ROOFTOP COMMERCIAL GREENHOUSE

AHUNTSIC ROOFTOP FARM
Montreal, Canada
2011

Lufa Farms

Piggybacking Tactic
Inhabit a Niche

Several enterprising ROOFTOP COMMERCIAL FARMS were founded in the wake of the global economic recession of 2008. Their emergence reflected a growing appetite for fresh local foods and a burgeoning culture of urban farming. In 2011, New York City–based Gotham Greens—which sells hydroponically grown vegetables to Whole Foods and other high-end grocery stores—built its first, 15,000-square-foot greenhouse above an existing warehouse in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. Its second rooftop greenhouse was designed as an integral part of a ground-up Whole Foods store in Gowanus, Brooklyn, and its latest, 75,000-square-foot Chicago greenhouse inhabits the rooftop of the Method Products manufacturing plant, designed by William McDonough + Partners in 2015. Montreal-based Lufa Farms shares a similar trajectory, and now operates three large rooftop farms in that city. These farms adapt proven technologies to newly identified rooftop production sites and are thus able to overcome agriculture’s biggest economic disadvantage in competitive urban real estate markets—the high price of land—by riding atop other productive land uses. They leverage their urban locales by tapping into local production and distribution ecologies to reach an affluent urban consumer base keen on buying “green.”

Read more about Gotham Greens