A Scottish farmer has opened Europe's largest urban farm in an abandoned factory in the Netherlands.
Self-study activity:
Watch the clip and anwer the questions below.
1 When was the Phillips factory built on the site?
2 Where exactly is the urban farm?
3 Apart from being self-sustainable, what is the farm meant to do?
4 What two things are the fish doing?
5 How many people does Mark intend to supply?
6 How expensive is the produce?
It started life as a television and telephone factory built for the electronics company Phillips, back in the nineteen fifties. When they moved out this building was left empty, abandoned, until now.
Look up! There's a sign on the site. The new residents have just moved in. We are now seven storeys above the city. We've escaped from the exhaust fumes and we're inside a lush urban oasis surrounded by sweet-scented tomatoes, silky aubergines and a patchwork of microgreens.
If you can be here and smell and feel and see and taste everything all at once, then you're totally consumed with what you're doing, you're not just shoving a tomato on your face so that you can have your lunch quickly.
The farm is designed to be self-sustainable and produce zero waste. They might not realize it, but these tilapia here are playing a vital role.
The fish are doing two things for us here. They're, they're producing our fertilizer for our plants, which is really important because in the city you don't have cows and pigs and sheep to produce the nutrients so we do that with the fish. And the other thing that it does is it creates a source of protein in the city as well.
Mark's ambition is to supply a thousand families a week. His initial challenge will be to convince those customers to swap their comparatively cheap supermarket produce.
I think it's a little bit more expensive therefore it really has to differentiate itself from what we now already find in the supermarket so it should be ultra fresh, ultra tasty, and the other thing is it is a high-tech nature, therefore some consumers will like this but others will probably prefer the traditional agriculture out in the field with their light from the sun and water from the rain.
This enthusiastic chef was the first to buy into the concept. If this pioneering project is a success, the team are hoping to inspire people in places like Glasgow, Manchester, in Cardiff to cultivate their own urban farm lands in the sky.
Anna Holligan BBC News in The Hague.
Key:
1 in the 1950s
2 on the seventh floor
3 produce zero waste
4 producing fertilizers and creating proteins
5 one thousand families
6 more than if you buy at a supermarket
