BUILD TOUR - On the Road 

When I first met Rupa Marya I admired her fun nature and fierce activism it would be 8 months later before we would start to fall in love and then she invited me to accompany her band Rupa and the April Fishes for the BUILD Tour, a world tour of their third Studio Album. 
The tour was  16 weeks and included  52 shows in over 9 countries. I was a farmer to go on the road and I decided to conduct a seed sharing event at every show. I gathered some educational materials and blank packets,  a few books and brought some seeds with me.  It was actually hundreds of thousands of seeds all organized and labeled in a suitcase that I would then set up at all the shows along with the merch that the band was selling. 

A green roof project that wants to be a rooftop farm. That sounds cool right? Well in researching this I soon found out that rooftop farming is a very young concept in the green roof industry . Although green roofs began to be designed into buildings over 40 years ago, the incorporation of rooftop gardens for food production have really only taken root in the last decade. Farms like the Brooklyn Grange in NYC being one of the best examples of a large scale food production in a city and on a roof. 
In doing such a project there a number of concerns that immediately come to mind. First on is weight and type of "soil" medium to use. Then comes irrigation, drainage, water use and all the other supportive infrastructure needed.  To address these issues I began to research the companies and manufactures of green roof products as well as talk to the farmers currently farming the roof. I interviewed a number of farmers and acquired samples from over a dozen companies. I soon decided that it was good to start experimenting with some prototype mock ups to test it all out on a small scale before a 11,000 square foot farm was to be built.