Learn how this innovative approach to farming offers multiple sustainability benefits for agricultural production.
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00:00 My name is Lauren Rathmell. I'm co-founder and co-CEO of Lupa Farms. We're an urban
00:07 agriculture company based here in Montreal.
00:11 We have four rooftop farms here in Montreal. We have a team of around 700 people. We've
00:23 been growing, growing, growing.
00:26 The rooftop greenhouses are the heart of what we do, but we partner with farmers and food
00:30 makers from all throughout the region to put together this online marketplace, and then
00:35 we sell directly to customers. So it's really as fresh as possible and as minimal waste
00:40 as possible.
00:44 We follow these tenets of responsible agriculture. So that's everything from recirculating irrigation
00:48 water to saving energy and watching our footprint to how we manage waste. We harvest to order
00:54 and we compost all of our green waste.
00:59 We thought we would be relatively immune from pests being in the city. Not the case. So
01:04 we don't use any synthetic pesticides. It's really reliance on ecosystems, managing kind
01:09 of good bugs versus bad bugs, these biological controls and predatory insects that we introduce.
01:15 Really the most important thing though is vigilance. So we scout our plants every week.
01:19 We remove affected plants if need be.
01:24 We have pollinators in the greenhouse. They're bumblebees, they're friendly pollinators,
01:28 and we need those for certain crops for the fruit to set.
01:35 Designing that greenhouse, it's not the same as a greenhouse that would be built on the
01:38 ground or in a rural area. We really had to figure out the engineering of it and adapting
01:42 it to the codes and the requirements of an urban context.
01:47 We essentially did a Google Maps survey of the whole island of Montreal, looking for
01:50 potential buildings that could be suitable. And then it was going and kind of spying on
01:55 the buildings to see if they structurally made sense. And then talking to building owners,
01:59 seeing who might be interested.
02:04 Energy savings, it's a very harmonious combination. Having a greenhouse that replaces what was
02:08 once a heat island or in snow, a surface through which heat is lost. So now we're this insulating
02:13 bubble of plants and warmth that helps cool in the summertime and keep things warm in
02:17 the wintertime. We also benefit, obviously, from the heat rising from the building below.
02:22 We save about half the energy by building greenhouses on rooftops as opposed to on the
02:27 ground. By farming in the city and delivering directly to our customers, we're shortening
02:31 the distance of delivery as well.
02:36 The future of sustainable agriculture, I think, is really going to be around building in circularity,
02:40 building in self-sufficiency into any operation at any scale.
02:53 (upbeat music)