HBS Case Protagonist Mohamed Hage on Rooftop Farming

so we grow food in cities, we are actually urban farmers, so about eight years ago we had this vision of growing food where people live and growing it more sustainably and our concept is simple, we don't use new land, so we take existing buildings, usually storage spaces. Big low flat buildings and we build

rooftop

s that we can operate all year round growing fresh food for the local community of local people around us and we grow food with about half the energy because we get a lot of energy from the building. Next we are also insulating the building we grow without pesticides, herbicides or fungicides, so it is very sustainable.

In fact, we introduce insects to the forum to fight other insects and try to create a balance, really copying what Mother Nature does. We also grow polycultures. On one of our farms, if you walk around and it looks like a living grocery store, you have tomatoes, cucumbers, peppers, lettuce, herbs, and essentially there are times when over 50 things were grown in the same greenhouse, so polyculture It has been very useful. Food is easier from a pest management perspective so early on we decided to take a page from the cs basket program which is pretty established in North America and we said we would go direct to consumers initially it was a set basket that we had about 200 subscribers that got this weekly basket and they had no other choice, fast forward three and a half years, we have about 5,000 greenhouse subscribers, we offer our food and our share and food from farms and you can choose what you want online, so it's, on the one hand, amazing online service, on the other hand, it's in a very, very distant connection to the ground type service and that's pretty much what we do at that Montreal level and for us, The next big thing is to expand to loofa abroad from the start of the company.

We have been struggling with what would be the best model, the best formula to copy what we have done here in Montreal in other places. Our vision is to change the way people eat in cities.