extrapolating...

since my first post, i’ve heard from an experienced farmer, a smart potter (if that doesn’t seem relevant, think of creating something from a lump of clay and the ability it involves to foresee the way things will change shape, combined with the flexibility to conform along the way), and several experienced chefs, all of whom care deeply about quality food, and all of whom want to be involved. i’ve also had an offer of land use in just about exactly the area i was thinking about. all this commotion seems to merit another foray. so allow me to elaborate, and simplify.  

my first layout of this concept reveals (to me, and anyone bored or courteous enough to read my ramblings) the “cool” of the concept, without taking into account some of the ethical considerations (which, i assure you, are plenty), practical and financial considerations, and the potential ramifications of the project. here are a few.

first, let’s do ethical. it’s so much fun. i don’t know why this specific didn’t make it into the first post – perhaps i was just so enthusiastic that i failed to include it (this happens sometimes). it has been my intent since my mind wandered to this concept to donate minimally 10% of all food produced to the nyc charity City Harvest, which works to provision the city’s hungry. this isn’t for tax write-offs or accolades. it’s my belief that hydroponic applications have the potential to solve the problem of global hunger. indeed, it’s been postulated by many advocates better-informed than i that it could, given the concept’s adaptability to geographical and environmental conditions. the use of our produce to demonstrate this potential of hydroponics is as integral to the vision as any other point.

let’s talk about nature, too, since that’s the ethics hot button. hydroponics has come under criticism for being disconnected from nature, and that’s clearly legitimate, because in many senses it is. the romance of tilled earth and of planting it has put the “farm” in more than a few farmers. hydroponics won’t, shouldn’t, and can’t replace traditional farming. we’re not talking about a takeover. we’re talking about a supplement. let’s talk about cows.

no, i don’t want to raise hydroponic cows (and i’m not going to try to invent lactoponics or anything, so relax). we love to eat steak and burgers and try not to think about cows and – if we do accidentally think about it – we like to imagine that cows are happy. i’m not in the mood to run statistics on it, but i’ll bet that less than one tenth of one percent of the people in this country are fortunate enough to eat beef that came from happy animals. sure, there are happy cows. you’ve seen a pbs special about it, maybe you’ve even read michael pollan. (you should.) there are farmers that let cows “graze,” which, if you thought about it, you’d probably describe as the main activity of a cow. but i don’t think i have to convince you that most beef doesn’t come from those pioneers. (who, incidentally, are raising beef the way… well, the way the actual pioneers did.) if we were of a mind to have cows, as some people are, but we wanted to plant as well, would it make tons of sense to buy 100 acres, plant 80 of them (so we can hope for income from plants), and then cram the cows into the last 20 in barns and feed them grain pellets? wouldn’t it make more sense to let the cows eat grass, like they’re supposed to, on 90 of those acres, and then plant the last 10? like i said, i’m not in the mood for cows. i’m merely out to suggest that hydroponics has the potential to improve the land supply, beyond its proven efficiencies, by simply looking at the bigger picture: it uses less. which makes all the more room for cows, and for farmers that need the smell of fresh-tilled earth in their noses. there’s no reason we can’t all be happy.

another consideration in terms of nature is organics. let’s lay out all the cards. just like the beef people don’t want you thinking about factory farms, the hydroponics people (don’t you just know so many?) don’t want you thinking about organics. basically, growing organically is tough in hydroponics. the plants don’t use just water, obviously; there needs to be food for them. the easiest way to do this is to add a bunch of mineral salts (think “potassium sulfate,” “calcium chloride,” “sodium nitrate,”) to water, and call it nutrient solution. these mineral salts, to look at it first from the dark underside, are sometimes obtained as chemical byproducts from ginormous petrochemical companies. (and remember, we’re trying not to use petro- things.) the exact opposite of that is a form of advanced aquaponics. if you’ll remember my brief mention before: fish eat and poop and get sold and plants eat fish poop and clean the water and also get sold. we’ll talk about logistics elsewhere (and there’s a whole mercury conversation we could have too), but as to organic, it couldn’t be cleaner.

so why would anyone bother with petro mineral nutrient blah blah? well, it’s way cheaper, it’s way less work, and it’s easy to analyze (how much nitrogen, how much molybdenum (which, yes, is in there)). oh, and systems that use these minerals produce more plants. bass-gardening, let’s call it, is more risky, since unless you have regular access to a real laboratory, you can’t know how much copper or ammonium or calcium is in that liquid; you just hope the poop is rich enough in everything to feed the plants. which it usually is. but as to certified organics, it’s on the edge of impossible, under the current system, to get a hydroponic farm legitimately certified. and how could you expect it to? plants eat minerals, which are inorganic. which is the opposite of organic. even the bass garden is complicated; are you going to feed the bass organic fish food?

fortunately there’s middle ground in my opinion. more and more mineral salts are becoming available which are not derived from petrochemicals, so you can avoid the bass setup and its many variables, but still be eco. ultimately, all these minerals are available “naturally” anyway (which is why plants survive so well in the wild). calcium phosphate, for example, exists in cow’s milk and in the enamel on your teeth. we can avoid petro, and we certainly won’t be using insecticides or pesticides or irradiation or genetic modification (“heirloom,” remember), or any of the other things that people who buy organics want to avoid. we should be able to establish some social and economic value in a system like this. we’ll just have to create our own certification system. we’ll call it something annoying like “hydroganics.” there’s also “bioponics,” where you introduce bacteria (as would exist in soil) and often use fish poop and things like this. within this concept it is possible to be certifiably “organic.” to my mind this concept is too risky for a startup, but for an operational farm with reinvestable capital, it’s simply a matter of evolution potential.

the point is, we’re moving forward with the understanding that, while of course we’ll be as green as green can be, the actual product will be food that people can feel good about eating, even if we can’t get a certified organic sticker on it.

well i’ve blown up a huge entry on ethical considerations, so really cool practical stuff and really important financial stuff will have to wait. but since i never could wait (especially on the fun stuff), let’s at least have a preview of practical considerations, and ramifications (in addition to those few below i’ll repeat, “new york vanilla”).

there won’t be 12 greenhouses, and whatever’s left won’t be an acre each, for sure. (as pursuing this concept becomes more and more enticing, practicalities are more and more important.) if you did things right and things went perfectly, on one hydroponic acre of tomatoes you could end up with 300 tons a year. and i simply don’t want to deal with 1650 pounds of tomatoes a day. consider that heirlooms are less productive and that we’ll be just starting out; i don’t even want to contend with 500 pounds a day when i haven’t even checked on the lettuce, herbs, berries, vanilla beans, and everything else. let’s just say, to start, 6 houses, maybe a third of an acre each – 15,000 square feet, so maybe 100 feet by 150. lettuces, tomatoes, strawberries, herbs, something else, tropical. (we’ll group plants with similar environmental requirements – tomatoes and cukes, for instance – into shared houses. except strawberries. they get their own.) we’ll have seeding areas for each plant in the same house as the mature plants; it’ll cut down on transport and therefore transplant shock, and it’ll save us a dedicated house. and of course, while it’ll all be nft, not every house or even every section of each house will have the same, uniform, waist-high gullies. strawberries will be higher, so they’re easier to harvest, tomatoes will be trellised, etc.

some other fun things that i think of: there will be a house on the grounds, where i’ll spend time living, and where we’ll have a kitchen for making jam and baking things to take to market and for making a noontime meal every day for the staff, so everyone can come and sit at a big wooden table and be convivial. like humans. i’m even getting a big cast-iron dinner bell, count on it.

obviously there’ll be a large shed. a barn, even. should be able to do without the silo, though.

we can’t expect and don’t want to set out being that guy who “meets all your produce needs,” either. we’ll pick a few things that really get us going and be the guys who bring you the very best of those few things. tomatoes and watercress and thyme are exciting, but mint and strawberries are even more exciting. still more thrilling is the idea of lemon verbena, since it’s so exquisite (honestly i could live in a house that smelled strongly of it all the time and be a happy happy man) and its season is so depressingly short. the main focus of my research right now is what to grow and how much of it. as that becomes clearer, it’ll be possible to focus on financials, from the perspectives of both setup and revenue.

next time, we’ll go over what goes with what in which house and how much, and we’ll progress into finances. for right now, though, here’s a crop list.

• tomatoes – heirloom and heirloom cherries
• cucumbers – heirloom varieties, and fun ones too, like mexican sour gherkins
• leafs – bibb lettuce, watercress, arugula, leafy herbs, spinach
• strawberries – heirloom varieties like suwannee, etc, and maybe some alpines (it’d be really awesome if we could grow these in high enough concentration to make alpine strawberry jam, because really, no one does this, and it would be tremendously good)
• herbs – lemon verbena!, mints (like black mitcham), thyme, rosemary, marjoram, tarragon, and oregano and all that; maybe we’ll foray into hydroponic bay laurel and break new ground there as well (honestly though verbena is really exciting)
• vanilla – the house won’t be limited to vanilla, and it’ll be a fun one; there are many tropicals we can look at including. the vanilla house might be just the place for the verbena, too, which likes that weather
• maybe brambles
• maybe peppers or peas, beans, brussels, or broccoli

in the meantime, i’m going through my seeds to see what i should plug into my home hydroponic system, for season two. (i was going to go with suwannee, i’m just not sure if suwannee is going to go with me.) who am i kidding; alpine strawberry will probably win.

things are growing all around.

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.