We have been granted permission by our main client and the City of Oakland to farm 38,000 square feet of space in North Oakland on the corner of 51st and Telegraph.  This site is the future location of a multi-use development in which Top Leaf Farms will be installing over an acre of rooftop farm--to produce food specifically for the people who live within a 3 mile radius. Our solar-powered farm will supply food by bicycle delivery to local residents and chefs as well as seeds and starts to local gardeners and other urban farmers. Our operation will start on the ground this year and as the building is built, it will continue its growth on the rooftop. 
The first steps are to establish a nursery and grow trials of what we think will perform well, save seeds and do it again.

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. 

Time to begin.   In early September I approached Jonathan Youtt at the PLACE for sustainable living in Oakland, Ca. to ask if he had a space for us to test our system out. Our Berkeley project was being delayed and I wanted to keep TJ busy and use the extra time to learn more about the design we were to install on the 16 roofs. Alot has been tweaked on paper and it was time to begin testing it out. We also switched blenders and wanted to  start growing in the new medium we had developed.  

The space that we were given was the roof of two shipping containers that were 20' long. The space ended up being 276 square feet, after we built the deck and parapet to contain the soil. There was alot of ideas that had been floating around in my head over the last 6 months on how to make a more productive lightweight and affordable system, getting the opportunity to do a test run at PLACE has been invaluable. 

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. 

It was March of 2013 that I was contacted by Josiah Cain of Sherwood engineers and Design Ecology to consult on a rooftop farming project to be built in Berkeley Ca, just a few blocks from the UC campus. The 72 unit building was in schematic design and the client was excited at the possibility to grow food on the 16 roofs of the residential building. My role was to assess the viability of the farm operation and recommend the type of supportive systems. After a lengthy review from from the city of Berkeley the Client received the go ahead from the city of Berkeley to develop the design for permit submittal in November of 2013.