Montreal (AFP)

A farm above the city, on the roof of a building located in a commercial and industrial area: organic eggplants and tomatoes take height in Montreal in the "largest rooftop greenhouse in the world".

A setting that is not conducive a priori to the cultivation of vegetables, but where a local company, Fermes Lufa, has just set up an organic greenhouse, according to her without equal in the world.

The size of three football fields, this greenhouse, officially opened on Wednesday, covers more than 15,000 square meters.

"The company's mission is really to grow food where people live, and in a sustainable way," Thibault Sorret, a spokesperson, told AFP in front of giant eggplant plants.

The new greenhouse is the group's fourth on the roofs of Montreal. The one built in 2011, which had cost more than 2 million Canadian dollars (1.3 million euros), was then the very first of its kind in the world.

Since then, competitors have swarmed around the world, such as the American Gotham Greens, with eight greenhouses on the roof in New York, Chicago or Denver, or the French Nature Urbain, which is planning one in Paris in 2022.

In Montreal, a supermarket has also been offering organic vegetables growing directly on its roof since 2017, completely green to fight against greenhouse gases.

- "Reinventing the food system" -

A native Lebanese, Mohamed Hage, and his wife Lauren Rathmell, an American from neighboring Vermont, founded Lufa Farms in 2009, with the ambition of "reinventing the food system".

At Lufa, around a hundred vegetables are grown all year round in hydroponics, in a container on a coconut fiber substrate, irrigated with a nutritious liquid: salads, cucumbers, zucchini, Chinese cabbage, celery, sprouts, but also fine. herbs.

Throughout the greenhouse, bumblebees pollinate the plants, while parasitoid wasps or ladybugs - beneficial insects - attack the aphids, avoiding the use of pesticides.

The harvests make it possible to fill 20,000 family baskets per week, all customizable and sold online at a base price of 30 dollars (19 euros).

This "online market" also includes products from around 200 partner farms that Lufa does not produce: bread, pasta, rice ...

On the ground floor of the new greenhouse, a huge distribution center brings together nearly 2,000 products offered to "Lufavores", customers, including restaurateurs.

The offer remains insufficient for certain vegetables, deplores a client, Catherine Bonin. "Peppers, I never have any", says this fifty-something, who however "adores" the quality and the freshness of the products in general.

- Beneficial pandemic -

"We have now reached almost 2% of Montreal with our greenhouses and our partner farms," ​​said the spokesperson for the company.

"The advantage of being on a roof is that you recover a lot of energy from the bottom of the building", allowing considerable heating savings, an asset during the harsh Quebec winter, underlines Thibault Sorret.

"We also manage to recover spaces which were until now completely unused", adds this native Frenchman.

Fully automated, the new greenhouse also has a "closed circuit water system", ensuring savings of "up to 90%" compared to a traditional farm, especially as rainwater is also available. collected.

The company "more than doubled" its sales during the coronavirus pandemic, a jump attributable "to contactless delivery from an online site," says Sorret.

"Profitable since 2016", Lufa now employs 500 people, around 200 more than before the pandemic, according to him.

The company is currently working on the electrification of its fleet of delivery trucks and is planning to export its model "to different cities in the world", starting with Canada and the United States, explains the spokesperson. .

“What's a little crazy,” he recalls, is that none of the founders “had grown a tomato in their life” before going into business.

© 2020 AFP