Chicago » Rooftop Hydroponic Garden Project Exceeds Funding Goal

via www.kickstarter.com

Alex Poltorak is a young entrepreneur who has launched a project called The Urban Canopy. His urban food production venture is yet another startup idea using crowd sourced funding. As of today, with the help of 180 backers he has exceeded his goal of $10, 000 and raised $13,280.

The funding will be used to continue Alex’s work on the rooftop of The Plant a former meat processing building in Chicago. He is creating a rooftop garden with the main feature being hydroponic tower gardens made from PVC pipe.

These are evocative of the Tower Gardens on the roof of the Bell Book & Candle restaurant here in New York City (prior posts here and here). These units, invented by Tim Blank, are amazingly productive and set an exceptionally high standard of productivity for vertical aeroponic and hydroponic gardens. The most recent project using these Tower Gardens is also in Chicago at O’Hare International Airport.

It will be interesting to follow The Urban Canopy project to see if Alex’s design will come up to the high standard set by the Tower Garden. Judging by these Flickr and Facebook photos, it is not there yet but the project is still a work in progress.

It is great to see projects of this type happening in cities around the country. It is particularly encouraging to see the results of crowd sourced funding as exemplified by Kickstarter.