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Empowerment with Vertical
Agriculture, Edible Walls
& Urban
Farming Food Chains
By George Irwin, The Green Wall
Editor
Photos Courtesy George Irwin Unless Otherwise Noted
December 15, 2009
The Green Walls Column
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Author's Herb Wall |
If
you ever have an opportunity to talk with my family you'll see there are very few
things I am obsessed with except for my fascination with food.
Fortunately when I am home and not traveling, I have the means to
provide nutritious food such as fresh berries, raw vegetables and other
non processed edibles. I do 90% of the cooking; I make three meals
a day for my family - breakfast before school, homemade lunches, and
dinner.
For me it is not just about making the food - I am obsessed with cooking
high quality nutritious meals that lack processed or frozen produce.
I’m talking specifically about not using frozen or canned vegetables and
eating ripe juicy fruit. I’ve been fortunate to be in the right
place at the right time but during these trying financial times not
everyone can afford fresh foods which provide the highest nutrition.
Fuel is at an
all time high, the U.S. economy is hovering above an economic crash,
houses are being foreclosed, unemployment is higher than ever and people
still go to bed hungry. Putting food on the table is one thing,
being able to afford a high quality nutritious meal is another.
Yet I also know too many families who don’t cook such meals simply
because it’s easier to stop at the local fast food store or to microwave
a frozen meal.
I was part of a
discussion group about Urban Agriculture the
third week
in October, 2009, in Toronto as part of the
Cities Alive! World Green
Roof Infrastructure Congress. The theme was growing fresh produce in urban
environments, and there were some great projects implemented on roof
tops of inner cities, the use of abandon lots, and the concept of
“Vertical Farming.”
Vertical farming is a breakthrough in socialized food production to help
feed the ever growing populations.
It was hard to think in a conceptual manner when we were already implementing
vertical farms as one of the most powerful applications of agriculture
ever. The concept of vertical farms is no longer conceptual!
Vertical farms
are real, however, there are many concepts that still lend themselves to
including horizontal growing as part of the vertical concept, yet this
is not necessarily the case. It only makes sense for this column
to incorporate my love for food and my experience with
Vertical Agriculture since I have been involved with what is no doubt
one of the most incredible Vertical Farming projects to date; it’s
called the Urban Farming Food Chain.
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Living
Walls - Left: Diagram from GLT; Right: Patrick Blanc’s mur
végétal at Le Musée du Quai Branly;
Photo: Bill Bishop; Source: Human Flower Project. |
Before I continue, let’s review the definition of “Living Wall” which
has a root system throughout the entire wall within its mechanism in
comparison to a “Green Façade,” better known as a 3D or wire trellis
type, where the roots are at the bottom of the structure and it is the
structure that supports the plants' climbing habits. Due to the
definitions, the walls of French botanist Patrick Blanc are defined as
Living Walls even though they do not have a growth media base and are
100% hydroponic.
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Author's Kids Planting
Lettuce. |
Back to my story - in 2005 we were preparing a test plot of plants with
our products for the growing season, I was home with both my son and
daughter who were 7 and 4 and wanted to plant something in the walls.
Here I was alone with two kids who wanted to literally play in the dirt,
something we as adults forget to do, that is “play.” My son found
some old lettuce seeds in the garage and this is what they wanted to
plant, but planting them in the ground was not good enough, they wanted
to plant them in our Green Wall Modules (which eventually became the
Green Living Wall Panels).
So we laid out
two Green Living™ Wall Panels, filled them with growth media and my kids
planted the seeds, painstakingly one at a time. If you know
anything about lettuce seeds they geminate pretty quickly. A few
days later my son discovered the germination and he made me hang them on
the wall. To my surprise, in less than a few weeks we had a full
panel of lettuce that we used for our own salads. This was the
start of a revolution; that same summer we planted tomatoes, cucumbers
and basil - we dubbed it the salad wall. The following year we
developed a 4 and 6 inch-depth green wall panel and were successful with
zucchini, leeks, strawberries, herbs and baby sugar watermelons.
We had no idea what we were about to realize - we can grow almost any
common crop literally in a vertical plane.
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Our first Lettuce Wall |
Two years later, I received a call from an architect, Robin Osler, whom
we have worked with in the past. To my excitement and curiosity,
Robin asked me if we ever grew food in our walls. Of course we had
just been through two years of authentic research/self use using our
Green Living Walls for growing food! Robin introduced us to Joyce
Lapinsky and Taja Sevele, the founders of an organization called Urban
Farming (www.urbanfarming.org).
Urban Farming’s
mission is to eradicate hunger. This was perfect timing since as a
corporation we, too, were seeking a non-profit to adopt as part of our
corporate giving program. Social responsibility is a key value in
our business plan and Urban Farming’s mission was very much parallel to
what we believed in. Urban Farming, based in Detroit, has its
roots, no pun intended, in planting gardens throughout urban areas
utilizing vacant land to help feed the homeless. This land is not
always available, sometimes contaminated, and simply not always
accessible in urban environments. However, there is always
vertical space with walls.
Joyce, who is
the West Coast developer for Urban Farming, asked me about a Green
Living™ Wall growing food for the homeless in Los Angeles. From
here the Urban Farming Food Chain was born. Robin associated the
idea of a chain's having links and the links making up the chain with
each edible wall being a link in the chain that would connect the Edible
Walls around the world as part of the “Urban Farming Food Chain.”
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Skid Row, Los Angeles,
California. |
Joyce and
Candice (Candice was a volunteer helping Joyce in Los Angeles) had spent
days and weeks looking for walls in the LA area, meeting with local
officials and building owners to grant the use of such walls.
Joyce found four locations to install the Edible Walls, I flew to Los
Angeles, and I had a chance to talk with the people we were trying to
help. Personally, I was in shock to experience the life of a
homeless person; I was at the epicenter of homelessness, the skid row
area, Gladys Park in the center of Los Angeles, 10 minutes away from
Hollywood and millions of dollars of revenues being generated minutes
from what seemed to be a scene in a movie. I was feeling like an
intruder, unwelcomed and at the same time experiencing guilt for my
successes in relation to what I was experiencing. I didn’t have to
live in a box, fight for a bench, and felt my pride would never let me
stand in line for food because I was starving.
Even among
their life trials these people faced everyday there was still evidence
of a hierarchy within the sub culture of homelessness. The real
estate may not belong to them legally, however, this area of street and
park was their home.
Trying to put myself in their shoes, I was thinking that if I were
homeless here how great would it be to have fresh food literally free
for the picking. One of the walls was going to be adjacent to a
basketball court. The initial mistake we assumed was that the
Edible Wall was something they wanted; yet we were met with resistance.
In the hierarchy of the residence of this particular park, we were
treading on something that was not ours. We had to actually step
back and re-think our approach; we had assumed that the edible wall, a
food providing wall with strawberries, cucumbers and more, would be
accepted with open arms.
No different
from you and I, very few people in this world enjoy having something
forced on them. If we would have taken the time to do
preliminary interviews and engage the people we were trying to help, I
think the initial outcome would have been more accepted. Homeless
or not these people, this society, clan, whatever they are labeled,
still had feelings and a sense of ownership of the space we wanted to
use for their benefit. We had seen it as helping, and they had
seen it as intrusive and “How dare you tell us what we want!”
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Edible Wall Growing at Cal Poly Parking Area. |
Joyce and Candice eventually found four locations to accept 750 square
feet of the Edible Walls. This project would be the first of its
kind anywhere in the world. The concept was to be able to allow
anyone to walk up to the wall and harvest produce and eat it raw.
We wanted to bring the first walls to the sites already bearing fruit,
but implementation was much more difficult than just hanging up our wall
systems. We had to start the growing and where? We had to
have the panels delivered and installed, teach maintenance, irrigation,
and designate someone to be responsible for each project.
Logistically these edible walls are unlike a sedum green roof in that
they need much more water, trimming, harvesting, and are located on a
wall in downtown Los Angeles - this was the hardest planning project for
our team and all with minimal funding.
The first recruit was Hunter Francis from California Polytechnic
Institute (Cal Poly) in San Luis Obispo. Hunter and two graduate
students were willing to turn one of the parking areas into a place to
grow the Green Living Walls prior to installation. If you recall,
my kids started planting seeds and to this day we still plant some seeds
on the walls, however, it works best by starting with a 1” plug or
starter plant. So the wall units were laid out in the parking
area, filled with specialized growing media and planted with a
combination of seeds and starter plugs. The panels were allowed to
mature for six weeks and in August, 2007 we had 15 volunteers to help
load the panels in two refrigerated trucks driven and donated by another
local produce delivery company to downtown LA.
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Left:
Homeless Participation; Right: Unloading the Truck. |
Two trucks went
to four difference locations; it was very early in the morning and tight
moving the 18 wheelers around in the Los Angeles morning traffic.
And getting to the walls was a difficult task because of the distance
between the delivery truck and the mounting surface. For example,
at
Miguel Contreras High School we had to walk the panels almost 400
yards to the wall. At the
Los Angeles Food Bank we had some
of the workers help us unload the wall and the final two destinations,
Rainbow Housing Trust and
The Weingart Center - literally the center of homelessness - held the best surprises and
provided the start of an advanced
education program.
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Volunteers helping with
a green, living, wall. |
The truck
pulled up and a crowd started to gather out of curiosity; the crowds
were the same people we were helping. Many volunteers started to unload
the panels and the people in the crowd, without asking, simply jumped
right in and helped us unload. The senses of pride, self worth,
and empowerment are words I used to describe what they were feeling. One
participant told me, “It isn’t everyday a truck pulls up with fresh
tomatoes to be hung on a wall. So many times people help me and
this time I want to help someone else.”
As the panels
were unloaded and the crowd diminished there were four participants who
stayed with us. They expressed how they wanted to see these
tomatoes on the wall so I personally invited them to help. They
worked with us for the first half of the day and asked if they could
stay and come back the next day. This was a welcomed surprise - as
a former teacher I am very much for hands-on learning and when someone
asks to be taught or expresses interest in something you don’t say no.
That night I asked our installers if they minded that they remain on
call vs. installing the four walls. Of course they didn’t because
they, too, were volunteers.
A friend of
ours from New York, Kevin Kaye, and I worked with and taught these four
individuals from sun up to sun down for five days. They learned
everything we could teach them from start to finish; eventually they
installed the last wall without our help, including the irrigation.
They were not the only ones who learned something that week. We
found out that these were people are no different than we are. One
had been a film editor for Hollywood, another a contractor, the third a
business owner and the fourth a union carpenter. I thought in
silence to myself, “What and where did things go wrong to the point they
became homeless”? It taught me not to judge; I would have assumed
that it was due to drug addictions, laziness, or a life changing
disaster. For me the stigma was gone, these were no longer
homeless people; they were our neighbors and peers and now my friends
who only had a bad situation get out of control.
You may ask why
I was the one installing these walls in the first place? We did
have “installers” and they could have done the work and that would have
been the end of it. Our company is well rooted in moral values.
No one can ever come to us asking for a check as a donation, the answer
would be no. But if you want our help, we will provide you our
hand and sweat equity, money only goes so far and who knows where it
goes. What we experience as corporate giving allows us to learn
just as much as these four homeless people did during that week in
August. This is social responsibility at its best, I’m no
religious man but I do believe in teaching someone to fish so they can
feed themselves instead of providing a hand out.
What we have
done is produce a foundation that has provided a life changing
educational opportunity while providing high quality food in
environments that were at one time at the mercy of the distribution from
a traditional farm. Now instead of empty buildings and abandoned
parking areas there is the tangible and real application of an Urban
Farm, future educational opportunities, job creation and it’s all done
without specialized plastics, pumps, electricity, excessive water or
fertilizers.
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Left:
Volunteers and me; Right: Enjoying a beautiful new Edible
Wall. |
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Volunteers
celebrating a completed Urban Farming Food Chain Green Wall
in Los Angeles. |
This is Vertical Farming changing the way we think
about agriculture and the relationship to urban inner cities. If these
four individuals were to be paid for their work there is a labor value
of close to $55.00 per man hour to install these walls and another
$20.00 per man hour to maintain them and an additional income
opportunity by selling the produce at road side stands in center city
less than 100 feet from where it was grown.
It doesn’t end here; this was a wake up to a much larger calling.
What if we can take what we have done and duplicate it throughout the
world? We can and did with easy to use, almost off the shelf raw
materials. What we did is scalable, affordable, and does not
require specialized equipment. The Urban Farming Food Chain also
provides additional learning opportunities to learn how to cook the
food, prepare healthy meals, job training and more.
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"A" Frame Vertical
Gardening by GLT. |
This experience has spawned an agricultural revolution - vertical
farming is no longer conceptual and the use of horizontal space is not
necessary to grow food. This technique of vertical farming method
food production uses the power of nature, traditional soils and is done
100% organic without the use of chemicals and pesticides. In just
the past year, products such as the Patent Pending Green Living™
Technologies “A” Frame are now available to grow 96 sf of food while
utilizing only 32 sf of minimal horizontal space, doubling and tripling
the yields per square foot and all in a parking lot or in a
rehabilitated building.
Our relationship with Urban Farming has become a staple of our business
model for many years to come. We continue to work towards
developing new agricultural techniques, self help programs and
empowerment opportunities not just for the homeless but for ourselves.
There is much more to businesses than writing a check as a giving
program. It’s been a humbling experience to be able to impact so
many in such a short amount of time. I suggest everyone go out and
volunteer your time, as you, too, may learn something.
George Irwin, The Green Wall
Editor
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Sponsor Recognition |
Since the installation of the first Urban Farming Food Chain in Los
Angeles, there have been Edible Walls implemented in more locations such
as New York, California, Vancouver, B.C., and Hawaii with others slated for
South Africa, South America and Dubai. Currently in progress,
Green Living Technologies has developed the GLT Innovations, LLC which
includes the GLT Institute providing green job training and job
placement in the future GLT Food Factories and GLT Farms, all utilizing
the Green Living Technologies Green Living Walls. If you’re
interested in sponsoring a link in the Urban Farming Food Chain, please
contact info@agreenroof.com.
George Irwin is the President and CEO
of Green Living™ Technologies, LLC (GLT) based in NY. Green
Living™ Technologies is the only U.S. manufacturer of growing media based
green wall and three types of green roof systems. Mr. Irwin is
a former trainer for Green Roofs for Healthy Cities Green Walls 101.
Contact George Irwin at:
GreenWallEditor@greenroofs.com,
George@AGreenroof.com, www.agreenroof.com, or 1.800.631.8001.
Past Green Wall Articles
The opinions expressed by our Guest Feature writers and editors may not necessarily reflect the beliefs of Greenroofs.com, and are offered to our readers to simply present individual views and experiences and
open a dialogue of further discussion, debate and research. Enjoy, and if you have a particular comment, please contact the author or send us an email to:
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