Urban agriculture is increasingly critical to ensure nutritional security, community resilience, and equitable access to healthy foods for growing urban populations. However, lack of open space and high land prices present a constraint to establishment of new urban farms and gardens. A possible solution and a way to establish new agricultural sites, is to produce food on and in buildings, for example, through rooftop farming, green facades, and controlled environment agriculture. Further co-benefits can be gained by creating a closed-loop system where building outputs (heat, CO2, greywater, organic waste) are recycled as inputs to the agricultural system, and agricultural outputs (O2, irrigation water runoff, food crops) ultimately provide inputs to building systems and users. Despite the many potential benefits of such building-integrated agriculture (BIA), there are currently no working examples of commercial BIA food production. This is due to a lack of qualified experts and a research base, since BIA requires multi-disciplinary expertise, as well as other challenges and barriers. Therefore, our overall goal is to identify critical challenges, barriers, benefits, and opportunities and create a network of professionals to further develop BIA through academic training, applied research, extension programs, and industry engagement.

This page will be updated as this project grows. Check back soon for more. 

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