Gotham Greens: Sustainable Farming in the Big Apple

In an effort to bring needed fresh pro­duce closer to home with far greater sus­tain­abil­ity, a move­ment in urban agri­cul­ture is rapidly gain­ing momen­tum. New York City, hav­ing such a large and diverse pop­u­la­tion, is a metrop­o­lis ripe for green urban agri­cul­ture and is now home to an inno­v­a­tive com­mer­cial oper­a­tion called Gotham Greens.

Inspiration

“The inspi­ra­tion for Gotham Greens was see­ing an increas­ing con­cern about the way food is grown,” Viraj Puri, co-founder of Gotham Greens, told Organic Connections. “It’s so resource inten­sive in terms of land use, water use, fer­til­izer runoff, pes­ti­cide runoff, pes­ti­cide use—things of this nature, includ­ing long-distance food trans­port. People are also increas­ingly wor­ried about pub­lic health con­cerns over food safety.”

Gotham Greens has now gone into full pro­duc­tion and is pro­vid­ing much-needed locally and sus­tain­ably grown pro­duce for the greater New York City area. “My part­ners and I had a vision for a local farm oper­a­tion here in New York City that could pro­vide New Yorkers—which would include restau­rants, retail­ers and consumers—with pre­mium qual­ity, fresh, nutri­tious culi­nary herbs and greens, salad greens and let­tuces,” Puri said. “They would be grown year round so that we could reli­ably and con­sis­tently sup­ply our cus­tomers with local pro­duce. Obviously our cli­mate in New York doesn’t sup­port year-round agri­cul­ture of a lot of these crops, so we thought we would try to do some­thing in a green­house. A green­house cli­mate allows you to poten­tially grow year round, at the same time pro­tect­ing crops against extreme or detri­men­tal weather events.”

Gotham Greens was founded in 2008 by Puri and Eric Haley; then in 2009 Jennifer Nelkin joined as a part­ner to head all green­house oper­a­tions. Puri him­self had pre­vi­ously devel­oped and man­aged start-up enter­prises in New York City, in Ladakh, India, and in Malawi, Africa, focus­ing on green build­ing, renew­able energy and envi­ron­men­tal design. Haley, who is cur­rently employed by a Manhattan-based invest­ment bank and pri­vate equity fund, also brought busi­ness acu­men to the oper­a­tion. The farm know-how comes from Nelkin, who cul­ti­vated her exper­tise in green­house sys­tems and man­age­ment at the University of Arizona. In addi­tion to green­house sys­tem design, her skillset includes plant nutri­tion and crop and pest man­age­ment. She has man­aged green­houses in far more extreme cir­cum­stances than New York—namely two dif­fer­ent loca­tions in Antarctica, pro­vid­ing fresh veg­eta­bles for US research scientists.

House of Greens

The Gotham Greens urban farm is located within a 15,000-square-foot state-of-the-art climate-controlled green­house atop the roof of a two-story build­ing in the Greenpoint neigh­bor­hood of Brooklyn, New York. Beginning with leafy greens, includ­ing sev­eral let­tuce vari­eties and a broad­en­ing assort­ment of culi­nary herbs, Gotham Greens is intent on con­tin­u­ing to expand its range of crops, with an imme­di­ate pro­duc­tion goal of 100 tons annually.

The choice of a rooftop was made quite delib­er­ately. “New York City obvi­ously doesn’t have a lot of arable or avail­able land, so it seemed to us that one under­uti­lized resource was rooftops,” said Puri. “You’re see­ing more and more inno­v­a­tive uses of the rooftops now in urban areas nationwide.”

Getting a rooftop green­house up and operational—especially one of this size and scope—was no mean feat. “It was extremely chal­leng­ing,” Puri recalled. “I would say the biggest chal­lenge was just hav­ing any real path to fol­low. There’s not a lot of prece­dent for what we’re doing.

“The first thing was find­ing a build­ing owner who wouldn’t mind us build­ing a green­house on his or her roof. We also had to find a build­ing that met all the con­struc­tion cri­te­ria, both struc­turally and for the obtain­ing of util­i­ties. In addi­tion there had to be access, and the eval­u­a­tion of how we would get stuff up and how we would get stuff down. On top of that we had to make sure the plan would meet all zon­ing and build­ing codes.”

The Gotham Greens oper­a­tion, as one might imag­ine, rep­re­sents an enor­mous sav­ing in resource usage. “We employ a recir­cu­lat­ing hydro­ponic tech­nique that actu­ally goes back and cap­tures all irri­ga­tion for reuse,” Puri explained. “It’s the most water-efficient form of agri­cul­ture in the world. We use ten times less water than con­ven­tional agri­cul­ture. Even though we are not in an area that is sus­cep­ti­ble to drought, we still think that it’s a great demon­stra­tion of a tech­nol­ogy that is very water effi­cient.” The hydro­ponic grow­ing envi­ron­ment is ster­ile as well, which elim­i­nates the risk of pathogens—particularly impor­tant in light of the increase in food­borne ill­nesses, such as E. coli and sal­mo­nella, from fresh vegetables.

Planned Economies

Due to the hydro­ponic grow­ing meth­ods, the facil­ity is also extremely eco­nom­i­cal with space. “We use about twenty times less land in terms of what we pro­duce per unit area as com­pared to con­ven­tional agri­cul­ture,” Puri con­tin­ued. “The equiv­a­lent of a con­ven­tional farm for the crops we pro­duce would be six acres.”

Click any image above to see a larger version.

Puri and his part­ners have seen to the fru­gal use of energy too. “We have 55 kilo­watts in solar pan­els that pro­duce elec­tric­ity to help meet the elec­tri­cal needs of the facil­ity,” said Puri. “Along with that, we’ve spent a lot of effort here to design our facil­i­ties to be as energy effi­cient as pos­si­ble. We’ve installed increased insu­la­tion in many areas; the glaz­ing mate­r­ial that we selected helps insu­late the green­house; and we’ve deployed heat cur­tains and heat blan­kets in the win­ter to reduce space in the green­house that needs to be con­di­tioned.” Additionally, a sophis­ti­cated com­puter con­trol sys­tem ensures that climate-control equip­ment oper­ates effi­ciently to reduce resource consumption.

Perhaps the most sig­nif­i­cant sav­ing in terms of resources is that of fos­sil fuels, as the dis­tance from farm to con­sumer is con­sid­er­ably shorter. “Of course, we sharply reduce the trans­porta­tion of our prod­uct and the asso­ci­ated car­bon emis­sions that are caused because of that,” Puri added.

All nutri­tion and pest con­trol is done nat­u­rally and sus­tain­ably, which was also one of the goals for Gotham Greens. “We uti­lize min­eral salts that we dis­solve in the water,” Puri said. “These con­tain min­er­als such as nitro­gen, mag­ne­sium and potas­sium, along with micronu­tri­ents like sele­nium. In con­trol­ling pests, we mostly rely on ben­e­fi­cial insects; there’s a whole pro­gram in inte­grated pest man­age­ment for which a fair bit of mon­i­tor­ing goes on. If we do find a pest in here, we will intro­duce its nat­ural predator—for instance, we have lady­bugs and lacewings to con­trol aphids.”

It’s in the Taste

Despite all the tech­no­log­i­cal advances dis­played in Gotham Greens, the top pri­or­ity is taste. “Flavor is our num­ber one pri­or­ity here at Gotham Greens,” Puri remarked. “We want to be known more for the fla­vor of our prod­ucts than the fact that they’re grown in New York in a green­house on a rooftop, or any of that. First and fore­most we want to win taste tests, which we’ve suc­cess­fully done.”

Like many oth­ers con­cen­trat­ing on great fla­vor, Puri and his team have found that truly car­ing for the plants will result in the supe­ri­or­ity they seek. “The biggest thing in obtain­ing that fla­vor is really tak­ing care of our crops—making sure they have ideal grow­ing con­di­tions in cli­mate, humid­ity, tem­per­a­ture, and so forth. We’re also mak­ing sure they’re get­ting all the nutri­ents that they need, along with the right amount of irri­ga­tion, the right amount of dis­solved oxy­gen. The fore­most belief is that healthy plants are going to make for tastier plants.

“And then because we are so close to our cus­tomers, we never have to har­vest any­thing before it’s com­pletely ready. Many con­ven­tion­ally grown crops have to be refrig­er­ated and trans­ported long dis­tances, so they are picked early and then arti­fi­cially ripened. We don’t have to do any­thing like that; we can har­vest crops when they are at their opti­mal fresh­ness, size, fla­vor, pro­file and color. We can har­vest any item in the morn­ing and have it to a super­mar­ket or a restau­rant in the afternoon.”

In addi­tion to sup­ply­ing locally grown pro­duce, Gotham Greens con­tributes to the local econ­omy by pro­vid­ing badly needed jobs. All staff are res­i­dents from the nearby com­mu­nity. As pro­duc­tion expands, they also plan to offer their prod­ucts to more local areas that have lim­ited access to fresh produce.

They’re Buying It

In their first sea­son, response to the avail­abil­ity of such crops has been out­stand­ing. “We’re already sup­ply­ing many of the super­mar­kets across the city, like Whole Foods Market, FreshDirect, D’Agostino, Union Market, and a hand­ful of restau­rants,” Puri reported. “Our prod­ucts are sell­ing very well, and we’re hav­ing to turn cus­tomers away. We’re going to con­tinue adding to our vari­ety of crops, and we’re inves­ti­gat­ing how to build a big­ger green­house facil­ity where we can grow an even greater diver­sity of crops for our customers.”

For more infor­ma­tion on Gotham Greens, visit www.gothamgreens.com.