Transcriber: Curtchura da Libetati Reviewer: Denise RQ
About a year ago, I decided to become a farmer, an urban farmer,
and as Tim mentioned,
I had nothing to do with agriculture in my previous life.
And about all the things I could have possibly imagined
doing in the future, farming was not one of them.
Topic of today, "Urban Farming."
I think there's a reason why farming can have
a more prevalent and more promising future.
First of all, we'll be 9 billion people pretty soon,
and something happens, something very important happens,
70% of us, the majority of us, will live in cities.
So it could make a lot of sense
growing food for people where they are going to live: in the city.
But most importantly, we will be so many more people
we need about 100% more food from today to tomorrow.
One hundred percent more.
Some people say this is the most efficient system,
this is the most recurrent system the cheapest system,
this is how we do it.
But I have to ask you; now as a farmer, fellow farmer:
how much money are you making?
And you're using all the fossil fertilizer which is made out of oil,
and we know what's going to happen to oil,
using all these pesticides, and fungicides, and herbicides;
using all this water, and all this fuel for transportation.
Did you know that the vegetables you buy in your store have traveled
on average 2,000 kilometers before they get into your store?
How can that be efficient? And efficient to whom?
Maybe to the transportation industry but certainly not to the farmer,
and certainly not to the consumer, and certainly not to the environment.
Not surprisingly, if you look at our overall footprint,
the way we consume food today weighs the heaviest
on our total environmental footprint.
Food is more important than housing, energy, or water,
or private transportation;
it's the biggest impact on your environmental footprint.
So small differences can already have a huge impact on this scale.
There are already a lot of people who are farming in the city.
It's not a new phenomenon.
Look at this picture here; this is taken from a farm in Brooklyn.
You are looking out from the rooftop of a building into Manhattan.
And on this farm, people are farming;
they are farming their own food you can buy it downstairs in the shop.
There are other more creative ways to farm, right?
Like this! I love these guys: Truck Farm.
All right, so, "Honey, please hop into the car, but don't crash the salads,
or nothing to eat."
We were asking ourselves: how can we hack ourselves into the city?
How can we put farming on the urban Google map?
We could start by taking this parking lot.
We could say, all right, instead of the upper level,
the 40 parking lots that we have on this building,
let's put that into a greenhouse.
Instead of the 40 parking lots, we could grow enough food for 500 people
year in, year out.
So, those 40 of you who took the car to work, take the bus.
We'll grow now food. This could be important.
Of course, there are many approaches to this, and I think we need to look
at solutions that are really productive, and scalable, et cetera,
and have all the means to actually achieve something.
So, as I said, about a year ago, I discovered that there are farmers
in the city using new, innovative technologies,
which would allow them to grow food without soil.
I said, "Food without soil, how can you grow without soil?"
Well, apparently it is possible
and some even use a technology called aquaponics,
which allows them to grow fish and vegetables in a closed-loop system.
Basically, this is a technology
- and by the way, this comes out of a research lab in Waedenswil,
of all places, Waedenswil, the Harvard of vegetable growers.
They have developed this kind of stuff.
So, here it goes:
the fish basically provide the nutrients for the plants.
So the fish urine basically is used
as organic fertilizer for the plants.
And the plants basically take up these nutrients, they filter the water,
they clear the water, and release it back to the fish.
So it's a natural symbiosis between fish and plants.
I brought one of these farms here, and you can see what it can grow.
you can grow salads, you can grow herbs, you can grow all kinds of vegetables;
can grow tomatoes, peppers, aubergines, melons, you name it.
The system is very resource-efficient.
We use about 90% less water than conventional agriculture;
we have everything in a closed-loops so is very resource-efficient,
and we lose virtually little waste.
At the beginning, people asked me,
"Well, Roman, do these fish wear any nanosensors?
I said, "No! They're not."
"But what are you going to do when you harvest the fish?
What are you going to do with the fish?"
"It's very easy! We eat them."
Think about this, the freshest produce, directly from your roof onto your plate.
You're going to have fish harvested just minutes ago,
on your plate from the roof.
How great is that? Oceans are over-fished, now we're bringing the fish into the city.
Of course, if you looking at it and say,
how can we scale this, how we present this to people?
We start by building miniature farms, small urban farms.
We're using recycled cargo containers and greenhouses;
on top, you would have the vegetables;
inside the cargo container, you would have the fish.
Really what we want to do here
is prove the point that this is about self-sufficiency.
A family of three can basically live
on vegetable and protein consumption off a box like this.
So, small communities, schools, restaurants, groups of people
can go get together and grow their own food.
But our vision, our aspiration is of course, to still provide
large quantities of food, urban farming.
We are setting out these projects, and this is actually a real project
that you are looking at currently, in the city of Basel.
It is a small project, a pilot project.
Well, we are already there,
we can grow about five tons of vegetables and about 800 kilograms of fish
year in, year out, on that, otherwise, vacant rooftop.
it's food for about 100 people.
And as we did this study and this project, we found out in the city of Basel alone
there's two million square meter of idle rooftop space.
And by using just 5% of that would yield harvest for 40,000 people.
So it's a lot of potential to grow food in the city.
I'd like to close with three remarks.
First of all, the time is right:
I think we need to consider food security.
Secondly, we are at the tipping point, the environment cannot be scaled anymore,
we need to think of solutions that are better;
and thirdly, we can grow food in the city.
So next time when you see one of those empty rooftops in your city,
image what it would be like to produce fresh food in the city,
like good food, from the roof.
Thank you very much.
(Applause)