Member Article

Top Manchester restaurants back Biospheric Studio's urban farms

Manchester could soon become a world leader in urban farming, in which the city’s restaurants have their own food farms right on their doorstep producing the vegetables, fruit, herbs and even fish they need for their menus.

Ecologist and urban food pioneer Vincent Walsh is setting out this vision of ‘hyper-local food systems’ to a gathering of the urban farming movement in Manchester.

He is heading up the conference ‘MCR Massive Change’ tomorrow Friday May 1st, when he will launch his five year vision to create 50 ‘hyper-local inter-connected food systems’ across the North-west.

Held at SpacePortX in Lever Street, the event will assemble ecologists, technologists, artists, architects and planners to imagine how the future might look if all restaurants were supplied by their own local food farms.

Vincent is the sustainable food entrepreneur who has raised £750,000 to launch his Biospheric Studio, the urban farm on the bank of the River Irwell in Salford, which attracted world-wide attention as part of the last Manchester International Festival.

The Biospheric’s experiments included farming carp in giant tanks, and growing fruit trees and organic mushrooms. It won a prestigious Green Apple award for one of the top five environmental projects in the UK.

Now the first commercial flowering of that venture will bear fruit in June when Vincent begins producing organic shitake mushrooms for sale to restaurants in Manchester.

Two of the city’s best-known eateries have already expressed their interest in taking the Salford-grown fungi. David Fox, co-owner of noodle chain Tampopo says; “We tasted some of the delicious mushrooms when they were grown by Vincent, and they are perfect for our Korean Sesame Scented Glass Noodles, Thai Fried Rice and Japanese Ramen. We are very excited about his vision for urban farms supplying restaurants in the city.”

Also putting in an order is the 5-star Lowry Hotel’s River Bar and Grill, where the General Manager Adrian Ellis says, “We love the idea of high-quality food grown on the bank of the Irwell just half a mile away being served on the menu. The hotel is very positive about putting more local produce into the restaurant and we are supportive of what Vincent is trying to do.”

Vincent, 30, hails from Wythenshawe and is in the final stage of completing a PhD at Manchester Metropolitan University’s MIRIAD (Manchester Institute for Research and Innovation in Art and Design) in whole systems approaches to urban farming.

He says: “The Manchester city region is at the forefront of this movement. There is increasing interest from tech companies of working with ecologists like me to create new ways of making food production sustainable. It’s an exciting time to be launching the next phase of Biospheric.”

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by The Biospheric Studio .