Inter-Farm-Market

"There was a disconnect in that vertical farming had tremendous benefits for so many of the challenges traditional agriculture was facing, but no one really knew about it. I wanted to show people this technology was available and profitable today,” says Max Loessl about his passion for vertical farming. In 2013, Max Loessl and Henry Gordon-Smith co-founded the Association for Vertical Farming. Today, AVF is an international nonprofit organization comprised of individuals, companies, research institutions, and universities focusing on advancing vertical farming technologies, designs, and businesses.

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floating forest

Looking for a new way to obtain fresh produce? This floating urban forest has your back. Swale, a barge topped with a forest of trees and edible plants, will be docking in Brooklyn, Governors Island and the Bronx this June.

The 80 feet by 30 feet barge and collaborative floating food project will let people on board harvest scallions, rosemary, blueberries, wild leek, radicchio, ramps, sea kale and other fresh produce.

Mary Mattingly, the artist behind the project, told Brooklyn Based via email...

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another tower

London firm Rogers Stirk Harbour + Partners has revealed details of a concept for a bamboo-framed vertical farm that could provide an alternative to traditional land-intensive farming.

Named Skyfarm, the design is for a multi-storey hyperboloid structure that integrates different types of farming – ranging from traditional planting to aquaponics – and also produces its own energy.

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fantasy projects

reeHugger has had some trouble digesting vertical farms for a decade, as has Stan Cox of Alternet, who wrote in 2010 that “Although the concept has provided opportunities for architecture students and others to create innovative, sometimes beautiful building designs, it holds little practical potential for providing food.” Now he is at it again, refining his points in a new article in Alternet that was picked up and retitled in Salon as Enough with the vertical farming fantasies: There are still too many unanswered questions about the trendy practice.

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Food Tower

ABF-lab is a paris-based design collective founded in 2011 that specialize in creating projects that mix architecture, energy, climate, and engineering. for a building in romainville, france called ‘food-farm tower’, they aimed to optimize the volume to follow the sun’s path, making it as productive as possible and liberating it from the use of artificial light to supply power to the gardens. the project proposes both housing and gardening at the same time.

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Vertical Farming..design

The Beenleigh Hills is an experimental architectural design typology integrating densified cohousing, vertical farming, solar farming and boutique agricultural fields. Sustainable design must build vertically and become part of the eco-system. An eco-system has no waste, just another resource for another system to plug into. Building vertically must expand past our traditional way of thinking about living and working, it should include growing our food which currently uses 1/5th of the Earth’s available land area. Vertical farming is the solution to feeding a growing global population and halting deforestation. Advancements in energy, robotics and low cost aeroponic modular systems are first required for vertical farming to be feasible.

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retirement farms

Spark Architects won the “experimental” category at the 2015 World Architecture Festival, held earlier this month in Singapore.

The practice’s “Home Farm” aims to deal with two of the main issues facing cities in Asia: an ageing population and excessive food imports.

The idea is that elderly residents can occupy themselves with growing crops in “vertical farms” contained within buildings, thereby providing the city with food and themselves with a modest income.

Occupants can work as part-time agriculturalists, but there is no obligation to work.

Spark say that 90% of Singapore’s meals are imported, so action is needed to improve food security.

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Urban Forest

Italian architect Stefano Boeri dreams big and green. He has created six bold, transformational "ideas for a bio-diverse metropolis" that could be installed in and around the city of Milan, to establish "transitional states between the city, nature and agriculture" and provide "energy sources for a new model of urban economics." Visionary and Idealistic, they challenge us to think about cities and the possible in new ways. The concepts were first introduced to the public at an exhibition in Rome last year.

While all about landscape and greenery, BioMIlano is also about urbanist revitalization and putting a stop to sprawl. The key philosophy seems to be taking advantage of creative opportunities to green the urban core while also developing a greenbelt around the city.

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Director of Urban Agriculture

Green thumbs and farm-to-table advocates rejoice: Atlanta has hired its first Director of Urban Agriculture! Mayor Kasim Reed announced the creation of the position back in September, and the slot was officially filled by Mario Cambardella over the weekend. The position's expressed mission is to expand access to healthy food for all residents of Atlanta.

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Fayetteville 2030: Food City Scenario

FAYETTEVILLE, Ark. — The University of Arkansas Community Design Center’s project Fayetteville 2030: Food City Scenario has won a 2015 Honor Award in the Analysis and Planning category from the American Society of Landscape Architects. The project seeks to build food sustainability by promoting local urban agriculture.

Food City Scenario is featured in the October issue of Landscape Architecture Magazine and will be exhibited at the ASLA Annual Meeting and Expo in Chicago in November. This is the Community Design Center’s seventh ASLA Honor Award.

The Community Design Center led an interdisciplinary team at the University of Arkansas for Food City Scenario, which speculates on what Fayetteville might look like if the city’s growth integrated local urban food production sustainable enough to create self-sufficiency. Fayetteville’s population of 75,000 is expected to double over the next 20 years. In addition, although the region is the most prosperous in the state, it also has one of the nation’s highest child hunger rates.

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Corn Is as High as a Cabdriver’s Eye

But Mr. Santana, 66, and other Seaman drivers spend their downtime tending a small farm off Johnson Avenue in the Spuyten Duyvil section of the Bronx, near Riverdale.

“It was just a few guys,” Daniel Montes, a driver, said of the farm’s origins. “They just got together and started doing this.”

The farm began about 15 years ago with a few tomatoes and beans planted along a thin, unused strip of land behind a 30-story apartment building. It has grown into a thicket that stretches about a quarter-mile.

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Personal Food Computer

The personal food computer looks like a fish tank. It’s the right shape and size, but there’s no water. Inside the two-foot-long box, under glowing purple LED lights, lettuces and legumes sprout up, their roots, free of dirt, misted by digitally-controlled sprayers. It’s a tiny, low-water, climate-controlled agriculture system, designed for growing food in cramped city quarters. The machine is plugged into a network, so all the environmental information runs into a database, where other farmers can see how much water and light the plants are getting, and use that data to tweak the way they grow their own crops.

Call it open-source farming or data-driven agriculture. Either way, it’s a way to program how we grow what we eat. Caleb Harper, an engineer with a background in architecture and design, developed the personal food computer. He also runs the City Farm group, which looks at innovative ways to grow food in urban areas, at MIT’s Media Lab. He thinks his contraption is the future of food.

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St. Louis Rooftop Garden

Mary Ostafi, an architect who founded the nonprofit Urban Harvest STL in 2011, has led an effort to dump some 40 tons of dirt on the building’s 9,000-square-foot roof and grow organic vegetables in a venture called the Food Roof Farm.

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Canada Green Roofs

The city bylaw requires green roofs to be 80 per cent covered three years after planting. If you're harvesting crops every season, the green roof is periodically naked while the new crops grow, and this breaks the law, Throness explained.

“I think the fear was that edible plants would take too much labour and water,” and the city wanted to give developers a low-maintenance solution for building green roofs, Throness said. “But we’ve been monitoring our water use and don’t require any more.”

After a pilot project in 2013, last summer the roof hosted a five-crop rotational farm that produced more than two tonnes of vegetables, she said. “We’ve found that we can grow everything here.”

The harvest is split between campus kitchens and the Gould St. farmer’s market on Wednesdays.

Ontario imports billions of dollars of produce from California each year and this supply is becoming threatened due to the state’s prolonged drought, said Throness. Rooftop agriculture adds local food security to the existing environmental benefits of green roofs.

For Peck, while rooftop farms aren’t appropriate everywhere — older buildings often can’t handle the extra weight — they’re an essential part of the future of the city.

“There are still hundreds of millions of square feet of roofs in Toronto that could still be greened,” Peck said. “We invest billions and billions of dollars on grey infrastructure. It would pay great dividends to devote a small part of that to green infrastructure.”

By the numbers:

72,020: Square metres of green roofs built in Toronto in 2014

232,000: Square metres of green roofs already in existence

185,000: Additional square metres approved.

4,984 hectares: Land area identified as the total available area for green roofs in the City of Toronto, about 8% of the total.

20 %: Minimum area that must be covered by green roof on new buildings.

2 tonnes: Amount of produce produced by a 929-square-metre farm on the roof of Ryerson University’s George Vari Engineering and Computing Centre last summer.

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Architecture and Food

Specialist Design Consultancy dedicated to developing the architecture of Building Integrated Agriculture.

We work with building owners and developers to unlock value in their sunlit roofscapes and concept designs for new-builds by developing a model of horticultural production infrastructure supplying local markets and consumers with fresh produce.

Once roofscapes are activated and relationships with their hosts are negotiated and agreed, A&f will form branches of sister company * Hyperlocal to take on the horticultural operation. We hope to eventually develop London's own indigenous, high-volume, resilient food production capacity supplying fresh produce at stable prices, free from supply-side volatility, over the long term.

Urban Agriculture is a field steadily gaining attention for its commercial and social opportunities. We believe it will be a major influence on the development of architecture and a powerful tool in urban food security, community development and climate change adaptation.

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Urban Agriculture

Book: http://www.verticalfarm.com/

Vertical Farming update

"If you follow architecture or design at all, you may have come across aggressively futuristic renderings of skyscrapers topped with rice paddies, or tree-shaped buildings, sprouting plant life from every orifice."

Check out the updates on what's happening with Vertical Farming here:

indoor farms

Shigeharu Shimamura put his plan for the farm into fruition back in 2011. As mentioned before, the farm produces 100 times more food than traditional farming, but an example would probably do best for visual purposes. Right now, the farm has produced 10,000 heads of high-quality leafy lettuce. What is truly mind-blowing isn’t the quantity or the quality of the heads of lettuce. It is the fact 10,000 heads of lettuce is the farm’s output in a single day! If that rate were to be calculated annually, the farm produces about 3,650,000 heads of high-quality leafy lettuce per year!

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Landscape as Infrastructure for Biodiversity and Food Security

Titled ‘Landscape as Infrastructure for Biodiversity and Food Security: Perspectives from Switzerland and Qatar’, the day-long event will feature a series of lectures and a workshop on green roofs. 

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interaction between producers and consumers

The Future Food District is in the centre of the Expo Milano 2015 site, in a 6500 sqm area between the Cardo and the Decumanus. Designed by Carlo Ratti Associati, the pavilion is the product of a partnership between Coop and MIT Senseable City Lab, and aims to answer questions such as: “How will we do our shopping? What will we eat? Who will handle food and food products before they get to consumers’ tables in the future?”.

Carlo Ratti Associati offer an experiment, a new retail layout with greater interaction between producers and consumers, a reference to the old-fashioned market. In the“supermarket” area the layout of the goods is organised on the basis of five routes representing five production processes, and “augmented or intelligent labels” designed by the architects provide consumers with complete information on the produce or food purchased. The Exhibition Area will be a multipurpose facility projecting visitors into the future, for example with prototypes of sea farms.

Carlo Ratti Associati is the focus of an exhibition to be held by SpazioFMGperl'Architettura during the 2015 Salone del Mobile in Milan, due to open on Monday, April 13 2015.

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