Jason Merges 15 December 2010 Rooftop Gardens The movement towards sustainable food is a multifaceted one, with as many

sides as the problem it is attempting to address. How do we ensure that the food we produce and consume is responsible and sustainable in every phase? The problem is one that is massive and systemic and thus there is no one solution, but rather a series of solutions addressing individual problems. One major facet of the problem is our urban lifestyles. About eighty percent of the population of the United States lives in urban areas.1 To produce enough food to feed the population of just the Boston area, it takes about one hundred square miles of land, about double the area the city occupies.2 For this reason, cities provide unique challenge to the food movement in that currently very little of the food consumed in them is grown or produced in them. Innovations on how to produce more food in cities and thus reduce the overall ecological footprint of city food consumption are springing up with every day. There is a push to convert more city space to green space, with urban and community gardens becoming more and more popular. Access to local foods in cities has also skyrocketed with the popularity of more direct-source distribution systems like farmers markets and Community Share Agriculture programs. Another innovation that has potential for addressing local food production to metropolitan areas is the concept of rooftop gardens. The idea is that cities have a lot of unused space in the form of rooftops, which can be converted to grow crops for consumption by residents of that very city. Rooftop gardens are currently still very much in the exploratory stage, and have many inhibiting factors that have so far prevented them from becoming widespread aspects of city life. However, they do provide real benefits to communities in the form of environmental services and food access. This paper will explore rooftop gardens with the purpose of determining what sort of impact we can expect this innovative solution might have. In doing so, this paper will look at several types of rooftop gardens, including home and commercial scale gardens and case studies of certain gardens in particular. What is a rooftop garden? A rooftop garden is, at its simplest form, a garden on the roof of a building. It is markedly similar to a green roof, and therefore the two are often mixed up. However, there are some important differences between the two. A green roof, like a rooftop garden, is a green space on the top of a building. However, green roofs and rooftop gardens serve very different purposes. A green roof is designed to cover as much of the roof area as possible. Specific, hardy-weather plants that cover as much space as possible are chosen for green roofs for ease of maintenance and greatest productivity. This is all because a green roof is designed with environmental issues of cities in mind, such as reducing rainwater runoff, pollution control, wildlife habitat creation, and high urban air temperatures, known as heat-island effect.3 Additionally, they provide additional insulation to the buildings. Rooftop gardens, while often keeping these factors in mind, are often designed more to be aesthetically pleasing or productive in growing edible produce. Therefore, they often use a higher variety of plants, many of which
1 2

(US Census Bureau, 2004) (Jones, 2010) 3 (Nedlaw Living Roofs, 2008)

are more intensive and they rarely cover the entire roof as they are designed to be accessible. The key differences between the two, as mentioned before, is that rooftop gardens are designed with their utility in mind, whereas a green roof is much more passive. While the functions of rooftop gardens vary, this paper will focus mainly on those designed to grow produce. As with any type of agriculture, there are different scales of rooftop gardening, ranging from personal-use gardens, to more complex, large scale facilities. Home use and small scale rooftop gardens require very different structures and techniques than large scale facilities. Some concerns, however, are the same regardless the scale of the garden. Rooftops, depending on geographic location of course, have the potential of having somewhat extreme weather, making gardening on any scale difficult. They are often hot, dry, and windy, and thus special precautions in terms of structure and plant choices must be made, regardless of scale.4 Additionally, structural issues of the building itself are a major concern for the implementation of rooftop gardens. A rooftop garden can add a lot of weight to the top of the building and thus put much more stress on the overall structure, and thus it is important to either consult an architect or design the building with the additional stress in mind.5 Small-scale rooftop gardening Small-scale rooftop gardening can range from home use, above an apartment or garage, to slightly larger facilities for small scale production, such as ones used by restaurants. There are several different examples of small scale rooftop gardens, each with their own advantages and disadvantages. The first example, and probably the most simple and easiest to implement, is a container garden. The concept of the container garden is not unique to rooftops, but can and is implemented wherever there is a lack of space and no access to suitable soil. The idea is that rather than building fixed garden beds or gardens integrated to the land, there can be a more temporary structure to the garden made up of smaller, individual parts. These parts, the containers, can range in size but are usually between fifteen and 250 quarts in volume, and can be virtually made from anything (including reused materials).6 These containers are then modified for drainage (usually just the addition of holes in the bottom coupled with a permeable liner to prevent soil loss) and filled with soil. The advantages of this strategy of gardening are that it is extremely easy and inexpensive to implement and can be adapted to fit almost any situation. Additionally, containers housing certain plants can be rotated around the space, dependent on sunlight and weather conditions. These advantages have led rooftop container gardens to become very popular in residential and small restaurant settings. Also, container gardens have received recognition as a way to improve lower income, marginalized people who do not have access to traditional growing space better access to fresh and healthy produce, by affordably allowing them to utilize whatever space they have to grow.7 Rooftops that are not strong enough to support a full-fledged garden bed often will be strong enough to hold up a container garden, especially one strategically positioned over secure parts of the roof, such as edges and corners where there is additional structure. There are some negative aspects of container gardens, usually depending on the exact configurations of the garden. Container gardens have a tendency to require more water than conventional gardens, as the lack of
4 5

(Nowak, 2004) (The City of Chicago, 2001) 6 (Nowak, 2004) 7 Ibid.

continuity results in them being more easily dried out by the elements.8 Additionally, they are quicker to freeze in the colder months, providing additional challenges and potentially shortening the growing season.9 Likewise, a warm winter day may cause the containers to thaw, allowing the seeds from perennials to germinate too early, only to be frozen once again.10 One final disadvantage of rooftop container gardens is that they often are not capable of performing environmental services, such as runoff mitigation and cooling to the same level as integrated systems, as they often are not as productive and expansive as these systems.11 The challenges of rooftop container gardens are easy enough to work around and the ease of implementation and their reasonable price tags allow them to be great options for small scale rooftop agriculture in most situations. Another approach to rooftop garden is to have a garden bed integrated into the rooftop itself. These rooftops are much more intensive to build and are permanent structures. Depending on the size of the garden, they usually add a large amount of weight to the roof and thus careful assessment of the roof must be done, and often times structural reinforcement must be added before one of these is implemented. A typical integrated rooftop garden will have several layers, most often including soil or some other growing medium, a permeable soil screen, a drainage layer, and a waterproofing membrane.12 Materials are chosen with keeping weight down in mind to ensure the least stress on the structure of the building. The growing medium is often a combination of compost and recycled materials, which allow for good drainage but is much lighter than traditional soil.13 Similarly, the drainage layer in small scale integrated rooftop gardens often consists of lightweight Styrofoam packaging, rather than gravel. 14 There are many benefits associated with integrated rooftop gardens. For one, they have the potential to act as green roofs and mitigate environmental problems found in cities.15 Additionally, when properly constructed and instituted, they perform very similarly to conventional raised bed gardens. While there are still concerns over the more extreme weather conditions found on rooftops, it is much less likely for an entire garden bed to freeze or thaw. Techniques for urban gardening, such as square foot gardening, high density planting, or even permaculture provided the rooftop is large enough, are frequently used.16 There are some significant obstacles to integrated rooftop gardens, however. For one, they add significantly more weight than a container garden would, and there is no option of moving the garden around. One can expect the garden to weigh anywhere from eighty to 150 pounds per square foot, whereas most roofs are designed to be able to withstand an additional thirty pounds per square foot.17 Therefore, in most circumstances, additional structure is needed which can skyrocket the costs of the garden. The construction of an integrated rooftop garden adds an additional fifty percent to the cost of a traditional roof, and is thus much more expensive.18 However, if the structure is already
8 9

(GardenGuides.com, 2010) (Nowak, 2004) 10 (Nowak, 2004) 11 Ibid. 12 (Kortright, 2001) 13 (The City of Chicago, 2001) 14 (Creating Your Own Rooftop Garden, 2010) 15 (Nowak, 2004) 16 Ibid. 17 (The City of Chicago, 2001) 18 Ibid.

available, the costs of building a personal rooftop garden that is integrated is not all that expensive, depending of course on size and the materials used. From personal experience, I have found that all the materials to make a small scale rooftop garden bed add up to only a dollar per square foot, and this includes all of the various layers and drainage system. Therefore, while in many cases cost can be prohibitive, it is still a viable option to grow produce on a small scale. Small scale rooftop gardens are adaptive and can either be very inexpensive or very expensive. Regardless of the chosen system, container or integrated, they are both viable ways for anyone with roof access to produce food for themselves. The amount of food produced may not be sufficient enough for people to receive all or most of their food from their personal gardens, and seasonal restrictions still apply to these gardens. Therefore, it is safe to say that while small scale rooftop gardening may have some effect on the food production system, it will most likely be a modest one. However, it can be argued that the intention of personal gardens is not necessarily to gain complete independence from the current industrialized system, but rather to supplement the system with a level of independence. Large-scale rooftop gardening While rooftop gardens have been growing in popularity for years among households and small restaurants, the question of large-scale commercial agriculture on rooftops is a relatively novel one. It was not until recently that the topic was broached as a realistic idea, for large-scale commercial growing facilities to be built on rooftops.19 Questions regarding large-scale rooftop farming center mainly around the cost-benefit analysis of growing a large volume of produce on a city roof. Retrofitting a rooftop to withstand the forces of a small farm is very expensive, not to mention a large scale facility that produces enough vegetables to turn a profit. Despite these questions, in the last few years, and especially this past year, examples of commercial rooftop farms are springing up in urban centers, such as New York City and Montreal.20 21 There are several different methods that are available to the commercial-scale rooftop agriculturalists, each with its benefits and drawbacks. The first is the integrated rooftop farm, very similar to that of the small scale rooftop farm in that it is a facility that is built into the structure of the roof. However, as one can imagine, the difference lies in scale. The Eagle Street Rooftop Farm in Brooklyn, New York is an example of this type of farm. The 6,000 square foot facility weighs over 200,000 pounds, not including produce and water.22 All of the same costs associated with retrofitting or building a roof to support a small scale rooftop garden still apply, while the actual rooftop garden materials do not cost much at all (Eagle Street Rooftop Farm claims it cost them only ten dollars per square foot.)23 Another consideration of an integrated commercial rooftop farm is an irrigation system that has the ability to distribute water throughout the garden. However, if implemented successfully, an integrated rooftop garden can be a successful business, as is the Eagle Street

19 20

(Grover, 2008) (Guevarra, 2010) 21 (Team Planet Green, 2010) 22 (Team Planet Green, 2010) 23 Ibid.

Rooftop Farm, which through a CSA program and a restaurant distribution program, generates enough money to get by.24 A more popular method of commercial rooftop agriculture is the installation of hydroponic growing facilities on the roof. The advantages of this system are that weight is kept down, hydroponic systems can be more efficient at growing vegetables (two to four times quicker than conventional systems), use less overall water than conventional systems, and hydroponic systems are easily mechanized and thus require fewer hands-on jobs.25 A disadvantage of hydroponic systems is they provide much fewer general environmental benefits than conventional rooftop gardens in that they do not mitigate runoff. They are generally much more energy intensive than a conventional gardening system, as a series of water pumps and timers must be used, in addition to the need for purchasing plant nutrients, and growing media.26 Currently there are several rooftop hydroponic farms undergoing planning and construction throughout North America. Gotham Greens, a New York City based company is currently constructing a twelve-thousand square-foot hydroponic rooftop garden. The project is set to cost 1.4 million dollars and, when implemented will produce thirty tons of fruits and vegetables each year.27 The project is just one of several rooftop farms that Gotham Greens is designing and implementing throughout New York City, with hopes to have 100,000 square-feet of hydroponic greenhouses on rooftops throughout the city.28 With production of this facility not beginning until next year, it will be interesting to see how it fares, although prospects are already looking good for Gotham Greens as they have forged a deal to distribute seventy percent of their produce to local Wholefoods.29 Is rooftop gardening a viable solution? Rooftop gardening, in its various forms, is a very accessible way to produce fresh vegetables in an urban setting. It can often be inexpensive, especially in the small scale, and therefore be a great supplement to the food import system found overwhelmingly in cities today. However, in regards to commercial agriculture, it still may be too early to tell exactly how viable of a business these farms can be. High expenses in implementing with uncertain levels of return will hinder projects until there is more of a guarantee that the benefits will outweigh the costs. However, studies on the matter are promising. Research shows that in Toronto, if only 0.6% of all rooftops were converted to rooftop gardens, the city would yield 4.7 million kilograms of produce per year.30 Therefore, this shows that lack of space in an urban setting is not the issue, but rather the willingness to initiate these changes in urban infrastructure. If urban areas became producers of food, rather than just consumers, the beneficial impacts would be enormous. Carbon emissions from transporting food hundreds and even thousands of miles would drop drastically, the effects of green roofs would help cut down on aforementioned environmental issues that plague cities, and the quality of produce would stand to become much better, serving nutritional benefits to city dwellers, especially those who do not have access to healthy food
24 25

(Cornes, 2009) (Madden, 2010) 26 Ibid. 27 (Schwartz, 2009) 28 (Geminder, 2009) 29 (Gotham Greens, 2010) 30 (Mazereeuw, 2005)

options.31 The current initiatives in New York City and elsewhere are paving the road for sustainable city food production systems, and in the next few years we will see what sort of potential rooftop agriculture has.

Works Cited
Creating Your Own Rooftop Garden. (2010). Retrieved December 12, 2010, from Gardening Knowhow Website: http://www.gardeningknowhow.com/urban/creating-your-own-rooftop-garden.htm Cornes, S. (2009). High Altitude Agriculture. Retrieved December 13, 2010, from Edible Brooklyn Web site: http://www.ediblebrooklyn.com/summer-2009/traceability.htm GardenGuides.com. (2010). Guide to Container Gardening. Retrieved December 2010, 12, from GardenGuides.com Website: http://www.gardenguides.com/685-guide-containergardening.html Geminder, E. (2009, October 2). Greenpoint Next Frontier in Commercial Scale Rooftop Farms. Retrieved December 13, 2010, from The New York Observer Web site: http://gothamgreens.com/Greenpoint_Next_Frontier.pdf Gotham Greens. (2010, May 4). Gotham Greens. Retrieved December 13, 2010, from Urban Farms: http://gothamgreens.com/Fast_Company.pdf Grover, S. (2008, December 9). First Summit on Building Integrated Sustainable Agriculture. Retrieved December 13, 2010, from Treehugger.com website: http://www.treehugger.com/files/2008/12/summit-vertical-farming.php Guevarra, L. (2010, November 11). A Vision for a Commercial-Scale Rooftop 'Farm' Nears Completion. Retrieved December 13, 2010, from greenbiz.com blog web site: http://www.greenbiz.com/blog/2010/11/11/vision-commercial-scale-rooftop-farm-nearscompletion Jones, T. (2010, January 28). Food Miles, Fair Miles. Retrieved December 12, 2010, from State of the Planet: http://blogs.ei.columbia.edu/2010/01/28/food-miles-fair-miles/ Kortright, R. (2001, October). Evaluating the Potential of Green Roof Agriculture. Retrieved December 13, 2010, from Cityfarmer.org Website: http://www.cityfarmer.org/greenpotential.html Madden, B. (2010, June 22). Urban Gardening, Part 1: The Hydroponic Lab on the Roof. Retrieved December 13, 2010, from Tech News World Web site: http://www.technewsworld.com/story/70249.html?wlc=1292277954 Mazereeuw, B. (2005, November). Region of Waterloo Urban Agriculture Report. Retrieved December 13, 2010, from Edible Strategies Web site: http://www.ediblestrategies.com/fsd/2005_Urban%20Ag%20Waterloo%20Feasibility.pdf

31

(Mazereeuw, 2005)

Nedlaw Living Roofs. (2008). Living Roofs. Retrieved December 2010, 12, from Nedlaw Living Roofs Web site: http://www.roofgreening.ca/living_roofs.php Nowak, M. (2004). Urban Agriculture on the Rooftop. Ithaca: Cornell University. Schwartz, A. (2009, Junee 15). Gotham Greens Building First Hydroponic Rooftop Farm in NYC. Retrieved December 13, 2010, from Fastcompany.com Web site: http://www.fastcompany.com/blog/ariel-schwartz/sustainability/gotham-greens-building-firsthydroponic-rooftop-farm-nyc Team Planet Green. (2010, April 28). Rooftop Farm Produces 30 Different Vegetables, Takes Urban Agriculture to New Heights. Retrieved December 13, 2010, from Discovery's Planet Green Web site: http://planetgreen.discovery.com/food-health/rooftop-farm-urbanagriculturenewheights.html The City of Chicago. (2001). Chicago's Green Rooftops. Chicago: The City of Chicago. US Census Bureau. (2004, February 9). Census 2000 Population Statistics. Retrieved December 11, 2010, from Federal Transportation Department: http://www.fhwa.dot.gov/planning/census/cps2k.htm