Canada: Feeding a city from the world’s largest rooftop greenhouse

Can you grow enough produce for an entire city in rooftop greenhouses? Two entrepreneurs in Montreal, Canada, believe it might be possible.

By Sean Fleming
World Economic Forum
Apr 20, 2021

Excerpt:

Lauren Rathmell and Mohamed Hage cofounded Lufa in 2009. The company has four urban gardens in the Canadian city, all in rooftop greenhouses. Lufa’s most recent sits on top of a former warehouse and measures more than 15,000m2 – larger than the other three greenhouses combined. Its main crops are tomatoes and aubergines, producing more than 11,000kg of food per week. It is, the company says, the largest rooftop greenhouse in the world.

Rathmell says the new greenhouse will accelerate Lufa’s mission to grow food where people live and help it to meet an “ever-growing demand for fresh, local, and responsible foods”.

The company – which says it’s not trying to replace local farms and food makers, acknowledging that not everything can be grown on rooftops – follows what it calls ‘responsible agriculture’ practices. These include capturing and recirculating rainwater, energy-saving glass panels, and an absence of synthetic pesticides. Any waste is composted and reused, and food is sold directly to customers on the day it is harvested. Lufa also has a fleet of electric vehicles to make those deliveries.

“Our objective at Lufa is to get to the point where we’re feeding everyone in the city,” Hage said in an interview in Fortune. Lufa’s fifth greenhouse is due to open later in 2021.

At the moment, Lufa grows food for around 2% of the city’s population. While that might sound like a modest proportion, interest in urban agriculture is on the rise. Presently, agriculture in urban areas tends to be more common in developing countries. But the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) favours an increase in urban agriculture, saying it can have “important benefits for food security”.

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