Rooftop Farms: A Regenerative Urban Agricultural Model

Throughout the Bay Area, a small but mighty revolution is blooming just above our heads.

Rooftop farms are on the rise and have the potential to dramatically transform the present urban agricultural landscape.

Here in the Bay Area, Top Leaf Farms is one of the pioneering urban agricultural businesses, offering both ground and rooftop design and farming services. Top Leaf Farms reimagines urban landscape design by asking, “How can we create buildings to try and meet other ecological benefits that extend beyond the peoples’ need for housing?”

Typically, the “peoples’ need” calls for the construction of gleaming infrastructure at the expense of natural landscapes. Parks are incorporated within city design but, often times, these havens are carefully manicured and thus lacking in biodiversity. So, with rooftop gardens, Top Leaf Farms is able to refigure the image of “the city” by creating habitat in conjunction with infrastructure.

To learn more, I spoke with Benjamin Fahrer, owner and project manager of Top Leaf Farms. An experienced farmer of over twenty years, with expertise in permaculture and natural building, Fahrer previously managed and stewarded farms like the Oceansong Organics in West Sonoma County, the Solar Living Institute in Hopland and the Esalen Institute in Big Sur.

“It’s a rewilding of the cities,” he says. “Our existence has the ability to not only minimize harm, but also help other organisms.”

The company works in conjunction with the buildings’ architects and engineers to design a seamless connection between the flora at the base of the building and the garden on the rooftop. The rooftop farm at The Garden Village, a Berkeley student housing development which partnered with Top Leaf Farms in 2016, quickly became a hub for local pollinators such as ladybugs, bees and other insects. Fahrer also saw hawks and other nesting birds begin to establish themselves nearby. “You give nature a little bit of space, and it’s amazing what she can do,” he commented.

Designing urban architecture with rooftop farms also significantly reduces urban heat island effect and decreases combined sewage overflow from stormwater.

The immediate ecological benefits of rooftop farms are evident, but systemically implementing these architectural models requires a shift in the city’s social field, a cultivation of ecoconsciousness. “Seeds of [understanding] on how we each contribute to the food system need to be planted and cultivated. [With the current model] the rural agricultural sector gets funneled into the urban setting, creating a heavy dependency on fossil fuel to transport and grow food… and still the freshest thing you can purchase is at least a week old.” Take a look at the amount of time and energy invested into producing a single box of strawberries.

Fahrer goes on to suggest that consumers are actually the “co-producers” of food because “they’re helping produce [the food] simply by participating in the act of buying it and choosing not to waste it.”

The current industrial-agricultural complex operates through resource extraction and “right now what we need to do is create new patterns, new models that are regenerative, not extractive,” says Fahrer.

Unlike large-scale, rural monocropping, urban farms contribute to a food web that is locally sourced and regenerative in nature. Multiple crops can grow simultaneously and communities have reliable access to local, seasonal produce with less energy embodied in it.

A garden doesn’t grow overnight. Even when the rooftop farm for the Garden Village was completed, student interest lagged behind. It became evident that garnering resident involvement and support would require more than the physical existence of a garden. Next time, Fahrer plans to set up a more systematic approach to involve the community by implementing a CSA program, a community supported agriculture distribution system that operates similar to a food subscription service. In the case of the Garden Village, the Top Leaf Farm team opted to contract with local restaurants to sell and distribute freshly harvested produce.

Transforming the urban agricultural landscape is an ambitious yet crucial undertaking. The world’s population is projected to exceed 9 billion by 2050 and the current agricultural production system contributes significantly to global warming.

“Now is the perfect time to get involved,” says Fahrer.

Rooftops at UC Berkeley’s Garden Village apartment complex. (Source: Santiago Mejia)

In response to UC Berkeley’s initiative for developing more student housing, an initiative that compromises green spaces such as the Oxford Tract and People’s Park, Fahrer believes preserving current green spaces should be a priority but agrees rooftop farms offer a potential remedy to Berkeley’s housing and food insecurity issues. Recently, Top Leaf Farms incorporated rooftop farms in two San Francisco affordable housing apartment complexes.

More than anything, Fahrer emphasises the key to building regenerative and resilient urban infrastructure is collaboration between architects, engineers, urban farm designers, and community members.

“A hundred years from now, [we’re] not going to be here but that building will be.”

To learn more about the potential of rooftop farming check out New York City’s Brooklyn Grange which operates the world’s largest rooftop farms, and the Boston Medical Center’s community rooftop farm project which provides fresh produce to the hospital’s cafeteria and local organizations.