>> ARLENE: we are at a quarter-acre rooftop farm at Ryerson University in downtown Toronto. We produce ten thousand pounds of food each year that goes to the farmers' market and to our CSA customers and it's distributed to the food room as well which is where students can get food for free. When we started the farm we weren't sure what we could grow on a roof so we started by growing a little bit of everything and we found that there wasn't anything we couldn't grow. Corn, broccoli, potatoes, tomatoes...we tried it all and everything was gorgeous but we've moved toward crops that are higher value and that make more sense in a small confined space so we're trying to grow things that have a lot of different successions or a continual harvest so we do tomatoes, peas, beans, salad greens, radishes, carrots, beets... [Ambient Noise] This green roof was built as part of the original infrastructure of the building in 2004 and it was planted with daylilies and it was left standing until 2013 when Ryerson's student-initiated garden group converted it into a farm so the soil that was here when we arrived was actually really beautiful it was a really lightweight engineered soil that was high in organic matter. One of the advantages of having a soil that is higher in organic matter is that it retains water really well so we actually only water once a week and we we use a drip tape which is great because it reduces evaporation so we turn on the drip tape once a week and we leave it on for 24 to 48 hours which kind of mimics a heavy storm, which the plants love and what we do is we check the weather if there's a storm coming we don't water so that way we can make sure that we're catching the most amount of rainwater possible so that we're contributing to stormwater management. Water is a big part of green roof technology so the professors who were instrumental in including a green roof on this building were actually instrumental in creating the city of Toronto's bylaw that all new buildings that are over a certain size have to include a green roof. [Ambient Noise] This project began as a student initiative with the mission to grow food on campus and create opportunities for people to learn about how to grow food. Urban agriculture crosses over a number of different disciplines so that's one of the things that makes this project really interesting so we have nutrition students, architecture, engineering, environmental studies, urban planning, and even business students are attracted to urban agriculture for a lot of reasons so that's one of the things that makes it really fun. >> Jayne: we do a 10-week Ecological Market Garden Program and it's a 10-week program that starts in the spring and the idea is that the participants get to see the farm from the very beginnings in the pre-greenhouse up until planting it in the field so it takes place from mid-March to the end of May so we're actually in the last two weeks of that right now and so that course involves a field session for kind of hands-on experiential learning which we think is really key to learning about farming and also a classroom session to complement the training in the field to do a bit more of the technical background. >> Saba: I've always been into sort of gardening, I have a pretty large lot out in Scarborough so I used to do it a little bit with my dad and then as I got older I still enjoyed doing in and then I started looking around Ryerson to see if there were any opportunities and we actually have a farm so I was like okay I need to get involved with that and I started off with the training program and I've learned so much from it and it's actually made me way more interested in science and I've never taken science in high school and now I'm back in high school because I want to like I want to build it up and see where it goes. [Ambient Noise] >>ARLENE: rooftop farming companies that aim to build a farm on an existing roof usually source older industrial buildings, maybe in an industrial neighbourhood. Older buildings that were built before the 1950s tend to have the load-bearing capacity to support the extra weight of a rooftop farm. Here in Toronto we have a green roof bylaw so all new buildings that are over a certain size have to include a green roof so that means that green roofs are now part of our urban infrastructure in Toronto so people are asking the question: "are we gonna see more food being grown on roofs now that it's part of the infrastructure of our buildings?" and I do believe that rooftop farming could be a viable option for producing food for the local community. It's expensive and it takes a lot of organization to make a rooftop a place where food can be grown but the added value is that people get to spend time on the farm and participate in growing the food that they eat and learn how to grow food so even even the small impact that we're making in producing food in the city could have huge repercussions because people have backyards, and balconies, and their own roofs where they're taking what they learn here and trying it somewhere else and we have people come visit from other universities who want to replicate the project. When people stand on the farm and look out at the cityscape they start to see roofs and they go: "well, what about that roof, could we be growing food on that roof?" so I do believe that this project could be replicated and we're doing a really thorough job of writing down everything we do so that we can share some of what we're learning here about what grows best, and how to manage a rooftop farm. 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