ØSTERGRO FACTS • 600 m2 organic rooftop garden, five floors above an old car auction in Æbeløgade in Østerbro, Copenhagen, Denmark.
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• The ØsterGro rooftop farm is a Community Shared Agriculture (CSA) association where members pay 3,000 Danish kroner (400 euros) each year to receive locally-produced organic food in season. • There are currently 16 members but 50 families are on the waiting list to join ØsterGro. • The farm is run by volunteers but it is the plan to hire a part-time urban farmer, as it is not economically viable to operate such a big project with volunteer labour alone. In addition to income from the vegetables, the ØsterGro team has plans to offer workshops, courses, tours and events. For example, ØsterGro hosted several evening events during the food festival, Copenhagen Cooking, where guests could come and eat an organic dinner prepared on site from fresh vegetables and served in the greenhouse up under the evening sky. • A concern that urban gardening is often met with is whether the food grown is safe to eat. However, researchers at Copenhagen University found in a study from 2012 that it is perfectly safe to eat vegetables grown in urban areas. • ‘We are not labouring under any illusion that the people of Copenhagen will somehow become self-sufficient from urban gardens and agriculture, but we want to serve as a link between Copenhagen and organic agriculture for the city, inspire local organic markets and disseminate knowledge about food – whether it comes from rooftops or the countryside,’ said Livia Urban Swart Haaland, one of the team behind ØsterGro. • The overall objective of ØsterGRO is to create a platform for the dissemination of organic farming - both rural and urban - and thus link the city and country closer together. Much of the population now live in cities with no actual contact with the rural landscape, where food takes place. In many ways, urbanization helped us loose basic knowledge about how we grow and produce our food. By creating an urban farm, close to the consumer, Østergro seeks to create new connections and solutions between producer and consumer, and thus, enrich both the farmer and citizen.