Montreal sets new rooftop greenhouse world record
BUILDING on a new hanging garden trend, a greenhouse atop a Montreal warehouse growing eggplants and tomatoes to meet demand for locally sourced foods has set a record as the largest in the world.
It’s not an obvious choice of location to cultivate organic vegetables – in the heart of Canada’s second-largest city – but Lufa Farms on Wednesday inaugurates the facility that spans 15,000sqm, or about the size of three football fields.
“The company’s mission is to grow food where people live and in a sustainable way,” spokesman Thibault Sorret said, as he showed off its first har vest of gia nt eggplants.
It is the fourth rooftop greenhouse the company has erected in the city. The first, built in 2011 at a cost of more than C$2 million (US$1.5 million), broke new ground.
Since then, competitors picked up and ran with the novel idea, including Gotham Greens from the US, which constructed eight greenhouses on roofs in New York, Chicago and Denver, and French Urban Nature, which is planning one in Paris in 2022.
A loca l Montreal supermarket has a lso of fered since 2017 an assortment of vegetables grown on its roof, which was “greened” in order to cut greenhouse gas emissions linked to climate change.
‘Reinventing food system’
Lebanese-born Mohamed Hage and his wife Lauren Rathmell, who is from the neighbouring US state of Vermont, founded Lufa Farms in 2009 with the ambition of “reinventing the food system”.
At Lufa, about 100 varieties of vegetables and herbs are grown year-round in hydroponic containers lined with coconut coir and fed liquid nutrients, including lettuce, cucumbers, zucchini, bok choy, celery and sprouts.
Bumblebees pollinate the plants, while wasps and ladybugs keep aphids in check, without the need for pesticides.
Enough vegetables are harvested each week to feed 20,000 families, with baskets tailored for each at a base price of C$30.
Sorret said the company’s “online market” also sells goods produced by local partner farms including “bread, pasta, rice, et cetera”.
On the ground floor of the new greenhouse, a huge distribution centre brings together nearly 2,000 grocery products for offer to “Lufavores”, including restaurants.
Shopper Catherine Bonin says she loves the freshness of the produce but laments that some items are always out of stock. “I can never get peppers”, she says.
Sales doubled amid Covid-19
Sorret said: “We are now able to feed almost two per cent of Montreal with our greenhouses and our partner farms.
“The advantage of being on a roof is that you recover a lot of energy from the bottom of the building,” allowing considerable savings in heating, an asset during the harsh
Quebec winter, he explains.
“We also put to use spaces that were until now completely unused,” he said.
Fully automated, the new greenhouse also has a water system that collects and reuses rainwater, resulting in savings of “up to 90 per cent” compared to a traditional farm.
Sorret says Lufa “more than doubled” its sales during the new coronavirus pandemic, a jump attributable “to contactless delivery from our online site”.
Profitable since 2016, the private company now employs 500 people, around 200 more than before the pandemic, he said.
It is currently working on the electrification of its fleet of delivery trucks and is in the process of exporting its model “to different cities around the world”, starting with Canada and the US, he added.
“What’s a little crazy,” he recalls, is that none of the founders “had grown a tomato in their life” before opening the business.