Canada: Inside The World’s Largest Rooftop Greenhouse That Grows 100 Types Of Vegetables

This is usually not conducive to growing vegetables, but Lufa Farms has chosen the roof of a building to construct greenhouses for organic farming that are unlike any other found in the world.

The area of ??this farm is the size of 160,000 square feet (15,000 square meters), or about the size of three football fields.

"The company's mission is to grow food where people live and in a sustainable way," spokesman Thibault Sorret told AFP.?

This is the fourth greenhouse that this company has built on a roof, in Montreal. The one, which was built in 2011 at a cost of more than two million Canadian dollars, was the first of its kind in the world.

Since then, its competitors have abounded in the world, such as the American “Gotham Greens” with eight greenhouses on the roofs in New York, Chicago and Denver; or the French “Nature Orbine,” which intends to establish a greenhouse in Paris in 2022.

Since 2017, a supermarket in Montreal has been offering organic vegetables that sprout directly on its rooftop that has been turned into a green space in the fight against global warming.?

Lufa grows about 100 types of vegetables throughout the year, using the technique of water cultivation in ponds made of coconut fibers irrigated by a nutrient liquid. Among the cultivated vegetables are lettuce, cucumbers, zucchini, Chinese cabbage, celery and fragrant herbs.

Throughout the greenhouse, bumblebees pollinate the plants, while beetles and other parasite control insects scavenge aphids to avoid the use of pesticides. The crops allow for 20,000 family baskets to be filled per week, according to each order, and are sold online at a base price of $30.?

This "online market" also includes the bread, pasta and rice products of about 200 partner farms not available at Lufa. On the basement floor of the new greenhouse, there is a large distribution center with about 2,000 products offered to individual customers and restaurants .