From dead building space to hydroponic farm
Inner-city rooftops are being converted to hydroponic farms
● Shovelling bird-poop fertiliser and quitting a corporate career to do it takes a certain kind of person — someone like Mapaseka Dlamini.
Dlamini is a new breed of entrepreneur-farmer who’s transforming Johannesburg’s dead building spaces into commercial hydroponic farms.
Until five years ago her workplace was a swish office and she was on a trajectory to qualify as a chartered accountant. She was never really happy, though. Dlamini quit her job to live out her passion: farming on periurban plots.
“It wasn’t easy; I lost my bakkie, my savings and investments trying to get established on a plot outside Cullinan. My family also didn’t understand why I was giving up a full-time salary,” says Dlamini.
Growing food in the sky
She failed, but last year she gave it another shot by joining a business incubator and swapping out a soil-rooted dream for one of growing food in the sky. Now she’s about to launch Green Sky Rooftop Farm on the top of Stannop House in Doornfontein.
Chatting under hail cloth, she shows off an array of custom-built A-frame hydroponic grow beds that can accommodate 3 600 basil and gourmet lettuce plants. Hydroponics replaces soil with water and a mineral nutrient solution. Growing high-value produce at this scale optimises profit margins.
She employs four women and plans to expand the markets she supplies. The clients she has lined up include restaurants in Maboneng and farmers’ markets in the city.
Hydroponics is water-efficient because the water-mineral solution is recycled through the system. Basing the project in the city reduces transport, storage and refrigeration times and cuts costs and energy consumption. Another plus, Dlamini points out jokingly, is that with hydroponics there’s no stinky fertiliser to scoop.
The backdrop for her business is the Johannesburg skyline, an ever-present reminder that this is a city that needs to be adaptive, resilient and innovative.
It’s this urban energy that drives Dlamini to make her business a success and to step up as part of a network of pioneers and disruptors who are aware of the need for jobs, urban food security and hope, and who embrace new solutions and support structures to make these goals a reality.
“I am driven to give back to others, especially in lessons on how to avoid mistakes I’ve made so they can do what I’ve done in half the time,” she says.
Dlamini took part last year in the urban agriculture programme run by Wouldn’t It Be Cool (WibC), an organisation started by Tina and Michael Magondo in 2013 as an incubator for entrepreneurs.
Its urban agriculture initiative was launched last year in collaboration with the Johannesburg Inner City Partnership, with the aim of repurposing city rooftops through urban agriculture and helping young entrepreneurs like Dlamini. The model relies on strong business training and support, innovative and appropriate technology, and collaborative partnerships.
Brendon Martens, WibC’s programme director for urban agriculture, emphasises that the model deliberately inverts priorities: driving entrepreneurship before upliftment.
Greening cities
He says building sustainable businesses is the foundation for creating jobs, localising food production, improving food security, greening cities and tackling community improvement.
“Since 2013 we’ve put over 400 entrepreneurs through mentorship and training programmes,” says Martens. The incubator hopes to inculcate disruptive business thinking to encourage beneficiaries to look for success by being part of an ecosystem, rather than by putting profit before people and the planet.
The project’s first commercial rooftop garden was launched in October last year on the seventh floor of the Chamber of Mines Building in Marshall Street. This pilot project was subsidised by the chamber to kick off Gegezi Organics, run by Nhlanhla Mpati.
The chamber put up funding for infrastructure costs and still subsidises water and energy bills.
Martens stresses that these are not corporate social investment projects. Contracts are designed so entrepreneurs can, over a threeyear period, develop business muscle to wean themselves off WibC and negotiate with their rental hosts as partners, not beneficiaries.
Jeannette Hofsajer, senior executive at the chamber, says the initiative has been a “spectacular success”.
She adds: “We were interested in repurposing our tired old building and in supporting the spirit of immersing ourselves in the changes in the city.”
The chamber put up R60 000 to cover infrastructure costs for the hydroponic growhouse that produces around 720 plants of three varieties of basil.
The monthly water bill for this farm is just R70, because of the recycled water system, she says.
For other building owners, a WibC partnership will represent a more straight-up commercial transaction.
After an initial three-year rent-free or subsidised rental agreement, the building owners can expect a revenue stream for rooftop rental space from a flourishing tenant.
High-density city living
WibC aims to have 15 agri-entrepreneur businesses in operation in the inner city by the end of the year. Buildings expected to come on board include the Rand Club on the corner of Loveday and Fox streets and others in Maboneng and the inner city owned by Propertuity and Africa Housing Company.
“We’ve seen overwhelming interest in commercial rooftop agriculture because people recognise the need to solve problems of high-density city living,” says Martens.
Four out of five applicants for the agri-entrepreneur programme are younger than 35, a sign of changing views of what farming means to millennials.
Martens says rooftop farming hits the mark because young people can be farmers and still be thoroughly urban — they can tend to their farms while never roaming far from their craft beer or Wi-Fi signal.
The rooftop entrepreneurship revolution is necessary disruption to business as usual and it’s exactly what an evolving city like Johannesburg needs.
Young people can tend their farms and never roam far from their Wi-Fi signal