rooftop farms

This rooftop at 148-02 Archer Avenue
in Queens will grow your next arugula.

Viraj Puri believes the future of farming is not about tractors or rolling swaths of quilted fields or even soil. Co-founder of Gotham Greens, New York City’s first hydroponic commercial-scale rooftop farm, he envisions a three-dimensional agricultural landscape sprouting across the city’s rooftops.

Toward this green-tinged skyline, Gotham Greens hopes to build 100,000 square feet of hydroponic greenhouses throughout the five boroughs by 2030.

Brooklyn is the next horizon for these sky-high tomato dreams. The startup will transform the vacant rooftop of a Greenpoint manufacturing plant into a 20,000-square-foot greenhouse brimming with a litany of earthly bounty: salad greens, basil, squash, eggplant, to name a few. Gotham’s first greenhouse, on the rooftop of a church in Jamaica, Queens, is projected to produce 30 tons of fresh fruit, vegetables and herbs annually, starting next year.

“Hydroponics lends itself really well to the urban environment, specifically because we don’t have a lot of arable land,” Mr. Puri said. “It’s also very water and land efficient: it uses about 10 times less water than conventional agriculture and a lot less land.”

Vincent Callebaut Architects

The Dragonfly.

This week's special summer issue of New York magazine includes a package about modern urban hippies.

"The hippies at Woodstock seem anachronistic, but look around. More and more city dwellers today are scrutinizing their food sources, buying eco-products, and composting their leftovers—they just wash their hair a little more often," reads the subhead.

And what package about urban hippies would be complete without a piece on rooftop farms? Certainly not this one, which gives us a glimpse atop Greenpoint's unpretentiously named Rooftop Farms.

Rooftop Farms was conceived in December 2008 by green-roof business entrepreneurs Chris and Lisa Goode, of Goode Green, and a business partner. The trio approached a local Greenpoint warehouse owner with the idea of farming her rooftops. Then they brought a former E*Trade marketer on board who wanted to start an urban-farm business, along with a New York Botanical Garden employee.

They started hauling more than 200,000 pounds of soil up to the roof this spring, and, according to New York, it now "has sixteen four-foot-wide beds irrigated by rain" as well as "an army of volunteers" to plant veggies including corn, salad greens, radishes, herbs, nasturtiums, and peppers.

Rooftop Farms is just one in a series of futuristic urban farm projects in NYC that have been soaking up some media sun recently.