Raising The Root
Some City Dwellers Are
Hoping Rooftop Farming Will Bear Fruit
By Robin Shulman
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, September 12, 2009
NEW YORK Like many a farmer, Ben Flanner rises with the sun. Like most
crops, his need water and weeding -- bright tomatoes and fragrant basil,
delicate nasturtiums, mottled melons and black eggplants, mustard
greens, puntarelle, peas, beets, beans, kale -- about 30 fruits and
vegetables in all, and then there are the herbs.
But his farm is not like most farms.
His farm is three stories off the ground.
Beyond it is a sweeping view of the Manhattan skyline. Below it is a TV
and film soundstage.
Flanner's 6,000-square-foot farm is on a rooftop in the industrial
Greenpoint section of Brooklyn. He hopes it can become a model for
others who want to grow food but lack space.
The problem in cities such as New York is always land. It's expensive
and valuable, and it never makes more sense to plant than build
apartments. But from a bird's-eye view, much of the city is rooftops.
Most roofs are flat. They get direct sunlight, a rare commodity in a
densely built place.
In recent years, enthusiasm has grown for green roofs, hailed for
harnessing rainwater that can overwhelm urban sewage systems, and
keeping buildings warmer in winter and cooler in summer, lowering
electricity use.
But amid increasing interest in fresh, local food, this season seems to
herald the era of the rooftop farm. It's as though somewhere someone
decreed, "Roofs shall not lie fallow." And a colony of entrepreneurs,
residents, schoolteachers and restaurateurs set to work.
"All right, open the floodgates!" Flanner says to a volunteer assistant
holding a hose on a recent morning.
"Sweat these babies down!" says Flanner, speaking of the mustard seeds
just laid into the earth. A Brooklyn restaurant ordered 10 pounds of
mustard greens to be delivered next month. Mustard greens take exactly
one month to grow. Flanner is working on deadline.
Flanner, 28, considered going to the country to farm -- only to realize
he didn't want to leave the city, he just wanted to be a farmer. He quit
his job at E-Trade and partnered with Annie Novak, 26, who had farming
experience. The green-roof design firm Goode Green agreed to do the
installation for free and the production company Broadway Stages agreed
to pay for it, as an experiment on the roof of its Greenpoint building.
It took two days for cranes to haul 200,000 pounds of soil made of
lightweight expanded shale, like crushed brick, onto the roof. It cost
$10 per square foot, or $60,000. Now it is up to Flanner and Novak to
make a profitable farm.
Flanner harvests in the mornings, barters vegetables for lunch at
local eateries, and in the afternoons bikes dozens of pounds of produce
to restaurants that have commissioned them. He and Novak run a Sunday
farm stand.
Across the country, a handful of commercial-scale rooftop farm start-ups
have fashioned a rough formula for profit: It involves the distance
vegetables must travel from farm to table, their consequent price and
quality, and a city's food culture and population density.
New York City seems to calculate high on the benefits, and hundreds of
other rooftop gardens are in the works, some even large-scale.
In the Jamaica section of Queens, the start-up Gotham Greens just signed
a lease to build a 10,000-square-foot greenhouse on a roof and grow 30
tons of greens and herbs for sale. The company has a $1.4 million budget
and will grow hydroponically, using recirculated water and dissolved
nutrients to produce enormous yield without soil.
"We see it as a compelling business opportunity," says co-founder Viraj
Puri, who hopes to expand to larger rooftops and farm an acre or two at
a time.
In the South Bronx, an affordable-housing developer is designing a
10,000-square-foot rooftop greenhouse for an eight-story building to be
run by a local food co-op.
On the Upper West Side, the Manhattan School for Children is building a
2,000-square-foot greenhouse both for food production and environmental
education.
And this spring on the Lower East Side, Amber Kusmenko, 27, an animator,
and her boyfriend hauled 4,000 pounds of soil to the roof of their co-op
to build a 200-square-foot farm. "It feels like a big accomplishment,"
says Kusmenko of the cucumbers and bush beans she has been harvesting.
The biggest obstacle is cost. A structural engineer must assess the
roof's ability to bear weight. A base layer of heavy-duty plastic may be
laid on the roof, and it may be retrofitted for drainage or even
outfitted with a greenhouse -- though plenty of food can grow cheaply in
a Toys R Us kiddie pool or a basic wood box.
Other aspects can be difficult, too, such as providing the amount of
water plants need under direct sunlight, dealing with high winds, and
hauling soil and other materials upstairs.
The benefits are the sun, the ability to custom-engineer the soil for
each type of plant, and the lack of pests -- snails, insects and rats,
on ground level in the city.
"Our biggest pests were the squirrels and the landlady," says Kerry
Trueman, 49, who kept an edible garden on the roof of her West Village
apartment until her landlady shut it down.
Certain cities have led the way to the roof. In San Francisco, Mayor
Gavin Newsom has required all departments to audit their land, seeking
places suitable for urban agriculture. Chicago, where the mayor's office
has a green roof, also has the country's first organic-certified rooftop
farm, 2,500 square feet over a restaurant. Toronto just passed a law
requiring green roofs on new buildings above a certain size, and many
could include food.
In the District, the Pug planted tomatoes and chilies above the bar
for use in bloody Marys. Sara Loveland of D.C. Greenworks says her
nonprofit company is helping four other restaurants build rooftop
farms.
"Some of the most expensive things for them to purchase can be
grown on their roof pretty easily," she says. "It's unused real
estate. People need to reevaluate the use of space."
Meanwhile, Sky Vegetables envisions building commercial-scale
10,000- to 40,000-square-foot rooftop farms in cities across the
country and selling the produce to grocery stores and restaurants.
The company is negotiating for test sites in the District, San
Francisco and Boston. The dream: after a year, 20 farms; after two
years, 100.
"In the Northeast, half the year fruits are coming from
California and elsewhere, and it's picked prematurely to survive the
thousands of miles to get there," chief executive Robert Fireman
says. "We have the competitive edge from savings in transportation
costs."
In New York, there used to be more room on the ground. In the
1990s, there were several thousand community gardens, but as the
city boomed, they were sold for development, and now the number is
about 600. Willie Morgan, 71, has kept a vegetable garden in Harlem
for 40 years, moving to a smaller plot when his previous garden was
developed. Now buildings are being constructed on three sides of
him.
"It's blocking my sunlight," Morgan says.
Of course, rooftop farming is not an altogether new solution.
Just after the turn of the past century, a utopian vision of
self-sufficiency led the Ansonia Hotel on the Upper West Side to
keep a rooftop barnyard including 500 chickens, many ducks, six
goats -- and a small bear.
Then in the 1990s, Upper East Side supermarket owner Eli Zabar
became a rooftop pioneer of contemporary times. He built a
greenhouse that could harness the heat of his bakery's ovens below
for the plants.
"I had always wanted to grow tomatoes out of season," Zabar says.
Now, he has about a half-acre of greenhouses on two buildings,
staffed by two full-time employees, and he sells the produce in his
stores.
Green Roofs for Healthy Cities, which represents companies that
create green roofs, says the number of projects its members
constructed in the United States grew by 35 percent last year,
though no one tracks how many involved vegetables and fruits. The
group is seeing so much new interest in farming that it is starting
an agricultural committee, President Steven Peck says.
"Everyone has in their mind that you have to start small, but we
decided to just start big," says Novak, the partner on the
Greenpoint rooftop farm. "People we work with say, 'Let's start with
basil in planter boxes.' I say, 'Let's cover your whole roof in dirt
and start a farm.' "
"It's different from the farm movement in the '70s, when people
just wanted to get away," she says. "I want to change people's minds
about food, and I can do that in the city. And also I love opera.
When I'm off in a remote farm, I think, 'Wow, I can't go to the
Met.' "
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