By Benjamin Fahrer

Benjamin Fahrer is the Director of Agroecology and Land Stewardship for the Deep Medicine Circle, an organization dedicated to healing the wounds of colonialism through food, medicine, restoration and learning. He is also the founder of Top Leaf Farms, which designs and builds innovative, ecological rooftop farming systems (including Garden Village on top of a UC Berkeley student housing complex). Benjamin has worked in a number of places in California and New Zealand as a land designer and farmer, including at The Esalen Institute in Big Sur, Oceansong Farm and Wilderness Center in Sonoma County, and the Solar Living Institute in Hopland, CA.

These are edited excerpts from a presentation Benjamin delivered at the Bioneers Conference as well as from a subsequent interview:

Benjamin Fahrer is the Director of Agroecology and Land Stewardship for the Deep Medicine Circle, an organization dedicated to healing the wounds of colonialism through food, medicine, restoration and learning. He is also the founder of Top Leaf Farms, which designs and builds innovative, ecological rooftop farming systems (including the Rooftop Medicine Farm – 1 acre rooftop in Oakland and  Garden Village on top of a UC Berkeley student housing complex). Benjamin has worked in a number of places in California and New Zealand as a land designer and farmer, including at The Esalen Institute in Big Sur, Oceansong Farm and Wilderness Center in Sonoma County and the Solar Living Institute in Hopland, CA. These are edited excerpts from a presentation Benjamin delivered at the Bioneers Conference as well as from a subsequent interview. 

I have lived and worked in some amazing rural places before I met my amazing wife, Rupa Marya, who is a doctor at UC San Francisco, a musician, an artist, a healer, and a mobilizer. She has taught me so much and mobilized me for the movement. Because of Rupa, I’m now an ally to help deconstruct colonial capitalism for the betterment of collective health. She challenged me: “What if we grew food at scale where people actually lived and made a real impact?” To do that, she moved me to the city, and since then urban agriculture has fascinated me. 

I have been inspired by many people working in this area of Urban Agriculture such as Michael Ableman who runs Sole Food Street Farm in Vancouver providing jobs for people experiencing homelessness, and the Brooklyn Grange which enhances urban ecologies by building rooftop farms and green spaces in their city. The amazing work they are doing in New York with their rooftop farms inspired me to create Top Leaf Farms with an added goal of rewilding our urban centers with regenerative agriculture. 

Why do we leave the city so much to go out in nature? What happens when we go out into the wild? We are brought into awe and wonder.  It’s a place we go to seek inspiration. Cities are not designed for wildness. That space is usually pushed away. But what if we started designing for wildness in our cities? I believe that if we did that, our cities would be more inspiring to live in, and we could grow our food in those same spaces.

What does it take to design and build an urban ecosystem centered around a farm with food as the byproduct? The opportunity presented itself when a developer asked me if it was possible to farm the roof of their building in Berkeley. The answer was Yes and then they asked if I could design, build and operate the roof of Garden Village, a UC Berkeley student housing complex. This would be  my first rooftop project. There are 16 different rooftops, 18 total towers in the complex, so it was a pretty big and complicated urban space, but the developer believed in what I was doing. He said, “You can farm this roof, I know you can, what do you need?”

That was 10 years ago. It took 2 years to complete the design, planning and permitting. I first had to figure out what I needed to learn. How is the roof built? How do you build soil on a rooftop? We were limited by weight which meant we could only have  8 to 12 inches of soil. Growing and harvesting extracts nutrients from the soil, but to replenish it we can’t keep building more and more soil because a roof can only handle so much weight. So, we had to design our own soil blend with stable carbon, which we did with Bio-char. And to allow it to really come alive, we developed a mycelium web, the highway for nutrients to travel.  

We were in the process of trying to figure out how we were going to replicate these systems, when I gave a tour, and Christian Macke, a landscape architect, came up to me afterwards and said: “ I love what you’re doing. I came to the Bay Area with my firm to grow food but they didn’t go in that direction, so I went off on my own. I’d love to partner with you.” Christian took over the drawings and support on project management and as a team we wanted to show how rooftop farming could be built at a reasonable cost. On our 1-acre rooftop in Oakland we were able to build it for half the cost because we managed the build out with systems that are simple and highly functional.

The Rooftop Medicine Farm, operated by the non-profit Deep Medicine Farm, is one-acre in size and is the largest rooftop farm on the West Coast. The roofs are planted mostly with leafy greens and highly productive crops. We rotate the crops and intercrop using different plants with white Dutch clover in the pathways. We inject compost tea into the fertigation system and have planted wind screens that attract beneficial insects. After about a year-and-a-half, hawks, nesting birds and butterflies started using the space as their home; it’s a haven.

It has also become a home for the community. We started doing pop-up dinners and kitchens and other events. There are multiple ways that rooftop farming can benefit developers, communities, and the climate. We have designed and built over 50,000 sf in the Bay Area. Last year the Rooftop Medicine farm grew 20,000 pounds of food for the local community in Oakland. This year we hope to exceed that. The food from Deep Medicine Circle goes to the communities in the East Bay: People’s Program, Poor Magazine, Mom’s 4 Housing, UCSF Children’s Hospital, and EFAM.

The idea of farm-centric housing and “agri-hoods” (neighborhoods centered around a community farm) is an approach to re-imagining our food system integrated into where we live. The DMC Farming is Medicine Initiative’s mission is that no one goes hungry.

Top Leaf Farms has recently partnered with the Deep Medicine Circle, a collaborative dedicated to repairing the relationships that have been fractured through colonialism. DMC runs two farms: The Rooftop Medicine Farm in Oakland and TeKwa A’naa Warep, on the coast south of San Francisco.  Farming is Medicine is rooted in righting relationship with the indigenous community and is a “land-return” food justice project. We are working with the Ohlone Indigenous community to help break the historical patterns of colonial capitalism and to reimagine land use and agriculture in a way that advances racial, climate, health and economic justice goals. We’ve been working with the Indigenous community for over 10 years with a goal of returning land into Indigenous leadership. 

Highly traumatized Indigenous communities have not been supported by the  reckoning on the scale that needs to happen. They’re fighting to get land back; they’re fighting for recognition; they’re fighting for a voice. How can we support this and reach out and do it in a way that’s healing and restorative? How do we create a multi-cultural connection to be in right relationship with this stolen land? It’s not necessarily about returning land for complete Indigenous sovereignty and then we leave. It’s figuring out how we work on this together. It’s a difficult task. 

In working towards a resilient culture, I believe that begins with a reckoning of what we’ve done as a culture. We’ve stolen land, we’ve polluted the land and done a lot of harm to indigenous people. Apology and forgiveness need to happen as well as a return of stolen land and a welcoming back. The trauma of the past is something we all need to reckon with. I’m witnessing the trauma of others and myself  that gets triggered through this process. It takes a lot of effort; there’s a lot of work that needs to be done. 

Buckminster Fuller said that in order to make change we have to create a whole new system that makes the current one obsolete. So, at Deep Medicine Circle we began to develop the “farming-is-medicine” model based around the idea that healthy food is a human right. It’s a holistic practice that has the intent of making colonial capitalism of our food obsolete. Through the lens of “farming as medicine,” we value farmers as healthcare providers, as stewards of the soil and of our health. Deep Medicine Circle has a number of initiatives. Its main goal is healing the relationships that have been fractured through the patterns of colonial capitalism. We do that through story, art, farming and healing, and by working with a number of other groups to create a toolkit that other communities and municipalities can replicate, so that we can make food free as a public health charter. No one should go hungry.