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FARM

URBAN

Farm Urban

INTERVIEW

Do you envisage every house having

a Produce Pod or something similar?

How is it likely to spread in a best-

case scenario?

PM The beauty is that it’s completely

scalable, I would say the smallest you’d

go to is the Produce Pod. Everyone could

have one of those in their kitchen. And

then you could scale up from that. We’re

developing a living salad wall at the

moment that a business could have in

the canteen for the business – they’d

have a living salad wall for everyone, and

restaurants and bars could do that.

Our next step is to turn the space

we’re in now into a 200 square metre

vertical farming system. If within a one

or two mile radius you had one of these...

it’s not small, it’s kind of a commercial

scale system, with the communities

involved in the growing, kind of nodes,

around the country... that would work

quite well.

Would supermarkets be interested in

growing fresh crops themselves? They

seem to have a quasi monopoly on

food production anyway, so it would

make sense.

PM I think that’s what’s really exciting

about this, is that maybe supermarkets

will buy it, but do they actually need to?

Can you just sell direct to consumers? I

think the States are further ahead in this

than us. There’s an organisation called

Bright Agrotech, and they’ve developed

something called the Zip Tower. They

just had a $200 million investment from

Jeff Bezos and SoftBank, and they’re

looking to put these farms outside every

major city on quite a large scale. But I

don’t see why you couldn’t be selling

through farmers’ markets direct to

consumers and even into supermarkets.

JENS There’s also the idea that you can

actually grow within the supermarkets,

of course. In Canada they’ve done this

where they’ve got supermarkets, on the

top they’ve got greenhouses that are

growing the vegetables. In Spain, they

do live sales in the supermarket where it

comes off the roof or the basement, the

customer cuts off the bits that they want.

They’re literally harvesting it themselves,

so you couldn’t get any fresher. That

means its going to last that much longer.

Whether you do that in a supermarket

or a smaller kind of shop, all of these

are open questions, which is why it’s so

exciting. No one knows what the model’s

going to be yet.

Above

The Water Elf:

an Arduino and a

bunch of sensors

Above

Much gear was donated by Merseyside

Police – confiscated from cannabis growers