Supermarket Farms Yield Produce for Shoppers, Environment

courtesy of Sky Vegetables

At Montgomery Farm Women’s Co-op Market, Bethany gazes at a perfectly ripe zucchini, its yellow blossom slightly open and still attached. It’s not the look of rapture you might expect. She tensely plants her hands at her hips.
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The Bethesda resident explains her dilemma: “That zucchini looks amazing, but what am I going to serve it with?” The Co-op farmers market is well-stocked with fresh produce, but Bethany wants to plate her greens with a brand of hummus she can only get if she drives to the supermarket. So much for her plan to go straight home. She grabs the zucchini and scrutinizes her watch. “Well, looks like an extra hour of rush-hour traffic and checkout lines for me. Can’t wait.”

Interviews with a half-dozen other time-strapped shoppers at Maryland and northwest D.C. farmers markets suggest that Bethany, a busy school administrator, isn’t alone in her frustration.

What’s a fresh produce-loving, traffic-detesting urbanite to do? Supermarkets and local food advocates around the world are beginning to advance a novel solution: collocate the farmer with the supermarket.

On June 26, the local food movement took an unanticipated geographic turn to Short Pump, Virginia – population, 182. That’s where the supermarket chain Whole Foods, working with a local Richmond organization called Backyard Farmer, opened its first “field-to-store” garden in the country.

Whole Foods garden in Short Pump VA - courtesy of RVA news 

Whole Foods built the garden on a plot of land located only a few hundred yards from its front door. “We’re having some trouble with the tomatoes, but the okra is going gangbusters,” says Linda Thomas, a marketing specialist at the Short Pump Whole Foods. The garden will eventually supply the local store with about 10,000 pounds of produce per year and could expand to six acres as necessary.

Whole Foods’ garden annex is a fine remedy for a tiny town at the outer edge of Richmond, but the concept won’t work in dense urban areas, according to Andrew Thornton of Budgens supermarket in the Crouch End area of North London. “Because of the cost of an acre of land in an urban environment, field-to-farm is not something that is viable,” Thornton says.

So, instead of food from the backyard, he opted for Food from the Sky - the name of his project to convert the roof of his supermarket into an organic vegetable garden. Thornton and business partner Azul Thome, head of Positive Earth Project, needed only six weeks to complete construction.

Andrew Thornton and Azul Thome at Budgens - courtesy of Hornsey Journal

Since the garden opened in June, Thornton says customers are showing up in increasing numbers for the fresh produce and one-stop shopping convenience. “There’s a distance of literally only a few meters from growing the food to selling it,” he says.

Budgens’ solution also stands to reduce annual emissions from the typical passenger vehicle, which the EPA estimates at 5.5 metric tons of carbon dioxide. Collocation of farm with supermarket eliminates the need for trucks to transport produce from large commercial farms hundreds of miles away. Plus, consumers don’t burn as much fossil fuels because they’re no longer forced to ping-pong ball their vehicles from farmers market to supermarket.

In fact, at least in theory, shoppers could scratch the farmers market altogether.

Despite the advantages of supermarket rooftop farms over farmers markets, Thome is adamant that no rivalry exists between the two sources of locally-raised food. With the increase in so-called “food deserts” in metropolitan areas underscoring the need for cities to access more produce, “It’s not either – or,” she says. “It’s and, and, and.”

Bernie Prince, co-founder of FRESHFARM Markets, which operates eight farmers markets in D.C. and Maryland, agrees with Thome that supermarket greentops fall short of achieving produce panacea. She notes that farm space is limited by the size of the roof. “If it’s just herbs and salad mixes, that’s great. But that’s not going to be enough crops,” she says.

Prince does her part to make farmers markets more convenient by positioning them in the vicinity of supermarkets. The one in Silver Spring, for example, is just a block and a half away from the town’s Whole Foods. She thinks customers like this approach and predicts that a rise in the number of supermarket rooftop farms would supplement, rather than marginalize farmers markets. “Supermarket farms are another way to get people to understand [the importance of local foods]. Whether x or y or z, I say, hooray!”

That is, if visionaries like Thornton and Thome can consistently overcome obstacles to rooftop farms, which are formidable enough that projects like Food from the Sky sometimes seem like pie in the sky ideas. Thome says that, although the team working at Budgens was able to succeed in a short time frame, they had to address concerns from landlords, insurance companies and Crouch End planning and zoning offices. Neighbors were worried about everything from noise to teenagers jumping from the market’s rooftop into adjacent apartments. Talking things out with the community, she says, required a slew of meetings.

As President of Sky Vegetables, an urban agriculture company, Bob Fireman is well-acquainted with the barriers to rooftop farms. For the past two years, he and his 30 employees have pitched their award-winning design proposal to businesses and municipalities across the nation. Next month, Fireman’s crew will finally begin constructing their first fresh-produce farm on the roof of an abandoned shoe factory in Brockton, MA. Because Sky Vegetables’ farms are hydroponic (working with water), he says, the one-acre farm in Brockton will yield 15 to 20 times more produce than soil-based farms. Crop yields will supply urban clients like elementary school cafeterias.

Still, Fireman continues to search for a supermarket willing to contract for roof work.

That’s not due to a lack of interest, says Mark “Coach” Smallwood. The problem, explains the regional Green Mission Specialist, is that reconstructing rooftops would be a financial and logistical nightmare. “The easiest way to do it is at a new store where you can get the infrastructure in place as you build and account for the extra load [of the rooftop farm] at the front end.”

At least in the short-term, though, don’t expect to find produce farms on any brand new Whole Foods. Supermarket construction was delayed by the 2008 economic downturn. Although building recently resumed, Smallwood says that stores currently scheduled for groundbreaking were designed one to two years before the downturn.  Back then, supermarket farms were just a twinkle in the eye of even the most forward-thinking local food advocate, so farms didn't make it into the design plans.

Fireman, the head of Sky Vegetables, suggests a more substantial barrier: the one-dimensional bottom line of the supermarket industry. “Supermarkets are in the business of supermarketing,” he says. “They are not in business of farming.”

For him and other proponents of supermarket farms, that kind of tension is galvanizing. “It’s fruitful,” Thome explains, so passionate that she seems unaware of her pun. “In permaculture, you learn that it’s the edges of a piece of land that are most important, because that’s where land biodiversity increases. Right now, supermarkets are at the edge of the local produce movement.”