Building-integrated agriculture

Building-integrated agriculture (BIA) is the practice of locating high performance hydroponic greenhouse farming systems on and in mixed-use buildings to exploit synergies between the built environment and agriculture. Building-integrated agriculture (BIA) is the practice of locating high performance hydroponic greenhouse farming systems on and in mixed-use buildings to exploit synergies between the built environment and agriculture. Typical characteristics of BIA installations include: recirculating hydroponics, waste heat captured from a building's heating-ventilation-air condition system (HVAC), solar photovoltaics or other forms of renewable energy, rainwater catchment systems, and evaporative cooling. The earliest example of BIA may have been the Hanging Gardens of Babylon around 600 BC. Modern examples include Eli Zabar's Vinegar Factory Greenhouse, Gotham Greens, Dongtan, Masdar City, and Lufa Farms. The term building-integrated agriculture was coined by Ted Caplow in a paper delivered at the 2007 Passive and Low Energy Cooling Conference in Crete, Greece.