The Environmental Capitalists by Making Billions

Author:Making Billions
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: CPI Group
Published: 2014-03-08T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 9.

One day I received a very strange request from a friend. Would I agree to be interviewed by an Irish journalist making a documentary about a new concept called “vertical farming”? The request was too unusual and intriguing to decline. So I accepted.

Trouble was I didn’t have a clue what vertical farming was. The journalist helped me out by explaining this novel concept. It turned out to be not so novel after all, since it was modelled on the hanging gardens of Babylon. The basic idea was that since more than 80% of the Earth’s arable land is already cultivated, the land that is left is located miles away from civilization. So, wouldn’t it make sense to farm in high-rise glass buildings, thus saving land and bringing food production closer to end consumers?

It emerged that the world’s first such farm was in the process of being constructed in Linköping, just two hours south of Stockholm. For me, the concept of vertical farming simply didn’t make sense. Knowing very little of the construction costs of skyscrapers, but assuming them to be very high, I couldn’t see how vertical farming could make economic sense once the cost of construction and supplying water and nutrients was taken into account. How could these costs possibly be offset by savings in land and transportation?

Ignorance is, for many people, a root cause of confidence; or more accurately, misplaced confidence. I am no exception. I proceeded to lambast vertical farming for the better part of an hour.

A bit later, I began to regret being so cocksure. I had already become jaded with the concept of sustainability. How could it be motivating just to sustain ourselves? I felt we needed bolder ideas, more audacious goals. We needed to create products and concepts that were new and wonderful, better and more attractive because they were resource-efficient and good for the environment. Sustainability seems such a depressingly modest ambition. Maybe, just maybe, vertical farms were just such a thing.

I decided to find out more about the company behind the vertical farm in Linköping. The company’s founder is a man named Hans Hassle. Having worked at his own public relations firm since the mid-1980s, he founded Plantagon in 2004. One of the strangest quirks of this bizarre company is that its co-founders are a tribe of Native Americans: the Onodaga.

Apparently Hassle met the chief of the tribe, Oren Lyons, at a conference and he asked Hassle to help the tribe find new ways of helping them move away from casinos and tobacco farming,”

It turned out that Hans had taken his vision of vertical farming far further than I had imagined. He possesses detailed engineering drawings of the 64-metre-high structure, zoning permission for the building and more than SEK115 million in assets on Plantagon’s balance sheet ready to turn his vision into reality. I remain unconvinced of the economic viability of vertical farms, although I would be delighted to be proved wrong once again. But I am certainly convinced that the first one will, indeed, be built.

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