Life from above

Lufa Farms and the Rooftop Garden Project make eating local an urban reality

By the time those rock-hard avocados are ready for guacamole, they’ve been on the road for two weeks and on your counter for one more—and this, to Kurt Lynn, represents exactly what is wrong with food these days. “To get here from Mexico, and to be able to present it nicely, [food] has to be picked early, you have to grow varieties that are tough, you have to use fungicide to prevent moulding, there are lots of transportation costs—all those things compromise the food,” says Lynn, co-founder of Lufa Farms.

Luckily for dissatisfied Montrealers, a solution is literally right over their heads.

Both Lufa Farms, a new private greenhouse, and Rooftop Garden Project, a community-based endeavour, think a roof is a wonderful place to grow your own. Though the two projects differ wildly in many respects, they’re both rooted in the same idea. “If we want a logical food system, it just makes so much sense to integrate food production into the city,” says Rooftop Garden Project coordinator Gaëlle Janvier. “How could [rooftop gardening] not be a good idea?”

NEIGHBOURHOOD HARVEST

Run by international solidarity organization Alternatives, Rooftop Garden Project planted their first seeds in 2003–2004 at UQÀM as part of a partnership with Santropol Roulant’s meals-on­wheels program. Since then, they’ve helped another 10 or so schools and organizations develop gardens, as well as teach people to plant on their own roofs and balconies. “Public spaces are often underutilized, but could easily serve as agricultural space,” Janvier says.

Most of the gardens are autonomous and serve particular groups—the residents at a senior citizens’ home in Montreal North tend to and benefit from their garden, as do members of a housing co­op in Quebec City. However, many of them are open-air, putting the gardens at the mercy of the elements, though the weather has proven to be a lesser foe than the government. Janvier says that because the government has shown little interest and support, the project’s ability to get more space has so far been stunted. Still, the prospect of eating the fruits of one’s own labour is exciting to Montrealers, so the project hosts workshops and sells several hundred balcony starter kits every year.

FARMING FOR GEEKS

Nestled among the concrete and brick of Ahuntsic’s manufacturing district, a colony of bumblebees busily tend to their blooming tomato plants. Unlike their hibernating brethren, these bumblebees worked hard throughout the winter in preparation for Lufa Farms’ first harvest—a single, victorious green pepper picked in the first days of April.

That green pepper is the lovechild of many concepts and processes, the most prominent being local farming taken to the extreme. “I mean, we grow these things down the street and to the left,” Lynn says excitedly of their position perched on the rooftop of a clothing manufacturing building.

Lynn and Lufa president Mohamed Hage are not farmers. Rather, Lynn would describe them as “serial entrepreneurs” hailing from the tech industry—businessmen looking at rooftops as opportunities to use science and technology to produce organic food to sell to Montrealers year-round.

The first order of business was to determine how Lufa could be economically viable and environmentally sound. “So often, making money and doing the right thing are mutually exclusive. In the food business, it’s rampant—there are a lot of compromises, [resulting in] unsafe or less tasty, nutritious food,” Lynn says.

The mostly privately funded $2-million farm is the world’s largest commercial rooftop greenhouse, at roughly 31,000 square feet. It’s a computer-controlled microcosm with several different grow­ing climates. The greenhouse uses and re-uses filtered rainwater to irrigate the plants. Bio-controls like micro-wasps, ladybugs and good old-fashioned fly paper keep the bad bugs at bay. They even have their own bumblebee colony to avoid cross-contaminating their organic crops.

“It’s farming for geeks,” Lynn says. But what it really is is community-supported agriculture for the 21st century—food grown on a roof a handful of kilometres away from the people who eat it.

Lufa promises to deliver fresh produce every week to drop-off points on the island, where subscribers can go to pick up their food. For baskets ranging from $22–$42, clients can expect cucum­bers, tomatoes, peppers, eggplant, lettuce, greens and herbs. The farm is expected to generate several hundred tons of food a year, enough to supply 1,000 or so households. ■

CHECK ROOFTOPGARDENS.CA UNDER “OUR PUBLICATIONS” FOR HOW-TO INFO, AND LUFA.COM TO LEARN MORE ABOUT LUFA FARMS

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