Montreal is shaping the urban farm of the future

Lufa builds its greenhouses on top of city buildings

Lufa Farms photo

More and more, we are going to live in cities - even as city sprawl takes over rural farmland and many farmers move into the cities because they can no longer make a living on the land due to climate change. So how will they feed themselves?

A brilliant startup in Montreal, Quebec is paving the way towards a future where cities will feed many of their residents through rooftop farms. “We see ourselves as part of a new industry that will affect change for millions – maybe billions – of people, across all cities and countries,” says Mohamed Hage, who helped create Lufa Farms in 2009.

This is urban farming for the 21st century - growing food where people live, growing what they want, and growing it more sustainably, saving water and energy. And Lufa, which built the world’s first commercial rooftop farm in 2011 and now operates five of them, wants to spread the concept to cities around the world to revolutionize food production.

 “With each new urban farm, we hold ourselves to an ever-higher standard of sustainability and technical ingenuity growing dozens of vegetables, greens, and herbs hydroponically,” Lufa says. Every week, it assembles customized baskets and delivers them to a network of pick-up points across Quebec, or straight to customers’ doors.

Lufa also partners with hundreds of local farmers and food makers to provide their products through an online Marketplace, helping to develop the local economy. "Of our hundreds of partners, only three are not from Quebec,” Hage says. “We believe in local products."

That echoes the Lebanese village where he grew up. “Bread was always warm when you bought it. Meat came off the cow: you went to the butcher and he just would cut up the cut of meat that you needed. Sometimes there was no meat because he didn't cut a cow that day. I am lucky enough to know what food was like and what food tasted like and what we're trying to do here is recreate that experience: better food, local food from people you know.”

Sadly, though, Wardanieh, the Lebanese village where he grew up, is not like that any more. People are growing tomatoes, eggplants and cucumbers in massive farms, using a tremendous amount of pesticide, imported labour and selling their food to food terminals,  but they're not making a living. For every one good year, they have four bad years.

It was to help those cousins that Hage began researching agricultural technology in 2005, and was amazed to discove that some extraordinary technologies were making it easier to be a farmer. In Holland, beneficial insects were replacing chemical pesticides. In California, farmers were collecting and reusing rainwater for crops; and in Canada, McGill University was building experimental roof farms, he told the Montreal Gazette in 2013. 

In Montreal, McGill University had been testing such greenhouse designs since 1974, when its Rooftop Wastelands project in the Saint-Louis district of Montreal created a demonstration rooftop garden on top of the University Settlement Community Centre. 

“These kinds of things made me realize that green-revolution technologies could bring down food prices and at the same time improve quality, health and food safety,” Hage said. “This was a convergence, I thought, and time for me to embark upon big challenge.”

In fact, ironically enough, it is technology that makes it possible for Lufa to grow a variety of vegetables as naturally as Hage’s grandmother used to do in Lebanon, but much more efficiently and cost effectively than on a traditional farm.

Apps, laptops and iPads, along with hydroponic growing systems, mean they can grow many different kinds of crops in the greenhouse, managing their growing environment so each kind of plant gets what it needs, and respond to their customers’ wishes and preferences.

Growing the food locally means that they can grow a variety of cultivars for taste, unlike commercial growers who must choose tough varieties that can survive long journeys from growers to grocery stores. Lufa can grow hundreds of varieties, many of them heirloom varieties, because the technology makes it possible to manage their growth individually.

Lufa is a climbing gourd that grows on many Lebanese rooftops, helping to keep home interiors fresh and cool. So the name symbolizes the freshness Hage wants to bring to Montreal’s dinner tables.

It was in 2009 that Hage, an entrepreneur and engineer at heart, joined with Lauren Rathmell, manager of plant science and farming, Kurt Lynn with decades of marketing experience, and Yahya Badran, supervising construction and engineering projects, to form Lufa.

It was challenging for them to explain their concept because it was such a radical departure from traditional models, as Hage explained to the late Silver Donald Cameron in the Green Interview in 2013.

“Lufa is a very basic proposition. We want to grow food where people live and we want to grow it more sustainably using, obviously, no pesticides, herbicides or fungicides; catching rainwater; recirculating all the irrigation water—so having no water or nutrient loss; composting; using half the energy of heating—in Montreal and you need a lot of energy for heat—and more importantly, using no new land.” 

The team had to solve many challenges before they could build their first rooftop farm.

The first challenge was to design a greenhouse that could be built on top of a building rather than on the ground. It took more than 18 months to come up with a suitable design. And then to find a building. Because one of their values is to use no new land, “we surveyed the city on Google Maps and interviewed dozens of building owners until one finally agreed to let us set up shop.”

Then the next challenge was to reinvent how to grow food sustainably. To do that, they rented a farm at McGill University for two years and started farming. ”We got to work implementing composting, rainwater recirculation systems, and several different growing methods like troughs for vining crops, nutrient film technique for herbs, ebb-and-flood benches for potted plants, and propagation, vertical LED systems for microgreens.”

That first commercial rooftop greenhouse, which they started building in Montreal’s Ahuntsic borough in 2010, planted its first seedlings in February 2011 and harvested its first vegetables later that year. They grew 15 varieties of vegetables and delivered roughly 200 baskets every week.

In 2013, they built a second rooftop greenhouse in Montreal’s Laval suburb and began involving hundreds of local producers in their online farmers’ market, the Marketplace. That e-commerce platform meant they could offer customizable weekly baskets to their customers, who had reached more than 10,000 by 2016. That year, Lufa launched home delivery by electric car, and the company became cash-flow positive.

In 2017, Lufa harvested the first crop from its third greenhouse in the Montreal borough of Anjou. By 2019, having outgrown its Ahuntsic distribution centre, it moved its main office and warehouse to the Ville Saint-Laurent neighbourhood of Montreal.

In spring 2023, Lufa opened its first indoor farm, transforming its Ville Saint-Laurent headquarters into a unique urban food ecosystem that combines the world’s largest rooftop greenhouse, a new distribution centre double the size of the previous one, and an indoor farm. It feeds thousands of customers each week.

This year, in 2024, Lufa completed building its fifth and most technologically advanced rooftop greenhouse in Ahuntsic’s Marché Central complex. The 127,000 square feet, state-of-the-art urban farm is predicted to increase vegetable yields by up to 40% compared to the other rooftops, Lufa says.

“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic,” Hage said in the Green Interview. “Essentially, you're picking up a box of vegetables and food that was harvested and made custom order to you the same day.”

“People here can say that, “I know who my farmer is, I know who my baker is and I know what ingredients they're using, how they're doing it and I've visited them and I've been to their open houses and I've talked to them by phone. So, it's a much richer food experience, over all.”

It is indeed a kind of magic.