The importance of food production within cities: a floating farm and rooftop farming in Rotterdam
We had a great session at our Future Food Convention 2020 with Peter van Wingerden, the CEO of the first floating farm in the world, and Wouter Bauman of the Rotterdam Environment Center and rooftop farmer of Dakakker, europe’s first rooftop farm. We talked about the importance, the benefits and their invention of food production within cities.
Both projects are located in Rotterdam and focus their work in reducing food ways to make food production more accessible, transparent and closer to the citizens.
“A green roof is not only fun, but really really valuable.”
The Dakakker rooftop farm is a project where they created a multi value circle by combining many beneficial factors- for the citizens and the environment. The farm is located in the city center of Rotterdam, was built in 2012 and has about 1.000 square meter, almost 10.000 visitors every year, 160 tours in 2019, and a bistro next to the farm where fruits, vegetables, herbs and edible flowers are grown, honey is produced, and since a year they have chickens as well. All these products are being sold to local restaurants or used in their bistro. There is a high demand for the edible flowers from restaurants and also the honey is selling out quickly. An important and distinct fact of Dakakker is that most — if not all — deliveries are made on foot, because the rooftop garden is within walking distance to their customers.
Citizens can engage and volunteer to farm every Friday. In fact, the project has gained so much interest that the Dakakker needed to introduce a waiting list. With this rooftop farm they created a little oasis to escape the city stress and reconnect with nature again. Space in cities is getting denser and denser, and rooftops can be a smart concept to create a greener environment for citizens.
They also developed an education program for kids, where children have the chance to farm, harvest and taste the products. Wouter sees high value in this education program and aims “to plant a seed in the minds of the kids” early, so they can develop a sense for sustainability, nature, food production and innovation.
The latest invention of the Dakakker farm is their “slim dak”, a smart roof system. It can communicate with the weather forecast and regulate its own water storage. The city of Rotterdam has over 12.5 million square meters unused rooftops available, which means a lot of opportunity for more rooftop farms.
Besides urban rooftop gardens Rotterdam is the home of the first floating farm in the world.
For over nine years Peter van Wingerden’s company has been designing and building “crazy” buildings, mainly on the water which can overcome flooding and be climate adaptive. Realizing that cities are so much dependent on transportation for their food supply, they tackled this issue by implementing their expertise and innovation to build the world’s first floating farm. The aim is to integrate farms within cities to transform them into transparent, accessible and sustainable cities.
The floating farm concept and design can be copied and scaled in different parts of the world. Peter is describing the benefit of an operation on water as perfectly scalable and maximum expansion is possible. Since May 2019 cows are living on their floating cow farm and dairy and organic fertilizer from their manure is produced. Creating such a new innovation of livestock farming, also always attracts criticism.
Peter has a vision for the future and you can see that the spirit of innovation drives him. Criticism is for him something that comes along with innovation and is more than normal. His vision is to change the way of thinking. For Peter it’s not about generating more profit and capitalizing everything to the maximum. He emphasized “[..] we should really skip on just thinking about money. I am really sure that we can create a better world if we would skip that thought.”
One synergy of both projects is the focus on the relationship between consumers and producers. The value of creating a transparent food chain, the appreciation of labour intensive workforce, the short supply chain, and within that the reduced environmental impact is just the way to go forward.
We are very happy to have had the chance to talk with Peter and Wouter about their great projects and getting inspiring insights about local food production. We hope their future projects will turn out to be as successful and transformative as Dakakker and the Floating Cow Farm have been. We are looking forward to seeing floating farms and rooftop farming all over the world.
Do you want to know more about the future of local food production? Watch the whole interview with Peter and Wouter here :
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