Building-integrated agriculture

Building-integrated agriculture (BIA) is of the practice of locating high performance hydroponic greenhouse farming systems on and in mixed use buildings to exploit synergies between the built environment and agriculture.

Typical characteristics of BIA installations include: recirculating hydroponics, waste heat captured from a building's heating-ventilation-air condition system (HVAC), solar photovoltaics or other forms of renewable energy, rainwater catchment systems, and evaporative cooling.

The earliest example of BIA may have been the Hanging Gardens of Babylon around 600 BC. Modern examples include Eli Zabar's rooftop greenhouse, The Sun Works Center for Environmental Studies, Gotham Greens, Sky Vegetables, Top Sprouts, Cityscape Farms, Dongtan, Masdar City, AeroFarms, Solar 2, Lufa Farms, BrightFarms, and Big Box Farms.

The term building-integrated agriculture was coined by Dr. Ted Caplow in a paper delivered at the 2007 Passive and Low Energy Cooling Conference in Crete, Greece.

Applications of BIA are motivated by trends in patterns of energy use, global population, and global climate change. Specific observations include:

Proponents maintain that BIA is an environmentally sustainable strategy for urban food production that reduces our environmental footprint, cuts transportation costs, enhances food security / safety, conserves water, protects rivers, improves health, reduces waste, cools buildings, and combats global warming. For example, hydroponics uses ten to twenty times less land and ten times less water than conventional agriculture, while eliminating chemical pesticides, fertilizer runoff, and carbon emissions from farm machinery and long distance transport. Using a building's waste heat and solar photo voltaic panels reduces fossil fuel emissions that typically result from production and distribution. Rainwater catchment systems help to manage stormwater, much like a green roof.

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