Rooftop garden plots could help produce food in India’s large urban areas, where real estate comes at a premium
LONDON, U.K. (Thomson Reuters Foundation) — On a cold and rainy Friday afternoon, Steven Dring is tending his baby carrots in a somewhat unusual setting.
The green shoots are in a tray of volcanic glass crystals under LED lights, and the tray is in a tunnel 33 metres underneath a busy London street.
Dring is the co-founder of Zero Carbon Food, one of a clutch of projects trying to help feed the world’s booming cities by farming in local spots — and often unexpected ones.
Social businesses in India are setting up small farms on the rooftops of crowded apartment blocks, while China’s government has built urban farming “showcases” to encourage city-dwellers to start projects at home.
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Cities in rich and poor countries are set to swell in the coming decades and cause ever more pollution by transporting food from rural areas. Two-thirds of the world’s population will live in cities by 2050, compared to slightly more than half now, according to United Nations forecasts.
“Thirty million meals are served a day in London. We’ve got to get all that stuff into the city, along with all the packaging needed to bring it in,” Dring said.
“So if you can bring any food production into the city, then that’s good.”
Zero Carbon Food started farming in an abandoned Second World War bomb shelter in Clapham North, an upper middle class neighbourhood, in January 2014. The company has been growing salad leaves and root vegetables in a small test plot, using LED lights instead of sunshine and perlite crystals or thin fibre matts instead of soil.
The venture is now setting up its full site, which will fill the steel and concrete tunnels with vertically stacked trays that have 100,000 sq. feet of growing space.
Dring said it will start selling to restaurants and homes in the second quarter of 2015, although it will only ever meet a minute fraction of the city’s demand.
London’s population is set to grow by one-fifth by 2030, when the number of residents will hit 10 million, according to the mayor’s office.
The projected growth rate is much higher than that of New York and around double the United Kingdom average, although it is below forecasts for many cities in the developing world.
“A city, of course, cannot grow all its produce, but it’s about combining this with other farming,” said Chungui Lu, a plant scientist and expert on urban agriculture at the University of Nottingham in the United Kingdom.
“You can’t grow wheat in a city, but you can grow a lot of high-value, fresh veg.”
In India, where the urban population is forecast to double to more than 800 million people by 2050, the idea of fitting farms into cities that already heave with people might seem impossible. However, the lack of space on the ground has spurred an increase in rooftop farming, using the flat tops of apartment blocks.
Fresh and Local, a social business in Mumbai, has run an organic farm on top of a low-income building since 2012.
The 2,000 sq. foot farm grows pomegranates, chillis and bay leaves for the building’s 50 families and 20 small businesses.
Fresh and Local is being hired to help set up two to three new urban farms in the city every six months, said founder Adrienne Thadani.
“There’s a lot of misconceptions (such as) that there’s no space, which isn’t true,” said Thadani.
“For every building in Bombay, you have that square footage of flat roof.”
Gardens of Abundance, a project in Hyderabad, a southern Indian city of 8.7 million people, has set up 10 organic roof top vegetable gardens since 2012 and has held workshops at 20 apartment blocks over the past year.
Garden plots can produce up to 20 kilograms of food per sq. metre per year, according to the United Nations. Many urban farming groups do not provide such figures for their production because yields vary with factors such as location and seed quality, they said.
Urban farming remains a niche sector, partly because setting up a mid-sized plot requires time and money. London’s high property prices drove Dring to an underground site that will cost £3 million ($5.3 million) to develop, using money partly raised on the equity crowd funding website Crowdcube.
Thadani, meanwhile, has to bring in basic materials from as far away as 150 kilometres outside Mumbai.
Governments sometimes step in to help. Some Indian states provide subsidized growing kits, while China’s government has partially funded a three-storey farm in Beijing, said Lu, who is working on a research project at the site. Showcases for indoor farming have been set up in recent years in smaller cities such as Nanjing.
However, when it comes to agriculture, China’s spending priority for now remains providing subsidies for poor rural farmers, said Lu. He points to Singapore as an Asian success story for urban farming.
In London, Dring’s visitors often think his farm is unusually high-tech, but LED lights and trays are common in U.K. agriculture.
“There’s such a huge disconnect between people and where their food comes from,” he said.
“Some kids in London probably think spaghetti grows on trees.”
