Film
The Farm Under the City
About
Director
Jordan Carroll, Brett Chapman
Producer
Lewis Coates
Sponsor
Quorn, Planet Shine, Waterbear Network
Running time
10 minutes
Country / Nationality
United Kingdom
Our Judges say:
Top class sustainable documentary about a micro indoor farming enterprise in Sheffield. Top quality - looks and sounds excellent, with a fascinating subject. Features a guest appearance by Sheffield music and food legend Danny Lynn too.Paul Hodgson Music Judge
Luke Ellis is a builder-turned-farmer that has set up an innovative new business in the heart of Sheffield’s industrial quarter. Leaf + Shoot is an underground vertical bioponic farm built in a disused spring factory. His closed loop system takes the food waste from local restaurants, cafés and businesses in his community and uses organic cycling methods including worm farms and hot composting to grow micro-herbs and vegetables beneath the streets of Sheffield. We follow Luke on his inspirational journey to revolutionise the way we all think about urban farming.
Sustaiability Notes:
The film was funded by Quorn and Planet Shine as part of their Pioneers of Food Film Fund and we gained Albert Carbon Neutral Sustainable Production certification for the production.
The film specifically showcases a brand new method of 100% sustainable food production by one man in a disused Sheffield spring factory. He uses recycled timber to create systems to hold the produce, uses food waste to create soil to grow the plants and an e-bike to deliver them to nearby businesses.
The call to action is to question each thing you're doing to see if it can be done more sustainably.
In pre-production, we completed an estimated carbon footprint with 'Albert' where we calculated the amount of travel we anticipated doing, how many days in the edit, how many crew we'd have to feed, how much equipment we'd have to charge, etc - all of this creates carbon and once you have an idea of how much you'll generate, you can find suitable ways to reduce it.
At this stage, we had a good idea of what areas would be the most carbon-heavy. Luckily, we were a very local production with a Sheffield crew and Sheffield locations. We were doing all the post-production from home studios rather than big edit suites, we could car pool between crew rather than all driving separately and we didn't have any set builds, prop buying or other departments that are carbon heavy.
At the end of post-production, we totalled our consumption to just 0.33697 tonnes of CO2e which would cost about £3.30 to off-set which we did and received our Carbon Neutral Sustainable Production certification.
