Landless Urban Rooftop Farming Context of Soilless Culture for Microbe Frees Cultivation, Roof Security and Environmental Sustainability

Landless rooftop farming is an artificial cultivation on the roof which uses organic solid or liquid media called solution culture “media culture” or water culture “hydroponics”. Media culture and hydroponics has been used sporadically throughout the world in rooftop and tissue culture also has been used the world as commercial means of growing both food and ornamental plants. It supplies fresh vegetables in countries with limited arable land as well as in small countries with large populations. Plants grown by hydroponics have concisely superior quality, high yield, rapid harvest, and high content, at present it is used widely in research facilities as a technique for studying plant nutrition. Gravel or sand is sometimes used in soilless systems to provide plant support, and retain some nutrients and water. The retention and water can be for their improvement through the used materials, but others such as rice hulls, bagasse, sedge peat, and sawdust are used sometime as constituents in soilless mixture straw bales have been used as the growing medium in England and Canada. Rockwool (porous stone fiber) is used in Europe. Since the major constituent of the media in artificial growing systems may be solid or liquid, it is appropriate to use the term soil culture in reference to this general type of growing system and reserve the term hydroponics for those in which water is the principal constituent. Soilless organic media preparation and use has a tremendous effect in land less culture. It is basically used in Rooftop vegetable cultivation.

Prospects for Rooftop Farming System Dynamics: An Action to Stimulate Water-Energy-Food Nexus Synergies toward Green Cities of Tomorrow

Rooftop farming is a practical solution of smart urban agriculture to furnish diverse socio-environmental benefits and short food supply chains, especially in densely populated cities. This study aims to raise urban food security with less use of public water and energy in food production, through utilizing green water and energy for sustainable management. A system dynamics (SD) model framed across the nexus of climate, water, energy and food (WEF) sectors is developed for a rooftop farm in Taipei City of Taiwan. The urban WEF Nexus is structured to address how local weather affects water and energy utilization to grow vegetables. The SD results showed that the annual yields of sweet potato leaves achieved 9.3 kg/m2, at the cost of 3.8 ton/m2 of harvested rainwater and 2.1 ton/m2 of tap water together with 2.1 kwh/m2 of solar photovoltaic power and 0.4 kwh/m2 of public electricity. This study not only demonstrates that green resources show great potential to make a significant reduction in consuming urban irrigation resources for rooftop farming, but contributes to urban planning through a sustainable in situ WEF Nexus mechanism at a city scale. The WEF Nexus can manifest the rooftop farming promotion as cogent development to facilitate urban sustainability.

Influence of Substrates and Hydrogels on Spearmint (Mentha spicata) Growth and Flowering in a Rooftop Garden

Agricultural hydrogels improve water retention in a variety of substrates. However, little is known about their impact on herb cultivation in rooftop farming. To identify the optimal substrate and hydrogel concentration for the growth and flowering of spearmint (Mentha spicata) in rooftop gardens, coir and perlite were mixed in three different ratios of 80% to 20% (v/v; referred to as C4P1), 50% to 50% (C1P1), or 20% to 80% (C1P4). Hydrogels were added into different substrates at different concentrations including 0 (control), 0.25, 0.5, 1.0, or 2.0 kg⋅m–3. Substrate composition significantly affected the growth (P < 0.001) and flowering (P < 0.05) properties of spearmint. The addition of hydrogels into substrates resulted in a significant (P < 0.05) increase in growth parameters for spearmint during the dry season. However, plants grown in C4P1, which has the highest ratio of coir, displayed inferior growth and flowering compared with those of the other two substrates during the rainy season. Therefore, a perlite-based substrate, such as C1P4 with added hydrogel, provides a suitable environment for the cultivation of spearmint in rooftop gardens regardless of seasonal rainfall patterns.

Toward an Evaluation of Cultural Ecosystem Services Delivered by Urban Micro-Farms

Since two decades, urban agriculture has been booming and a wide range of forms, from urban allotment gardens to rooftop farming under greenhouse, is developing. Various benefits are recognized for urban agriculture integration within the city and a specific consideration is dedicated to ecosystem services. In this article, we have focused on cultural ecosystem services provided by urban micro-farms. The state of the art reveals that urban agriculture delivers cultural ecosystem services that are well perceived and evaluated by users, but there are still few studies on this topic. Based on the analysis of specific literature on cultural ecosystems and micro-farms in parallel to a period of observation and documentary research of five urban micro-farms either on rooftop or at soil level, located in Paris and its surroundings, we proposed a specific methodology. This methodology aimed at quantitative and qualitative evaluation of the cultural ecosystem services provided by urban micro-farms and is based on a framework, which distinguishes exogenous and endogenous cultural ecosystem services.

Recommendation of Pesticide for Roof Top Pest Image Using Convolutional Neural Network Model

Rooftop farming in urban places is gaining more popularity which increases the cultivation of organic vegetables on the rooftop of houses and buildings with the minimal utilization of water. But rooftop farming is more vulnerable to pest infestation which reduces the quality of plants. Urban residents are novices in farming, and they are unaware of the pest attacks. Various researchers have proposed pest identification systems using image processing techniques and machine learning algorithms specific to particular disease which shows less accuracy on generaliztion and not user-friendly. To provide user-friendly pest identification system, this paper proposes a mobile based pest identification system using the concept of pre-trained convolutional neural network model – AlexNet. Experimental results have been analyzed with various rooftop pests using different kernel sizes and layers of convolutional neural network. In addition, the best evaluated pre-trained model has been converted to a mobile application using REST API for the recommendation of pesticide to the novice user.

Urban Rooftop Farming – Model for Sustainable Vegetable Production and Environmental Well-being

Background: Urban rooftop farming is a form of urban agriculture. Due to the scarcity of agricultural land in urban areas, rooftop farming is becoming popular in many countries. An experiment was conducted to grow herbs and vegetables in a small and sustainable urban rooftop farm in Nagpur city, India and the various ecological benefits of this form of urban agriculture were studied.Methods: The experiment was conducted on a 230 sq ft rooftop area from July 2019 to March 2020. Environment friendly cultivation methods employed in the study include pest management by cultural means to produce pesticide-free vegetables, conversion of household green waste into compost for augmentation of soil nutrients and the use of harvested rain water and greywater for irrigation.Result: The experiment resulted in the production of 61.7 kg of pesticide-free vegetables from an area of 230 sq ft using sustainable farming methods. Apart from this, the various ecological benefits obtained from the experiment point to the fact that sustainable urban rooftop farming can be an innovative means to promote urban agriculture without harming the environment.