Heather Wray, Sarah Wilson, and Kyla Smith could have reacted in any number of ways when their proposal for an on-campus rooftop garden was rejected for the TD Go Green Challenge, an environmental contest that awards $25,000. But rather than letting the setback dishearten them, the three civil engineering graduate students scaled down their proposal and started looking for other ways to bring their idea to life. For the site of their garden, the students settled on the roof of the Galbraith Building, where they are also conducting their graduate work on drinking water.
After receiving a $500 grant from the University of Toronto Environmental Research Network, a group that funds student-run environmental projects, the students spent the next several months meeting with university officials and working through bureaucracy before getting final approval for the project in June.
“I think it’s great that U of T is moving forward with this more and more because I know that there are often barriers at universities across Canada,” said Smith.
The Galbraith Green Roof is one of several pilot projects underway with the University of Toronto Campus Agriculture Project, a group that wants to promote farming as a more efficient and sustainable means of growing food both on campus and in the city.
UTCAP now coordinates several growing projects across campus, including plots at Hart House and UTSC, a small garden next to the UTSU building, and a larger 100-square-metre space at Hart House Farm. Eateries across campus use some of their produce.
In a recent report, UTCAP notes that approximately 6,000 tonnes of food have to be imported daily to feed a city the size of Toronto. The report argues that among other benefits, switching to local sources reduces the city’s carbon dioxide footprint and provides more opportunities for multidisciplinary research in geography, engineering, and environmental studies.
Wayne Roberts heads the Food Policy Council, a local NGO that advises the City of Toronto. At a UTCAP-organized presentation last Wednesday, Roberts congratulated students’ efforts. Local programs like UTCAP helped make U of T the first among North American universities to certify local and sustainable food for on-campus use, he said. In 2006, the university certified 10 per cent of food served on campus as local and sustainable. Now that figure is at 25 per cent.
Roberts tied local and sustainable food models to larger food security and development issues. “We need to move our food economies toward more self-reliance, at least in terms of basic staples,” he said.
“The more you’re dealing in a self-reliance economy, the better off farmers are because they don’t have middlemen who are able to drive down prices that farmers get, and drive up prices that consumers pay.”
Concerns have risen over whether food grown in urban areas is safe for consumption. “Our studies have shown that in general, a person’s consumption of garden-grown vegetables is not sufficient to be of concern,” said professor Miriam Diamond in an email. Diamond, an expert on soil contamination, did agree that more research is needed: “However, we did not look at lead, where downtown Toronto has the legacy of leaded gasoline.”
Roberts responded that there are now adequate mechanisms in place to check for contaminants. “The City of Toronto provides a simple and relatively low-cost test to find out if there are any dangerous contaminants in your soil that you need to take some special measures with,” he said.
For the civil engineering students, their rooftop garden is growing. They were recently awarded a $5,000 grant from the City of Toronto to expand the project to a 50-square-metre plot, and have hopes of adding more buildings if their next few growing seasons are successful.
