Urban Farming Archives

One idea: The Twin Harvest Project

The challenges are clear, and the answer is just below the surface. Village Vancouver members have combined two "pillar technologies" of sustainability--both in fact age-old techniques--to bring Vancouver into the 21st century. The Twin Harvest Project combines urban organic farming with horizontal loop geothermal exchange to create an economic- and ecologically-sustainable synergy. To find out more, and view the full proposal sent to the City of Vancouver in 2009, visit the Twin Harvest project web site here, or download the full proposal here.

We have to work with what we have, including current conditions, and it is financial analysis likeion the urban farming page, albeit not the last word on the subject, that led us to look for stable ancillary sources of income from the same land. Just as many farmers work extra winter jobs away from the farm, we knew we also needed to consider other sources of revenue. We then realized the same large flat open space that our farm required would also be suitable as a site for collecting geothermal energy, and the combination would be potentially synergistic. Read more about the Twin Harvest project here. We are eager to start an organized lobbying group to push this project to fruition, at least on a pilot scale, on a City-owned lot in Vancouver. Some members of the early design team are considering shopping this idea outside of Vancouver and even BC because of the lack of interest here. San Francisco has already approved an urban market garden in a dense neighbourhood, accomplishing half of what we want. We'd hate to see such seminal Vancouver ideas become the groundbreaking technological innovations ascribed to another city. Please consider how you could aid the adoption of this carbon-sequestering, synergistic project by contacting us here.