2 East Bay companies redefine urban farming - Berkeleyside

Benjamin Fahrer at work at the Top Leaf Farms location on the roof of 2201 Dwight Way in Berkeley. Photo: Alix Wall

One hundred miles, give or take, from farm to table, is the ideal maximum distance for produce to be considered local. But there are some companies that are greatly improving on that goal — instead of triple-digit mileage, they’re offering produce that’s grown within just a few miles. Even better, when there’s a short distance involved, delivery happens by bicycle or on foot, eliminating any reliance on fossil fuels.
Traditionally, this type of urban farming takes place in abandoned lots, backyards or parks. But two new East Bay companies are changing up that paradigm.
Read more about Berkeley’s Garden Village building.
​The larger of the two operations is Top Leaf Farms, a rooftop garden at 2201 Dwight Way in Berkeley. The building, which was built by the Oakland-based Nautilus Group, Inc., is called Garden Village and functions as student housing for UC Berkeley. It was completed in January 2016 and Top Leaf began installing its garden in August 2016. By October it was up and running, growing produce in 10,000 of its 12,000 square feet of space.
Top Leaf Farms is in contract for another rooftop garden at Telegraph and 51st Street in Oakland, where the garden will be grown across 30,000 square feet of roof space. The mixed-use building will include apartments, as well as a Whole Foods’ 365 store. In fact Top Leaf is already gardening in the vacant lot on which the building will be constructed; that garden will be dug up once construction begins. While Top Leaf Farms is in discussion to sell produce to the new 365 store headed to the building, nothing has been confirmed yet.

Benjamin Fahrer uses a Quick Greens Harvester (made by Farmer’s Friend LLC) at Top Leaf Farms. Photo: Alix Wall

Top Leaf has just two full-time employees. Benjamin Fahrer is the co-owner, principal designer and farm manager, and he is a 20-year veteran of organic farming in such places as Ocean Song Farm and Wilderness Center in Sonoma, as well as Esalen in Big Sur.
No doubt he would still be farming in a more rural locale had he not fallen in love with his wife, whose career requires her to be in an urban environment — she is a physician at UCSF and performs in a band.
There’s been a bit of a learning curve when taking his farming skills to the roof of a building. For one, much less soil can be used because of weight restrictions.
“Agriculture is a contrived system where we impose a production system on nature to serve our needs to extract product,” Fahrer explained. “On a roof, it’s even more contrived in that it’s separated from the earth. On the ground, you’re working with nature, and here you’re working with concrete, steel and metal. Fabricated materials have a certain rigidity you can’t be flexible with.”

Whatever challenges a rooftop presents, though, are not apparent to a farming novice visiting the roof on Dwight. One can walk through numerous terraces and see neat rows of crops growing; it looks no different than a regular farm, except for the fact that you can also see the tops of nearby office buildings and past those, the Bay Bridge in the distance.
Right now Fahrer is growing numerous varieties of kale and lettuces, arugula, pea shoots, herbs, flowers and more. Fahrer said he’s already determined which variety of arugula grows best on the roof — they may call it “arufula,” or “aroofula.”
Top Leaf Farms
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​Top Leaf sells produce to the students in the building in limited quantities, but makes most of its income with its “RSA,” or restaurant-supported agriculture, as Fahrer likes to call it. It currently supplies six restaurants with produce and all are within a three-mile radius. These include all three of Charlie Hallowell’s restaurants (Pizzaiolo, Boot & Shoe Service and Penrose), Juhu Beach Club, Chez Panisse, Ramen Shop, Benchmark Pizzeria and Gather.
“Ideally the [building’s] residents would take the majority of food that’s grown above them,” Fahrer said. “But right now the restaurants provide a constant revenue stream.”
Top Leaf Farms has an advisory board that includes author and sustainability expert Raj Patel and former Oakland Food Policy Council director Esperanza Pallana, and is in contract to design a handful of other projects, but Fahrer said they are very particular about their clients. The company has had a few experiences where a developer asks for a rooftop garden with the latest green technology, but after entering into a discussion, “at a certain point we realize we don’t agree with the ethics of that development,” said Fahrer. “We’ve declined because of gentrification and the way in which they’re developing because they’re evicting people from their homes.”
The hope for the Temescal farm, which Fahrer expects will be finished in 2019, is for it to be “a worker-owned cooperative, where we can train and employ local people to become part owners, and create more of a livelihood from urban agriculture,” he said.

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