The Urban Farmer, Issue #079 * Rooftop Farm * Cloning * Baby Cauliflowers!

January,

“Unemployment

Innovation Earth: A Rooftop Farm, Coming Soon

to Your

Supermarket

So how to reconcile all this — the growing desire for good, local food; the

ability to do it at an affordable price; and the infrastructure to deliver it on

a scale so that most Americans can access it? Enter urban farming innovator

BrightFarms, which is skipping the whole shipping part of the food system

equation and bringing the farm — in the form of sustainable hydroponic

greenhouse — right near or even on the rooftop of the grocery store.

It was CEO Paul Lightfoot’s love of locally grown produce that first inspired

him to do something to improve our food system. The company designs, finances,

builds and operates the greenhouses; the grocery store agrees to buy the produce

that BrightFarms grows.

The growing process is ultra-efficient, too: a one-acre greenhouse is capable of

growing up to

500,000 pounds of pesticide-free produce a year, with 10 times

less land and seven times less water than conventional field agriculture. Water

is recycled through a closed loop system and there is no agricultural runoff.

BrightFarms first greenhouse, in Bucks County, Pa., started delivering greens,

herbs and tomatoes to regional grocery chain McCaffrey’s just this past January.

But the company already has an additional seven greenhouses in development and

is now looking for a new 200,000-square-foot site in New York City, after

recently terminating a lease it signed in 2012 for a rooftop site in Brooklyn’s

Sunset Park.

All this can’t be thrilling the big produce (i.e., tasteless tomato) companies,

as BrightFarms starts to displace their products on supermarket shelves.

BrightFarms isn’t the only agricultural reformer, either: Gotham Greens is

already producing 100 tons of greens a year for New York City; Chicago vertical

farm

FarmedHere is on track to produce a million pounds by the end of this year.

But with five billion of us living in urban areas by 2030 and our natural

resources exploited to the hilt, long-distance produce is going to have to

become a thing of the past. “Any major changes in a system are likely to

generate opposition,” says Lightfoot. “We are not afraid to ruffle a few

feathers to be the change that we’d like to see in the world.”

Is Plant Cloning too futuristic or unethical?

Lettuce raft and a new baby cauliflower.

Vertical Hydroponic System

Hydro Tip of the Month- 

How do your veggies get pollinated in

a back bedroom? It’s not as big a problem as you would imagine.