If we could farm on our roof tops, Wouldn't It Be Cool (WIBC)?

Posted by Dineo and Emma Blog October 21, 2018

If we could farm on our roof tops, Wouldn't It Be Cool (WIBC)?

The Hola Harvest Demo farm at the WIBC incubator at 1 Fox

The Wouldn't it Be Cool (WIBC) incubator at 1 Fox street in Joburg City is an urban agriculture initiative involved in greening the inner city in Johannesburg. Due to the obvious lack of land in the city they use Hydroponic systems, where mainly leafy greens and herbs are sown in a growing medium which anchors the plant and the system continually input nutrients and water for the plant.

A-Frame Hydroponic system growing spinach

Hydroponics cuts harvest time in half because the growing environment is controlled. No erosion of soil of leaching of nutrients. Organic insecticides have to be used as the demo farm incorporated different plants. The whole process does not require a lot of labour and only requires one person, at the scale that we were exposed. Water is circulated in the system and changed out one monthly, therefore the system is not labour intensive. The system also uses little energy in the form of electricity but is vulnerable to power cuts where a power outage of more than one hour could have significant impact on the quality of the crops and result in a loss.

A WIBC roof top garden. The restaurants at 1 Fox are among the
main customers for the produce from the gardens

Food produced in the demo farm as well as the roof top gardens are grown with organic seeds and seedlings and are therefore of great quality and the produce is sold to businesses such as restaurants in branded packaging. The project supports and encourages the participation of young people with under-privileged backgrounds to take up innovative methods of agriculture to produce food in the inner city.

Bringing this into the conversation on food security, the is limited scope to consider this initiative as an alternative which challenges the food system to be socially just. It might in a way fit into Alkon and Guthman’s argument, in the introduction of the New Food Activism book, on the inadequacy of alternatives in contributing to a ‘socially just food system’ because of how the produce from this initiative are mainly accessed by the relatively elite in the restaurants that it is sold to as well as those who are informed and appreciate the concept of the alternative, but they are still relatively more well off. It is a challenge to think of how this good quality produce, which is affordable, can be more accessible to the masses because the main problem is the volume that such farms produce which limit them to restaurants and farmers markets. We also learnt from our hosts that they have not yet partnered with the department of agriculture which is an obstacle in mainstreaming this type of agricultural work and bringing it to the underprivileged. This is confusing in our view because government should be getting in on such initiatives for the urban area where most people that are subject to hunger on a daily basis are located in the many urban food deserts.

Inside the Hola Harvest Demo Farm

We would like to acknowledge Ms. Halaliswe Msimango, our host who showed us around the WIBC incubator and educated us on all that takes place there as well as on the work that WIBC does in empowering young previously disadvantaged innovators in various ways so that they can become entrepreneurs. We appreciate that she shared with us how she came to work in urban agriculture as well. We also appreciated learning that the hydroponic systems we saw, the A-frame, table and vertical systems are products which have been developed in South Africa with South African products, by South African people.