Does the future of urban farming lie in meeting wider sustainability goals?

Alex van Tuyll (right) with Green Spark colleagues – image Green Spark.

Within the six-storey building, “greenhouse modules get sunshine from the outside and attention from visitors from the inside”. A restaurant on the roof “where the food produced can be enjoyed” completes the design.

Horticulture Week
8 November 2018

Excerpt:

The recent bankruptcy of what was claimed to be Europe’s largest urban farming project and an international exemplar, in The Hague, has prompted some reassessment of the underlying concepts behind the trend.

The 1,200sq m Urban Farmers glasshouse on a factory roof, in operation from May 2016 to July this year, was designed to produce 50 tonnes of vegetables annually, with the 370sq m indoor fish farm yielding 20 tonnes of fresh fish — a combination known as aquaponics. But local media reported that competition from conventional growers in the adjacent Westland region “was too much for the independent farm”.

Wageningen University biosystems engineering student Alex van Tuyll says: “They were selling run-of-the-mill crops that could be found in greenhouses all around the area. Likewise, they were growing tilapia, a cheap and relatively undesirable fish, though easy to grow.”

Van Tuyll is one of a growing number of advocates of a wider system that aims not only for circularity within production but a “spiral” of adding value to waste inputs — a system van Tuyll labels AMI, for “aquaponics, mushrooms and insects”.

Read the complete article here.