a big, maybe strange idea...

now all we need are lights, plants, tanks, fans, humidifiers... well, a bunch of stuff...

you know by now that i get these big ideas. if you don’t know, here’s the opening greeting: hi, i’m julian plyter. i get these big ideas.

here’s one.

on about 30 acres of flatish land, rural new york somewhere; say, catskills watershed, i build and operate a largely self-sustaining hydroponic farm that’s capable of producing enough food to be a viable source of just-comfortable income for myself and my family. the obvious hope is to be a model of sustainable, alternative agriculture, the promotion of local foods and green ethos, mutually beneficial business practices, and the spirit of the heirloom food tradition on which this country was built, and on which, as is my belief, the future of it depends. all of these concepts are gaining ground in the modern marketplace, but as the line between big agro and big organic gets ever blurrier, small farmers are the people who will keep real food - and real food traditions - alive. (have i done anything like this before? sure, on a scale of 1:1.362^-5.)

now obviously this all sounds audaciously idyllic, something thoreau might have hallucinated after eating the wrong thing in the forest. the concept has to be sustainable economically, obviously; it’ll be a business. one of the frustrations that contributed to this idea is that, working as a pastry chef, i’m constantly asked for strawberries in january. now here’s the thing: i am committed to local, sustainable produce. however, this commitment is difficult to extend to the point of telling customers "no" - there are restaurants that have the awesome luxury (and for good reason) to do this. for most, though, if you can make money, you should. so if a customer wants to give you money in return for an out-of-season and imported piece of fruit, well... ...and then you get into the true socio-economics of actually providing that fruit (jet fuel, impoverished workers, the whole nine), and you really wish you couldn’t. so, here’s the big question. if you can sell strawberries in january (and really, from an economics standpoint, when is there a better time to have that product in supply?), but you’re only really interested in selling what you would probably call "good food," could there be a way of getting "good strawberries" to market in january in the northeast? i say there is a model, and i say it’s not only economically profitable, but also good for the community, the environment, and the frustrated people who just want to serve good food. this whole blaming-the-customer for wanting off-season produce is cute, but honestly, business is business. do you think the tile-store guy would EVER want travertine in a living room? but would that stop him from selling 1850 square feet of it to someone who just wants it?

so here it is. on the 30 acres of land are 12 greenhouses. each is 1 acre (yes, 1 acre; i did say "big" quite clearly), and constructed of hollow-core clear plastic (lexan thermoclear, maybe?), a material that is not only lightweight and strong, but has the benefit of significant insulation properties from the hollows of air that run the length of each panel. its clarity and the use of reflective materials on the interiors will allow maximum use of sunlight – clearly the houses will be geographically situated to best advantage for sunlight – reducing the use of electric lighting. supplemental electric lighting, incidentally, will be provided by LEDs, which can be made to provide varying spectra of light depending on what the plants need, wasting less, and using significantly less energy to begin with. along the peak of each roof, there will be horizontally-oriented wind turbines, made of lightweight, clear polymer in a long double helix. these are extremely efficient, and they’re quiet, and they don’t carry a danger of spin-off (in case you don’t know what "spin-off" is when it comes to giant windmills, it’s exactly what it sounds like). plus, the crowd whose objections to wind-power are based on aesthetics (fields of windmills are pretty ugly, it’s true) shouldn’t get too grumpy. there will be rainfall reservoirs to reduce the need for municipal water; this water will be filtered using natural methods, and will provide for the bulk of the hydroponic solution, and for humidity in the greenhouses.

inside the greenhouses will be nutrient-film-technique (NFT) gardens. as the thousands-of-years-old hydroponic concept goes (think “Babylon”), nft is a new technique. it’s one of the most efficient and productive hydroponics methods, wherein plants are grown in holes along rails that resemble closed gutters - let’s call them gullies. the gullies are tilted slightly, and the hydroponic solution runs along the length of them, feeding, hydrating, and oxygenating the plants’ root systems. one problem with nft is that if the power goes off or the tube gets clogged, the roots are left dangling in air, and quickly dry and die. this has been solved in practice by using a substrate (think “material that holds a little water”) in the gullies. these gullies will run lengthwise in each greenhouse to serve as the farm’s “rows.” there will be two sides to each row, with the rails stacked in a v shape - in other words, as you walk down a row, there’ll be multiple gullies on either side of you, the ones closest to the ground also the closest together, and the highest ones the farthest apart. it’ll be like walking through an alien jungle forest trench. in addition to maximizing space, a major advantage to a long v-shaped trench is that this layout makes maximum use of light, and therefore maximum use of every energy-dollar and sun-hour. each row will be split into several sections, forming the farm’s “beds”; a single gutter wouldn’t run the entire length of a greenhouse. the solution will flow from tanks through the gullies, and it’ll be refiltered and reused. the best organic fertilizer is poop, we all know that. for hydroponics it seems that bat and seabird poop are particularly special. poop smells. a couple (dozen) of high-efficiency ozone generators should take care of that. one very self-sustaining model for closed-system hydroponics involves linking the plant systems with large tilapia aquariums. this option could be considered during a stage of expansion once the farm is operational. another, perhaps earlier possibility, is waterfowl livestock. again, this is to be considered as a potential expansion possibility.

so how much will all these beds grow? well, each gully is 12 feet long. the holes in the gullies (i.e. the plants) are 8 inches apart, for 18 per section. with three gullies on either side of each row (so each bed has six), that’s 108 plantings per bed. in each greenhouse, the beds will be 3 feet apart at the bottom, there’ll be four feet between the end of each bed, and between the rows there’ll be 18 inches of dead space to allow for maintenance. there will also be several feet at either end of each house for entryways, equipment, tanks, electrical, and such. accounting for all this, a 1-acre house (about 270’ long by about 160’ wide) could comfortably accommodate 34 rows of 15 beds each, for a total of 510 beds, or 55,080 plantings per house. all of a sudden we’re a factory. let’s talk about lettuce. if it takes 48 days to produce saleable hydroponic lettuce from seed, and we operate at capacity, we could sell just over 1100 heads of lettuce a day, with new seedlings arriving to replace the sold lettuce each day. let’s say we get 1.50 a head. that’s about 11k a week. in lettuce.

with those figures in mind, let’s call house number one “lettuce house.”

herbs are a biggie, too. name your price, you’ll sell herbs. let’s look at an already real-world example – agastache foeniculum; anise hyssop. I cultivated this hydroponically and from seed to harvest it took about 60 days. if we grow basil, tarragon, thyme, anise hyssop, marjoram, a mint or two, oregano, dill, chives, parsley, cilantro, chervil, rosemary, sage, lemon verbena, and maybe 8 or so others including some heirloom varietals, for say 24 or 25 varieties total, we’ll have 21 beds for each variety, or about 2200 of each plant. so on any given day, we should have about 3 dozen plants of each of 25 varieties of herb, that we can sell. (this is obviously an average; some – chives – will grow a whole lot faster, while some – rosemary – will take quite a bit more time.) if we get just two bunches from each plant, we’ll be looking at 1800 bunches a day. let’s sell those for just 2 bucks (a steal, too, trust me), so we’re looking at $3600 bucks in herbs, per day. let’s call it “provence house,” because it’ll smell like aix in may. we’re up to 32,6 a week. the really cool thing about the herb house is that even if we can’t sell it all, we won’t have any waste – we can dry the herbs and sell them that way, now, or later.

then of course we’ll have to have the whole strawberry thing covered, since that’s what brought this whole idea about to begin with. the cool thing about strawberries is that since they produce runners, and we need more plants all the time, they’ll take care of providing their own offspring. here, though, is where things get a little more complicated. strawberry runners need to chill for about 10 days before planting. about 8 weeks after planting out chilled runners (let’s take an adequate supply of chilled runners as a foregone conclusion), we should be able to clip about a pint of berries per plant. let’s plan on a modest harvest of only 6 beds (648 plants) per day; this will allow us to grow continuously, with about 2/5 the house dedicated to runner propagation. the yield to hope for is one pint per plant. in january, you couldn’t ever have enough at 8 bucks a quart; that’s a good price at the market in june. so if we have 324 quarts – a DAY – and even if we offer every aggravated pastry chef in new york an insanely good bargain for empathy’s sake – we’re talking about 3 grand in strawberries, daily. and we’ll split any leftovers between dehydration and jam – again, no waste, and again, income for posterity. with the opening of “happy house” we’re up to 48k a week.

next, the most alien landscape of all. the “brambles” will house raspberries and blackberries – always a commodity. this document is already too long. let’s just say, cursory research being done, that we could conservatively hope for 45 pounds of berries a day. with a half pint (maybe a quarter pound of fruit) selling for $3-$6 off-season, and assuming we’ll advertise the organic, local nature of our pristine berries and go with $5, we’re talking maybe another grand a day. $54,000.

then the “vines” – our tomato and cucumber emporium. it’s not hard to imagine, with a little haphazard calculation, that we could very easily come into ten grand a week with a variety of heirloom tomatoes and cukes of various shapes and sizes, so let’s not expound, and just say 64k.

now, we’re only at 5 houses, and we’re at over 3.3M per year. i’d say we’ve earned a little fantasy.

house six is the “unknown country” – with all due roddenberry homage. vanilla beans. let’s just see what happens; we can apparently afford an experiment of this magnitude, especially considering its overwhelmingly enormous implications. new york vanilla, enough said. (be it known that it takes years for vanilla plants to fruit.)

of course, there has to be a nursery, so house seven gets that honor. the over 50,000 plantings in each house will be a trifle compared with the hundreds of thousands of seedlings that can be packed into their own acre house.

then there’s peas, beans, and other runny-climby things. carrots, radishes, parsnips, and other roots (which would obviously require a different approach, which we’ll figure out). kale, spinach, chard, collards, and other heavier-leaved greens. broccoli, cauliflower, cabbage, and other things that are all basically cabbage. that’s eleven houses. any ideas for the twelfth? i’m thinking more herbs! or maybe a whole hydroponic acre of plants grown specifically for essential oil production. figure with all that space, we can get up to at least 4.5 mil, being conservative.

in the spirit of the heirloom tradition, i think it’d be most excellent to find a way to use the phenomenal resources of the National Clonal Germplasm Repository, a government-funded living-plant-tissue library in corvalis, oregon. they’ve already supplied me with the heirloom strawberry fragaria x ananassa cv. “Suwannee,” and the vision of a greenhouse full of it is what birthed this whole idea in the first place.

startup funding… yeah, i’d need that. the initial capital for build-out would be, to say the least, very substantial; figure it’d take at least two years before the first berry made it to market. the biggest annual operating cost would be labor, and lots of it (someone has to harvest those 1100 lettuces a day), followed by transportation. but any business idea that can conservatively estimate 4M in sales by the second year has to be worth a look, right? this isn’t a business plan; it’s an idea. a business plan for this would be enormous. tell me to write one and i will.

this scheme is obviously grandiose, as i promised you it would be. the trick here, though, is not to lose sight of the real picture. it’s easy to forget, in the face of how truly cool an operation like this would be, that its main function is to supply real food to a growing population, to provide rewarding jobs to people who need them, to localize the food economy in an import-culture, to bolster and help revive the heirloom movement that is both the past and the future of food, and, ultimately, to end the suffering of frustrated pastry chefs everywhere.

if the scheme is too big, which it probably is, let’s cut the whole thing in quarters. a million a year is still pretty good for a small farmer.