Tuesday, November 30, 2010

Rooftop to Tabletop: Urban Farming Spreads Roots

Eighteen feet above Chicago’s honking city traffic, Mike Repkin stands in a plot of buckwheat, delicate white flowers waving about his waist as an elevated train clatters past at eye level. From this unusual spot, Repkin is farming.

He grows great leafy bunches of kale and chard, stalks of wheat and oats, chubby potatoes, sweet strawberries, and even deep-rooted rhubarb. He grows Jerusalem artichokes for diabetics at the nearby community center and basil to sell at the farmer’s market across the street.

All told, his food travels less than 50 feet from farm to market -- and much of that distance is vertical.
City dwellers have been growing food on rooftops for decades, either to fulfill a craving for the cuisine of their homeland, or for the simple love of gardening. But in recent years, efforts to turn rooftops into growing space have become larger and more ambitious -- more the province of farmers than of gardeners. Spurred by consumer demand for fresh, local produce, and aided by new technology, entrepreneurs across the country are leasing rooftop space for commercial agricultural operations in the heart of bustling cities.

Repkin's farm on the roof of True Nature, a natural foods co-op, covers about 1,000 square feet with a scrubby meadow of plant life. This is no orderly vegetable garden -- it’s more like an overgrown backyard, a flatland terrarium where dandelions jockey for space with a prickly rhubarb bush, a carpet of clover, and tufts of burdock, all in a scant four inches of soil. The wind gusts, the sun is strong, and the El rattles by every few minutes.

You’ll find similar sights in New York City, where Brooklyn Grange runs a 1-acre farm on an industrial rooftop in Long Island City, Queens. The company installed a multilayered green roof system, which prevents plant roots from growing into the building, and hired a crane to haul one million pounds of lightweight soil up to the roof. One borough over, Gotham Greens, winner of last year’s New York Green Business Competition, is constructing a partially solar-powered greenhouse on a rooftop in Brooklyn. It plans to grow about 30 tons of produce to sell at Whole Foods stores, restaurants, and farmer’s markets by 2011.

Repkin started his farm in 2006 with Urban Habitat Chicago, a nonprofit group he helped found. The plants and soil sit atop a green roof system made of multiple layers of filtering and insulating materials. Repkin uses no pesticides or synthetic fertilizers and chooses each plant carefully to benefit the rooftop ecosystem. The cover crop of white clover, for example, produces a fibrous root system that defends against invaders and fixes nitrogen to help fertilize the soil. He’s got native prairie plants to bring in beneficial insects. Herbs like basil fetch a good price at the market -- a profit incentive for urban farmers and building owners.
“But basil doesn’t keep people alive,” Repkin says. That’s why you’ll find him growing hard red winter wheat on his latest rooftop project, leased from a residential building owner who has agreed to donate some of the produce to the needy, in addition to selling at farmer’s markets. “Our wheat can’t compete on price with 50-pound sacks from Kansas, but it’s critical from a self-sufficiency perspective,” Repkins says. “We could easily make enough rooftop bread to feed someone for a year.”
Repkin has studied the load-bearing strength of other rooftops near True Nature, on either side of the El’s Red Line tracks, and found about 65 acres of potential rooftop farmland. (His lightweight growing system is suitable for most Chicago buildings.) This little slice of urban farms alone could provide about 1,000 jobs, Repkin estimates, and bring in revenues of about $1 per square foot each month – the equivalent of a highly productive organic farm on land.


While Repkin’s roofs are focused on food production, they have numerous environmental benefits. Like a typical green roof, his farm filters and retains stormwater, sequesters carbon dioxide, removes particulate pollution from the air, and insulates and cools the building. It also creates wildlife habitat. Butterflies, birds and honeybees are frequent visitors on this rooftop. Some birds even nest among the clover, plucking straw from the nearby buckwheat and oats to build their nests.

Urban Habitat Chicago’s latest project is a rooftop garden on a building that houses a food pantry and people recovering from drug or alcohol addiction. The garden will provide fresh produce, and community residents will be trained to maintain it. “We have lines of people going around the block at food pantries in Chicago,” Repkin says. “Giving people the opportunity to produce their own food, wherever it is, helps empower them.”

Read entire article at OnEarth.com
Photo by Peter Blanchard

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