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The world's largest urban rooftop farm in Paris utilizes vertical farming and aeroponic techniques to grow a variety of fruits and vegetables without soil. This innovative method significantly reduces water usage and transportation needs, allowing for fresher produce to be sold locally. While urban farming has its limitations, it represents a growing trend in sustainable agriculture that aims to bring food production closer to urban populations.

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2 views

Test 1

The world's largest urban rooftop farm in Paris utilizes vertical farming and aeroponic techniques to grow a variety of fruits and vegetables without soil. This innovative method significantly reduces water usage and transportation needs, allowing for fresher produce to be sold locally. While urban farming has its limitations, it represents a growing trend in sustainable agriculture that aims to bring food production closer to urban populations.

Uploaded by

Quỳnh Nhật
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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Test 1.

URBAN FARMING

On top of a striking new exhibition hall in southern Paris, the world's largest urban rooftop farm
has started to bear fruit. Strawberries that are small, intensely flavoured and resplendently red
sprout abundantly from large plastic tubes. Peer inside and you see the tubes are completely
hollow, the roots of dozens of strawberry plants dangling down inside them. From identical
vertical tubes nearby burst row upon row of lettuces; near those are aromatic herbs, such as basil,
sage and peppermint. Opposite, in narrow, horizontal trays packed not with soil but with coconut
fibre, grow cherry tomatoes, shiny aubergines and brightly coloured chards.
Pascal Hardy, an engineer and sustainable development consultant, began experimenting with
vertical farming and aeroponic growing towers - as the soil-free plastic tubes are known - on his
Paris apartment block roof five years ago. The urbarn rooftop space above the exhibition hall is
somewhat bigger: 14,000 square metres and almost exactly the size of a couple of football
pitches. Already, the team of young urban farmers who tend it have picked, in one day, 3,000
lettuces and 150 punnets of strawberries. When the remaining two thirds of the vast open area
are in production, 20 staff will harvest up to 1,000 kg of perhaps 35 different varieties of fruit
and vegetables, every day. 'We're not ever, obviously, going to feed the whole city this way,'
cautions Hardy. 'In the urban environment you're working with very significant practical
constraints, clearly, on what you can do and where. But if enough unused space can be
developed like this, there's no reason why you shouldn't eventually target maybe between 5%
and 10% of consumption.'
Perhaps most significantly, however, this is a real-life showcase for the work of Hardy's
flourishing urban agriculture consultancy, Agripolis, which is currently fielding enquiries from
around the world to design, build and equip a new breed of soil-free inner-city farm. 'The
method's advantages are many,' he says. 'First, I don't much like the fact that most of the fruit and
vegetables we eat have been treated with something like 17 different pesticides, or that the
intensive farming techniques that produced them are such huge generators of greenhouse gases. I
don't much like the fact, either, that they've travelled an average of 2,000 refrigerated kilometres
to my plate, that their quality is so poor, because the varieties are selected for their capacity to
withstand such substantial journeys, or that 80% of the price I pay goes to wholesalers and
transport companies, not the producers.'
Produce grown using this soil-free method, on the other hand - which relies solely on a small
quantity of water, enriched with organic nutrients, pumped around a closed circuit of pipes,
towers and trays - is 'produced up here, and sold locally, just down there. It barely travels at all,'
Hardy says. 'You can select crop varieties for their flavour, not their resistance to the transport
and storage chain, and you can pick them when they're really at their best, and not before.' No
soil is exhausted, and the water that gently showers the plants' roots every 12 minutes is recycled,
so the method uses 90% less water than a classic intensive farm for the same yield.
Urban farming is not, of course, a new phenomenon. Inner-city agriculture is booming from
Shanghai to Detroit and Tokyo to Bangkok. Strawberries are being grown in disused shipping
containers, mushrooms in underground carparks. Aeroponic farming, he says, is 'virtuous'. The
equipment weighs little, can be installed on almost any flat surface and is cheap to buy: roughly
€100 to €150 per square metre. It is cheap to run, too, consuming a tiny fraction of the electricity
used by some techniques.
Produce grown this way typically sells at prices that, while generally higher than those of classic
intensive agriculture, are lower than soil-based organic growers. There are limits to what farmers
can grow this way, of course, and much of the produce is suited to the summer months. 'Root
vegetables we cannot do, at least not yet,' he says. 'Radishes are OK, but carrots, potatoes, that
kind of thing - the roots are simply too long. Fruit trees are obviously not an option. And beans
tend to take up a lot of space for not much return.' Nevertheless, urban farming of the kind being
practised in Paris is one part of a bigger and fast-changing picture that is bringing food
production closer to our lives.

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