CENTRAL: High above downtown Hong Kong’s bustling, traffic-clogged streets, a group of office workers was toiling away not on a corporate acquisition or a public share offering but on harvesting a bumper crop of lettuce atop one of the skyscrapers studding the city’s skyline.
It’s rooftop farming taken to the extreme, and more about reaping happiness than providing food.
The volunteers were picking butter lettuce, Indian lettuce, and Chinese mustard leaf in rows of low black plastic planters on a decommissioned helipad on the 480-foot-high roof of the 38-story Bank of America tower, the scenery: a vertiginous panorama of glass office towers framed by lush mountain peaks and Victoria Harbor.
Hong Kong, with its skinny office blocks and apartment towers and busy, affluent residents, might seem an unlikely place for rooftop farming to catch on. The finance and trading hub has rural suburbs, but farming only takes up 700 hectares (1,730 acres) of its land and agriculture accounts for 0.1 percent of its economic output. Rooftop Republic’s founders say the appetite for their services is growing among Hong Kongers who are seeking a more sustainable lifestyle and concerned about where their food comes from.
“We have been getting more and more interest from people who want to grow their own food,” said Michelle Hong, one of the founders. “A lot of it is triggered by concerns about food safety and the realization that a lot of the food they consume might be laden with pesticides. I think people want to have more control and also more trust.”
