march-2013

W
hile New York’s High Line – a
shard of greenery slicing through
the metropolis – has captured the
imagination, some people believe that
within the next decade visitors to New York
will barely bat an eyelid at vegetables being
grown – and maybe even livestock being
reared – high above the glass and steel
canyons of Manhattan.
New York is at the vanguard of vertical
farming, a global revolution that its
advocates claim will soon change the way
that city dwellers get their food. The theory
is that instead of trucking food into cities
from farms, at a massive environmental
cost, it can be grown in huge greenhouses,
hundreds of metres above the city streets.
The last few years have seen a gold-rush
by companies to bag rights to any
serviceable plots. There are already
hydroponic (plants grown in water)
greenhouses on rooftops in Brooklyn,
Queens and the Bronx, producing basil,
lettuce and bok choy for retailers such as
Left and far left:
Brooklyn Grange
grows tomatoes,
spring onions
and squash at
its 6,000m2 roof
farm at the old
Brooklyn Navy
Yard in New
York. Below left:
Rooftop produce
on sale. Below:
Vegetables
PA
fl ourish up on
the roof away
from pollution EYEVINE;
Whole Foods and FreshDirect. One rooftop
farming pioneer, Brooklyn Grange, has a
6,000m² roof farm at the Brooklyn Navy
Yard that grows tomatoes, spring onions
and squashes, and a one-acre rooftop in
Long Island, Queens.
Another, BrightFarms, is creating a
hydroponic greenhouse on a roof in Sunset
Park, Brooklyn, which chief executive Paul
Lightfoot claims will grow more than half
a million kilogrammes of produce a year,
including tomatoes, lettuce and herbs.
Its aim is to “grow enough crops to meet
the fresh vegetable consumption needs
of up to 5,000 New Yorkers, to create
jobs, and to prevent as much as 6.8
million litres of storm water from going
into local waterways.”
While the emphasis is on the local, the
principle of urban gardening is global.
Similar schemes proliferate in other United
States cities such as Milwaukee and
Chicago and the first commercial-scale
vertical farm recently opened in Singapore.
March 2013 53