Urban Agriculture - Rooftop Farming
Growing food locally is becoming not only fashionable but to a certain degree indispensable, considering the sustainability issues. If you live in the city, the local growing might mean cultivating food on the rooftop of your building. The advantages are: it reduces the heat inside the building in the summer, it contributes to the greening of the city, it eliminates the long distances of food transportation, it reduces or even eliminates the transportation costs, and it greatly reduces any food production and storage waste. An excellent documentary Taste the Waste has just released at the Montreal World Film Festival on the amount of food wasted during production transportation, retailing and as leftovers. See my article about this documentary film in my blog News Real.
Here are some note-worthy examples of rooftop farming:
Montreal: Palais des congrès de Montréal
The edible garden on the roof of the Palais des congrès was conceived by the Montreal Urban Ecology Center. Unfortunately, the center has not yet written about this project on their website.
This Culti-Vert project received funding from the Canadian Ministry of Health's Climate Change Action Plan that includes a section for reducing the negative health impacts of urban heat islands.
One of the participants in the project is Crudessence. They specialize in raw vegan cuisine. They grow on the rooftop of the Palais des congrés the fresh produce for their Montreal restaurants. Here is a video about Crudessence involvement in this project.
Jardins sur les toits du Palais des congrés
I am not really sure why the growing of the produce for the Crudessence restaurants should be subsidized, at least partially, by Canadian Ministry of Health, since Crudessence is not a non-profit organization, and the prices in their restaurants are not low, but I guess their part in greening of the Montreal rooftops somehow qualifies them for the taxpayers' help.
Santropol Roulant is a non-profit organization who use the rooftop of their headquaters to grow produce for their meals-on-wheals service. They grow fresh vegetables in plastic containers, and also have a field like section, see photo below.
At the back of their rooftop field there are bee hives. This not only produces "urban" honey, but also helps to polinate the plants.
New York: Eagle Street Rooftop Farm
This large warehouse rooftop farm in Brooklyn, NY does not only grow herbs and vegetables, but also chickens and rabbits. This is a successful example of urban agriculture on an impressive scale, in one of the most densely populated urban areas in North America.
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