Today, I will be working at two different gardens teaching classes and workshops. The thing that I love the most about being an executive director is I feel like the conductor of a symphony and all of the various pieces are playing together and the goal is harmony. So, whether that’s working on something that’s short term or seeing into what the long term goals are or developing or envisioning strategy, I get to do that and set the things in motion. Now, since it’s summer, I get to play as well so it’s a lot time growing, thinking, imagining, dreaming, teaching, and eating.

What is your favorite part about working for Urban Roots?

Because the job is taxing, it takes a lot from me and from my family. Through our mobile classroom program or occasionally here, we just have really beautiful moments of the simple things like weeding, watering, cultivation, or pruning, the things that got me started in all of this. Last week, we sifted our first batch of compost from our bike powered compost service and it was just beautiful. It’s those moments where I actually get to touch, taste, or see the things that we are doing and not just be at a desk. I did this because I didn’t want a desk job, but I still found myself relegated at a desk sometimes. So, any of the time where I can be doing the human work is the most fulfilling for me.

How did your compost collection service come about?

This neighborhood, this community, and this land has been subjected to what's called disinvestment, which means resources being pulled out. When we define resources we don’t only mean dollars, we mean intellectual capital, experiential capital, social capital, and natural capital, which can be in the form of soil fertility. One of the questions was how do we get more resources here while simultaneously addressing a problem and a need people have which is where do I throw my organic matter because just going to the trash and being burnt in the incinerator feels like a huge waste of resources. We looked at two different problems and thought there’s actually an opportunity here for us to collect and capture resources that we can compost. It’s absolutely beautiful. It’s just gorgeous and most people on their home scale wouldn’t be able to make that happen. We pick up compost once a week, and since launching the program in April we’re at about 4,500 pounds of waste. Our goal for 2018 is 100,000 pounds of waste. That’s what we really want to get to and thus far, the responses have been amazing for people to spend $4 to $5 a week to have their compost go to something that is not the trash and build soil fertility at an urban farm while teaching people. That’s success all the way around.

Why do you hold free, farm fresh dinners at your open houses?

When you say the words farm to table, often that means it’s a very elitist, exclusive club. There’s some amazing farm to table restaurants in town that we love, and they charge a good amount because they are worth it and they value their employees and farmers. Unfortunately, farm to table sometimes doesn’t mean everybody is invited. To invite our community whether that be volunteers, donors, literal neighborhood members, and collaborators to an event and do something as simple and benign, but also something as transformational as share a meal felt like a really good idea so we do three of them a year. Our next one is coming up Friday, August 25th, and it’s just a chance for people to go share a meal together. The last one we had 80 or so people come in, and again eating a meal is this thing we all do all the time and yet we feel as if it can be transformational on how we think about place, economy, soil and food. They’ve been beautiful and we’ve loved doing them.

What other activities can people do at the open houses?

One of the things we’ve invited people to do is to just walk around, learn, see, and visualize. We have a very specific way of doing things and we’re constantly learning, but we want to invite people into growing, eating, and learning together. The meals are a specific time to eat together, but we also want to invite people to grow and learn together so every question from “What does compost look like? What is soil fertility? What is interplanting? What are the appropriate planting and harvesting dates for x, y, z crop?” There’s so much of what we call ecological literacy or agricultural literacy, which is the same way people can be literate to read a book, a person can be literate to read a farm, and we want to invite people into not tilling up land, but rather harvesting them as spring greens and throwing them in a salad because they are absolutely delicious and they pop up anywhere there is cultivated ground. Those are the sorts of things that are beautiful and wonderful to learn together as a community, and we define community really broadly to mean anyone that grows, eats, or learns together with us.

Do many people come to your open houses asking how to start their own garden?

Yeah, oh all the time! To be honest, there are very few people who don’t want a garden. It’s deeply ingrained in the human experience to want to touch and taste things that are real, whether it be wine that is connected to the vineyard, a salad, or even eating an artisanal bread and knowing that has a story connected to wheat which has a story connected to a farm. We all want that, very few people want to eat something out of a box that has no story. We want to grow those things too. Somebody can tell you the value of a carrot is 25 cents, but to the kid who planted the seed, watered it, cultivated it, and harvested it that thing is worth a hundred dollars because it’s the most amazing thing ever. I say a hundred dollars only cause that’s as abstract to the kid as the value of growing the carrot because he or she knows that it’s valuable. A lot of people want to learn and we’re continuing to learn as well. It's been incredibly valuable and we want to grow and learn with our community.

How can people get involved at Urban Roots?

You know, there’s always something. We have group service learning where we have groups come out for a workshop or a work experience and then share a meal together. We have volunteers here all the time, whether it's hilling potatoes, repairing bio-boxes, or preparing land for a shed. One of the things that is beautiful about cultivation is that it’s in perpetuity. You’re always cultivating as opposed to construction where you build a thing and it's mostly done other than tweaks. Cultivation is constantly happening because nature is constantly emerging new things. There is always something to be done here and there’s always a way to learn more.

Why should groups come to Urban Roots for service learning?

The idea of service learning is a popular one that’s starting has emerged in the academic community, which says volunteerism is a one sided thing, it’s not a transactional relationship. What we’re understanding now is that actually everything is the opportunity to be able to serve and learn so it’s mutually beneficial. In ecological terms, we would say its symbiotic that there's a symbiosis, a relationship between the two things. Sometimes people will say, “Hey, we want to volunteer,” but we’ll say, “Actually, you don’t just want to volunteer because you don’t just want to give yourself. You want a mutually beneficial relationship, which means you invest in something and you have something invested into you.” That’s the most beautiful relationship. I was reading a book on happiness that said this research coming out of Harvard said that people don’t want to be underpaid or overpaid relationally. They want equitable payment and equitable relationships. People come here and they get to give us a small donation to cover the time and cost and like I said, a tour where they learn some things, a work experience where they can contribute to something, and then a meal. That’s a great experience to learn more about themselves, their humanity, and the earth and to contribute to something good.

What do you think the future holds for urban farms?

Cultivation, which is the ongoing working of the land, is a constantly unfolding process. There's something in ecology called dynamic stability, which seems like a contradiction in terms cause stability feels like it means something is not moving and dynamic means it's changing. An urban farm can contribute to the tapestry of dynamic stability for any metropolitan region, which means things are always changing, evolving, and moving, but hopefully a growth towards redemption, reconciliation, restoration of ourselves and other humans, of ourselves and the earth, and of ourselves and our food, sun, soil, and water. My hope for Urban Roots is that we can contribute to a Grand Rapids that is a thriving one and not just thriving for certain people and certain areas, but thriving for all people. It is our human right to have healthy water, healthy soil, healthy air, safe homes, and community joy, and whatever way an urban farm like Urban Roots can contribute to the tapestry we want to be a part of that. Thich Nhat Hanh, zen Buddhist monk, has an excerpt where he says that the garbage and the rose interare. When you are creating garbage, you can see the rose in it, and when you are growing the rose, you can see the garbage in it. He’s obviously talking about compost and organic matter, and literally last week I had a group of students where I held up what used to be banana peels, coffee grounds, and food scraps and put it on a carrot that in four weeks from now I will be eating. You’ve never seen the growth of something that is going to sustain your body in your trash in that way. As humans, we are incredibly complex and so much of industrialism has pushed us away from our humanity, rather than reconcile us with the things that make us humans, and my hope is that Urban Roots and urban farming in general can restore the beauty that is our humanity.

As a community farm, market, and education center, there is always something happening at Urban Roots. On August 17th, there will be a “Compost You Can Really Do” workshop from 6:30 - 8:00 p.m., where you can learn all about how to decrease your waste. Three times a year, Urban Roots also hosts open houses where everyone is invited to learn more about the organization and share a free meal together. The next open house will be on August 25th from 4:00 - 8:00 p.m. and is kid and family friendly. On September 20th, Urban Roots will hold its first fundraising event on the farm. For $50, there will be a five-course meal made by Jeremy Paquin, the head chef from Grove, and it is a chance to gather together as a community and support Urban Roots.

About: Megan Sarnacki (Megan Sarnacki)

Megan is a student at Aquinas College studying Communications. She enjoys writing and learning about all aspects of entertainment, media, and culture.

Urban Farm Grows Ugly Greens In Brooklyn, NY

Urban Farm Grows Ugly Greens In Brooklyn, NY

Good greens don’t have to ‘look’ pretty. Even ‘ugly’ produce is just as delicious. This is something Gotham Greens has discovered through its recent Ugly Greens movement. What may have once been considered unmarketable produce was enjoyed by the staff at work or home instead. “We’d enjoy them as part of a team meal and staff would take them home to eat,” explains CEO, Viraj Puri. “But we realized there was an opportunity to sell them while helping to bring attention to the issue of food waste. The amount of food waste in this country is staggering and the NRDC estimates that as much as 50% of produce is thrown out between the farm and the fork.” They’re hoping to show people that slightly blemished greens can be perfectly nutritious, fresh and local despite their cosmetic flaws. “By embracing cosmetically-challenged produce as beautiful, we’re hoping to play a small role in reducing food waste,” he adds.

Food is wasted for cosmetic reasons

Food waste is a concerning issue for consumers, something all retailers and growers should keep top of mind. Puri says that in the US over 70 billion pounds of food is wasted each year which amounts to 250 pounds per person. “Much of what’s discarded is done merely for cosmetic reasons or as a result of long distance transportation. This negatively impacts farmers, retailers and ultimately consumers.” Changing consumer’s preferences towards slightly blemished or imperfect fruits and vegetables is an additional way to address the issue. Feedback on Gotham’s program has been overwhelming, according to Puri and even though it’s a small part of their production and overall business, they’re excited to see the positive feedback.

Current greens being grown and harvested include about a dozen varieties of leafy greens, arugula, and basil. And, supply is good. “Our current production is very strong,” he says. “We’re able to offer our customers a very reliable and consistent supply of greens all year round.”

Year-round availability

Gotham Greens stands by its model of urban agriculture, something Puri says is appreciated by chefs and retail produce buyers. “We grow premium quality local produce in high tech, climate controlled greenhouses, year round. That means, even in the dead of winter, we provide our customers— supermarkets, restaurants, caterers—with fresh produce within a couple of hours of harvest.” Produce is pesticide-free, grown using ecologically sustainable methods in 100% clean, electricity-powered greenhouses. He says this also results in providing precision plant nutrition and optimal growing conditions for the plants. “Hydroponic farming, when practiced effectively, can be very efficient, using a fraction of the amount of resources as traditional farming practices. This enables us to use one tenth the amount of water as traditional soil based practices, while also eliminating all agricultural runoff.”

There may be plans of expansion in the works. Gotham Greens has several new projects planned which could bring urban farming to other cities across the US and globally. “We have several new projects in the works and look forward to sharing more information about them in the coming months.”

For more information:  Viraj Puri  |  Gotham Greens

info@gothamgreens.com

www.gothamgreens.com

Publication date: 8/8/2017
Author: Rebecca D Dumais
Copyright: www.freshplaza.com

Thomas Paine Plaza Will Transform Into A Big Urban Farm in 2018

Thomas Paine Plaza Will Transform Into A Big Urban Farm in 2018

The PHS-run Farm Will Produce 1,000 Pounds of Fruits and Vegetables

BY MELISSA ROMERO  JUN 20, 2017, 12:00PM EDT

PHS will bring a temporary urban farm to Thomas Paine Plaza, similar to this pop-up garden that was set up at in 2011 at 20th and Market. 

Photo courtesy of Pennsylvania Horticultural Society

Goodbye, larger than life Parcheesi pieces, hello 2,000-square-foot urban farm: Next summer, the Thomas Paine Plaza in Center City will be transformed into a large community farm that’s estimated to produce about 1,000 pounds of fruits and vegetables.

The Pennsylvania Horticultural Society (PHS) was just awarded a $300,000 grant from the Pew Center for Arts & Heritage to create a “Farm for the City” at Thomas Paine Plaza, across from City Hall. The plaza is well-known for its 20-year-old “Your Move” art installation that features over-sized dominoes, chess and bingo pieces, and other game pieces scattered all over the plaza.

Thomas Paine Plaza in Center City, Philadelphia.    via Flickr/Wally Gobetz

Farm for the City will bring a temporary 2,000-square-foot urban farm to the plaza as way to spotlight food security in the city, where many neighborhoods lack easy access to supermarkets or fresh food. In addition to the actual farm, the site will play host to forums, gardening workshops, and performances throughout the summer and fall of 2018.

Meanwhile, the produce produced from the farm will be donated to Broad Street Ministry, a non-profit organization that serves the homeless. The ministry, which will help tend the garden, says it will also host two community dinners for 150 people using the food grown at the farm.

PHS spokesperson Alan Jaffe says the design is still in the very early stages, so we’ll have to wait a little longer for a preview of Thomas Paine Plaza’s transformation and whether the “Your Move” art installation will remain in place.