Mohamed Hage - The World's First Organic Rooftop Farm

mohamed

hage

, his friends run a successful

organic

vegetable

farm

there, every town has acres of flat industrial roofs, each of those roofs is potentially a garden, and for mo hajj and his colleagues at luffa

farm

s, the biggest and strongest are potentially farms. the

first

luffa farm, the

world

's

first

rooftop

farm, in fact, in an industrial district in northeast Montreal. The second is a few kilometers away, in the western suburbs. Every night, urban farmers work among the rows of fresh

organic

vegetables, picking to order, plucking with precision. what their customers have ordered every day, those personalized boxes of vegetables are delivered to strategic locations around the city, luffa farms are far from a traditional farm, in fact, mohais says they are not actually a food at all, it's a tech company, maybe it is, but still To me, it's a glimpse into the future of food, tell me why I'm dressed like that.

We asked everyone. We ask all guests to put on a Tyvek suit and shoe covers because we are trying to minimize the amount of bugs that come. From the outside, we grow our food here without pesticides, herbicides or fungicides, no synthetic size herbicides or fungicides, so we try to introduce other insects into the farm to create a level that really creates a balance on the farm where all the pressures of pests. They stay pretty low, so to make our job easier we would like all the bugs that are outside to join us on a regular basis, so this just helps maintain a level of separation between the outside and the inside to get back to what we I said there because you said you try to maintain a level of benign insects, I guess, or you should try to maintain kindness, actually, yes, absolutely, I think I mean the key to growing food without having too many problems is having enough insects, both good. and the bad thing is that they stay very busy and leave the plants alone.

It's so funny, once a week we would go and look for all the bad bugs, like aphids, and I'm not the technician. Here in Luffa, but I know roughly how it works and we basically measure the densities of bad bugs that we have on the farm and then we build a little software that will allow us to understand how those populations work. these populations will vary over time based on humidity and light levels and we introduce insects, predatory insects, into the farm to balance them out, things like ladybugs, parasitic wasps that we buy from various places around the

world

and they come in boxes. what we introduce to the farm and when, and this balance allows us to have minimal losses due to pests and keeps pest pressure quite low.

There are certain cases where we may not have enough aphids and where we could have a good population of ladybugs or parasitic wasps. but we might not have enough aphids, you know, which usually attack plants, in which case we could go and buy aphids, a different species of aphids that don't necessarily attack tomatoes just to keep our army in good shape in short. We're trying to copy what mother nature has been doing all along, yes, yes, and normally you're providing food for predators, in that case, yes, for both, yes, yes, and uh, but when your population of Aphids is low.

The reason for mentioning it is not that you want aphids, but that you want food for the predator. Absolutely yes, absolutely, we need to have an army that is always healthy as we see it and if we do, if you have a farm with absolutely no insects, you are very vulnerable because at the first sign of an aphid or a whitefly, you could have an infestation very quickly. , and if you had a good level of insects in your greenhouse, nothing really changes that quickly. it just floats, yeah, much more effective than trying to keep pests out in the first place, yeah, I mean you always want to keep new pests out, you always want to be able to control what you have in the greenhouse, just Build a new farm right now which has a technology that allows us to pass all the air through an insect mesh and maintain a positive pressure in the farm to prevent insects from entering so that we don't have to deal with the external insects, but we still have to deal with the insects internal, but when you have two or three species it's quite manageable, it's more so during the summer when you have dozens of species coming onto the farm it becomes a little more challenging, tell me. about the business model here because you're telling me no, tell me what you're trying to do because it seems to me as a consumer I wish you were in my city, so luffa, I mean, it's a very basic proposition, we want to grow food. where people live and we want to grow it more sustainably, obviously without pesticides or fungicides, without capturing rainwater, recirculating all irrigation water, so there is no loss of water or nutrients, composting using half the energy, half the heating energy, mainly, you know where you are in Montreal.

We need a lot of energy to generate heat and, more importantly, not use new land, so about seven years ago we started working on this new concept and it was a very challenging project. People looked at us and said, "You're crazy, you have no experience." in plant science and architecture in growing and distributing food, uh, however, you want to reinvent the way we look at food, the way we grow food, the way we distribute food, uh, and when we look at it At the beginning of the project it was a bit of a child's dream, you know, a bit of an idealistic vision of what food should be like, food should be grown in cities, could it be grown perfectly by local people?

Should they bring it to me? same morning they are harvested and we go from that idea to this, huh. through a huge amount of innovation and hard work and we had to rethink the way we plan our crops, the way we manage the farm, the way we think about distribution and software has been at the center of all of this I mean, I like to think that it is thanks to technology that we can grow in a more natural way. What an interesting concept. Technology allows you to be more natural. People come into the farm and the first thing they see, they see us wearing Tyvek suits. they see software, they see people with laptops, ipads and they are doing well, is this really natural? you know you're there it's too controlled uh we like to think we pick the best of the best technologies but we can't do it without technology I mean we.

Um, you know, when I look at the challenge that we have here today, if we had it, if it weren't for the software that manages our microclimates that gives us a different temperature, humidity and irrigation for each group of plants, we wouldn't be able to. to grow without we don't need it, we couldn't grow in polyculture, we would be growing in monoculture, so technology allows a lot that, if someone harvests a head of lettuce, we automatically know. that lettuce is in demand and we schedule more lettuce to plant, so technology allows us to have a seed-to-table type process where we understand our customers, we understand their needs, we understand the growing cycles of the plants and we can create a system of dynamic growth that is truly self-adjusting, so there are a number of different areas where we have implemented technologies to simplify our operations to make sure that we are also more efficient.

Efficiency is incredibly important at the end of the day, we need to make sure that our food is not only amazing, but also affordable and that is a direct correlation between that and efficiency, so we work very hard to make sure that we are monitoring our costs, we are monitoring our efficiency and We can deliver food at competitive prices. Who is your typical consumer? Our typical customer is a Montrealer, a local person who loves good food and understands sustainability. I think we only sell our food to consumers with a small subscription. type model um so you get a weekly basket of luffa uh you can see what's in your basket and change the contents of your basket we start with loofah vegetables and we complement our production with productions from around 40 different farms that are all in the area which share the same vision of sustainability as luffa, so these are potato, carrot, beet and onion farms and we have some local artisans who will bake your bread at midnight for your basket, soon we will have local cheeses and eggs too, so The idea is that we not only sell our own food, but we also try to bring together the best of the local community treasures for our customers and we have had customers for a long time. you know, all ages, genders, races, I think we all eat, that's what we discovered of course, but some care a lot, I think we really have two very strong segments, you have the food lovers and you have to the environmentalists and I think, you know, people love the projects, some people love the project for the environmental benefits and some people just love it for the food, we do a lot of tastings, we do a lot of open houses that we've had. ten thousand people visit the farm we have been in operation for over three years and we have had over ten thousand people visiting the farm to date we do open houses on a regular basis and people get a chance to visit the farm they get a chance to really hear our story but, more importantly, try our food and that's how we've been able to.

This is essentially what all of our sales and marketing does: people actually try the food and see the farm, see the Today we ship about 2,500 baskets, so we feed about 5,000 Montrealers with locally grown food and, although It is a small percentage, we consider it a good start and our hopes are to make entire cities self-sufficient with their food production, we know that what we are doing today is replicable. We know that there are enough roofs in Montreal and almost any city to be able to grow a good portion, if not all, of our fresh produce locally and a number of root vegetables we haven't gotten into that yet either, are you going to do that?

Also indoors and in a greenhouse, we definitely can, we've tried with radishes, we've tried with beets and we know that it's a matter of a lot of the crops that we grow today are the crops that are grown in greenhouses, but essentially you can growing anything, it's just a matter of really understanding how to grow it, what the conditions are necessary to grow it. this is this crop, so we grew radishes very well, we grew onions quite well, we ran out of space very quickly on our first farm, so we are looking to expand the project right now, now you have a great variety of vegetables. and also a wide variety of varieties within each vegetable, I'm sure they tell me a little bit about that, of course, the key, I mean, if we're going to be able to grow food, we're going to grow food locally, we might as well choose varieties that are It's amazing and, in our view, it is not the varieties found in the supermarket that were bred to be hardy, transportable, and essentially tasteless, because their taste has never been a factor in the selection of cultivars for a commercial farm in our farm.

We understand that we are working directly with customers and we have direct feedback on what varieties they like, so for example, we just planted our new farm and with the new farm we will have 23 varieties. of tomatoes, more than half of them are heirloom varieties that tend to grow very well on farms, but tend to be very difficult to distribute. They are very tender. They are very soft. They are unequal. You will have a tomato that is A small tomato that is huge, so for a commercial producer that is not always something very viable, but for us, because of our direct link with the customer, it makes it an excellent option, so We experiment a lot with cultivars that we use every time.

We change our crops, we have, we plant new seeds and the idea is to be able to provide variety to our customers, but also try to identify exceptional products, exceptionally tasty, walking in luffa is like walking in a living grocery store to a certain extent. you know you have your tomatoes, you have your cucumber, peppers, herbs, bok choys, lettuces, we have about a dozen microgreens, we had strawberries not too long ago, so we are always trying to experiment and bring in new crops and we hope that over time we'll even be able to grow, to expand that list, I think I read somewhere that you were already doing something with over 40 different vegetables, between now, between this farm and the second farm, our overall list of cultivars will be I think 120 130 different cultivars .

Yeah, one thing that really stands out to me is that you've already said it two or three times. Amazing food, good tasting food,taste sells the food, etc., you know, this is one of the things that I've always noticed that in a lot of environmentally friendly crops, the food doesn't taste as good, you know, the idea that taste is one of your main criteria, I think it is an innovation in itself. I mean, it has to be, I think this is what we eat food for and it's really interesting, we've found that people ask all the time, what is it, what's the correlation between flavor and growing methods and how How do we explain it?

Are you? I have seeds, so by choosing the right cultivar, we actually have a variety. I don't know if we still have it, but we had a variety here that just doesn't taste good. I know we planted it, we tried it, the whole team tried it and we realized that this is not a good tasting tomato, so the Tomatoes taste very, very different from each other, so you must choose the right seeds. The second element is to really make sure. that you are growing properly that you are giving the plant all the nutrients it needs a plant without nutrients will always have nutrient deficiencies it will never grow properly it will never form correctly the fruit will never be as tasty so you need to make sure that you have good growing practices we monitor our water weekly again the notion of science we do a water analysis weekly to understand exactly what nutrients are in the water what nutrients are missing and we can add to our water the nutrients that the plant needs this way we maintain a good balance of all the nutrients and the plants will be healthy at all times and they will have exactly what they need and finally it is the harvest, harvesting things like tomatoes when they are actually ripe uh you will you will see a two to three week delay between a green tomato and a very red ripe tomato ready to eat uh and we harvest them we have this every morning just the red ones for the baskets of the day where else The tomatoes that you buy at the supermarket were harvested green and ripened through the process of transportation, shipping, etc. so yes, they will be red but they will not have the same sugars, the same vitamins and nutrients as a tomato that was ripened in wine and they are more expensive tomatoes the vine the ripening process is expensive for the plant it costs time it costs money but it creates a much better tomato so it's very simple to choose good seeds from a good producer and make sure they are harvested fresh it has taken you years to get it all may be simple in essence, but doing it is not simple, this whole project is uh, there is not a single challenge that is not surmountable , all challenges are feasible. but there are so many of them in series, I mean, when we started, when we started attacking this idea, we attacked the architectural and engineering aspect, we said greenhouses were built to be on the ground, they were never built to be below. national building codes, how can you take this structure that is not suitable for construction in a building and put it in a building?

So we worked with engineers and architects for over a year and a half to design the structure you see today. Actually, we have three. designs now, so we have three iterations of structures with each one, there are improvements, there is reduction in cost, simplification of installation, uh, and that was the first challenge and the project was abandoned twice during that process. I remember a moment where I remember the moment when my architect called me and said, "You know, you're a great guy and you have a, you know, great idea, but, to be honest, it doesn't make sense anymore, you know, "I think you know for your own good, I think you should stop." this and we had several scenarios like that where it just didn't seem like this was really feasible when we completed the when we were sure that we had a structure that we could install in the city, the next process, the next challenge that we had. we assumed was how to grow responsibly we knew at that time that we knew at that time that we had to reinvent the way we grow food we couldn't use pesticides essentially we couldn't use the same amount of energy and heating that a typical farm used we had to grow in polyculture because we wanted to have that direct link with the customer and we couldn't just we can't do it with just tomatoes um and we knew we had to find a more efficient and effective way to do polyculture on a farm so we rented a farm at the intermediate university here in Montreal for two years and we started farming and we planted a little bit of everything uh Lauren who runs the farm she's the co-founder and she just took on this challenge as she knows her challenge and we experimented and the crops They didn't look very good in the first year They looked much better in the second year We did grow tests, we did taste tests, we analyzed With the nutrients in tomatoes, we really understood what it would take to grow good food and if we could do it or not in a commercial style and when we launched our first farm, I mean, the learning continues obviously, but we were comfortable enough. that we could get it up and running and start farming this way, exactly like this farm and as time went on we were able to set up more technologies, more processes, the team evolved and I think we are now at a point where we are confident that we have This works, you know, polyculture grows food without pesticides, recirculates water, composts, uses less energy and creates a workflow that allows us to harvest in the morning for baskets or for same day deliveries.

Yeah, I want to make sure we understand when we get it here, what happens is you have ripe red tomatoes here tomorrow morning, people will harvest them and tomorrow the consumer will eat them if you want, I don't know. Who said this, but someone said that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic and you know we like to see what we are doing today as magic, I mean we, as a customer, uh, you are, you are, you are able to log in? Go to our website and customize your basket and you'll say you know I want tomatoes and because I'm hosting a bunch of Italians.

I'm going to buy some basil and I'm going to get some Lebanese cucumber and I want some bread, honey, some cheese and some chard and essentially you have until midnight to customize your basket and at midnight all the action happens at midnight, we lock the order so you can no longer play with your basket and you send emails to everyone involved so our harvest team receives an email at midnight telling them what to pick up for the day our baker starts baking at 1 a.m. exactly what was ordered for that customer and everything comes together around 7 a.m. to 8 a.m., in a small space that we have in the building here where we assemble boxes, now we assemble up to 6,700 boxes a day and the We carry our consumers in bulk, so we put the boxes on pallets and We have three trucks that we are not very proud of, but now we are feeding quite a few people with them.

We take them to the delivery points and we have 120 delivery points in Montreal in bulk for each delivery. 20 boxes and customers begin to collect their boxes from three to four in the afternoon and they have the night to collect their box. Basically, you are picking up a box of vegetables and food that has been harvested and custom ordered. For you, this is the same day, it is incredible, it is an incredible achievement to be able to, it is a first-class logistical challenge, isn't it in essence? When you look at it this way, it seems daunting, but it's actually incredibly simple. the fact that you are not the fact that this is your warehouse this is your refrigerator uh you are harvesting what you need the baker bakes what what you need makes it very, very simple I think there is a lot of love in this By doing this, the People take pride in the fact that you wake up at midnight, you come here at four and five in the morning to harvest food for yourselves and I think that's really the point of that.

It works because there are people who are incredibly passionate, there are people who are very proud of what they do, what they produce and people who want to make sure that they are part of a new way of eating a new way of eating I mean, I'm originally Lebanese and I have very lucky to have grown up in Lebanon, where that's how we ate. The bread was always warm when you bought it. The meat. came out came out of the cow you know you went to the butcher and then he would just cut the cut of meat that he needed and sometimes there was no meat because I didn't know he didn't cut a cow that day um Basically, I mean I was lucky enough to know what the food and how the food tasted, and what we're trying to do here is recreate that experience, better food, local food from people you know, people here can say that I.

I know who my farmer is, I know who my baker is and I know what ingredients they use, how they make it, I've visited them, I've been to their open houses and I've talked to them on the phone, so this is a very much a dining experience. richer in general. Basically, you start from your experience in your village in Lebanon and you skip the industrial period and go straight back to it in a sort of post-industrial style. Really funny because it was the industrial period that got me into space, so when I want to say, I grew up in Lebanon in a town called Werdani, which is a very small town.

I think at that time there were 200 houses and all my cousins. and my uncles and everyone in my family is into farming, I mean it's a farming village and I'm lucky to have really gotten to see farming when it worked before the green revolution, I mean my grandmother put up nine of it . kids through college thanks to farming she did everything she grew local food distributed locally she never used pesticides because I don't think they were invented at the time or they weren't affordable and farming really worked the food was amazing and everyone knew it my grandmother and everyone could trust their food and and and and I've seen the transition to the green revolution where now, if you go to Lebanon, if you go to any my town, all you see are monoculture farms, uh, people growing tomatoes, Eggman cucumbers and These massive farms use a huge amount of pesticides, imported labor and sell their food to food terminals and do not make a living.

You know, they have one good year, they have four bad years and when I came here to Canada, all my cousins ​​told me to look at technologies and try to find something that could help us, we are suffering here and I did exactly that. I went out and started talking to all the big agricultural companies, visited a lot of farms and that was a big challenge. by the way, visiting farms is not easy, no one wants you to visit their farm, it was very difficult for me to get into the farms, they were essentially big, I like to call them big black boxes, they are the secret, you know, secret spaces, but it's total . property information is all property is you know, I never really understood why it was so hard for me to come visit a farm, it's agriculture, but I started doing all this, I started doing research and I started talking to a lot of farmers in North America. and It was so funny because no one here was saying the same thing, they said that agriculture in North America doesn't work because it's heavily subsidized and we still can't make it work.

We use a ton of energy in winter to keep ourselves warm. our greenhouses or we don't grow in winter, transportation is a big challenge because we take our food far from our farms and sometimes you know if you're in Quebec you have to ship it all the way. us and vice versa, they said it's hard to find labor, he said no one, Canadians don't want to work on farms, so we have to go to Mexico and Guatemala and bring people home, and you just know it and he didn't do it. work and they said that growing food without pesticides was impossible so you have to use pesticides otherwise you lose crops so it was a very sad and grim situation you know a situation and for me that was really exciting you know ?

I had talked to so many people that I knew that we had a tremendous amount of challenges growing food locally and I knew that the food didn't taste locally because I had stopped eating tomatoes when I came here and at the same time I knew that there were people you know all over the world They are working on better things, you know that in Holland there was a company called coppert, a company called in France called biobest that is making transportable insects that you can buy online and that you can introduce on your farm and These insects allow you to grow food without pesticides in California mainly because water sells cars.

They learned to recirculate the water and recirculate it at 100 so as not to lose water. We knew it. I knew one person who was crazy enough to grow up polyculture. and he was in Anguilla, um, so it was really starting to take shape and, and you know, at some point I think I realized that, hey, you know, universities have

rooftop

farms where they do research, so what? What would happen if you put all this together? It was an iPod moment where you know, you know, you know, theiPod didn't really invent any technologies, they brought them all, they put together existing technologies and patched them incredibly well, so we got to a point where we said, what?

If we do rooftop farms, you know? What would happen if we did polyculture? What would happen if we did? What would happen if we farmed without pesticides and managed water more effectively? And the CSA movement was pretty big at the time. What would happen if we just took the CSA program? We renewed it and implemented it. a lot more flexibility, a lot more software, a lot more communication between user and user and I created a new package for food, that's how the project really came about and my interest in all this was ignited by the fact that I was looking for a new structure, new technologies to help address the challenges my cousins ​​faced in Lebanon, isn't that a fascinating evolution?

How much of this can actually be exported to life, I mean how much is this helping you? It's helping Montrealers, but is it helping your family? You know it's funny. This concept can be exhibited anywhere, that is, in any city that has a roof over its space. come set up a rooftop farm and essentially farm on the rooftops and produce locally the challenge we have now is the cost of the technology is still too high it just can't be justified with the price of food in Lebanon you will never be able to do it viable and that is the challenge we have today.

I mean, our vision here is to be able to tell our customers five years from now and 10 years from now to eat local because it's better for you and it's cheaper, we believe that by farming more efficiently using fewer resources without land you can produce better quality food but also more affordable, so today we found out that it is suitable for North America, it is suitable for Europe, but we don't know yet. I think we have reduced the cost of the technology enough that we can deploy it profitably in areas like Lebanon or Bangladesh. I have a Bangladeshi friend who says you know what you have to come to Bangladesh.

We're out of land, which is essentially it, but we have a lot of roofs that would be ideal for that. Well, it should be cheaper, right? Because you're not doing it, you know everything, you're using all that energy to send great distances. We don't have to store it, we don't have to distribute it, we have no losses, we have almost no packaging, we use far fewer resources, the biggest challenge for us remains the fact that it costs much more to build farms on rooftops than it does on cots to build them in the ground, so I like to think of what we're doing as a whole new industry.

When you look at the solar industry, they started with something like four or five. dollars per watt and I think if not, I'm not wrong, they have come down to about a dollar or what I mean, as the technology matures and becomes an industry and there are more players in the space and the players are more essentially your your systems are more refined, the cost of technology will decrease and we are already seeing that our new farm was significantly cheaper per square foot per square meter to build than the first farm and that trend will continue over time and eventually we would like to get there to the point where it is as expensive or as cheap to put a farm on a roof as it is to put it on the ground.

Now on to the new one, do I understand that the building was built with This, as part of the design, we first look for rooftop space that is available and suitable, but we also work with the developers to design the buildings before we build them to that can include the correct weights and the correct loads. right transfer points to be able to take a rooftop farm and the advantage is that we can really maximize the space, I mean when we look at this space here, we take up about 75 percent of the rooftop where on our new farm we take up about ninety percent of the roofs, so we have much larger farms, they are much more efficient and the building is more efficient because what happens to the building is you insulate it and you occupy a larger area.

You're literally creating a big blanket on top of the building that reduces the energy consumption of the building quite a bit in the winter and summer because you have a nice cool space instead of a black tar heating mat. We are also reducing the cooling requirements for the building below, so there are benefits to both the building and the greenhouse from this merger. I like to think of greenhouses as clothing, in winter you can put a big jacket in the In winter we close our greenhouse, we put up energy curtains and they capture the sun and heat the building and the heat of the space and in summer it's like having a t-shirt where You know, the vents are wide open, you're cooling the farm, the plants are cooling the space, and we can maintain temperatures in the farm that are colder than outside, which is pretty remarkable, it's almost like a glass forest doesn't. it was. it's like the forest has the same effect the forest will give you the same cooling effect uh it won't necessarily give us the heat retention effect the glass gives you that heat retention effect in the winter in the winter when you walk inside and it's sunny, even if it's minus 20 minus 30 degrees outside, we don't use any heat, the sun, solar gain, I mean the plants will consume about 15 of the solar energy, the rest is heated, so making sure our our curtains are closed , we can consume a lot of you to use that heat to maintain the temperature that we need and many times we have to ventilate on very sunny days in the winter, we actually have to add some fresh air because the heat builds up so much, the gains solar panels are significant and that's another one of these beautiful integrations, doesn't the building itself benefit from having the farm on the roof?

We made a calculation. I estimate that this building will save 25 to 30 percent of its energy from its heating energy costs. With this farm on top, yes, you are doing continuous technology, continuous research and development, what are the challenges you are facing now? they're, I mean, obviously you've got this going, but I'm sure I gather that this is not the point where you're going to rest or stop, you're moving forward, we see ourselves primarily as a technology company, uh, we, what. We are trying to develop a new way of growing and distributing food and a new way of connecting people with their farmers and we see it as a technology company.

I think some of the main challenges we face. What we're addressing right now is how to scale this business and maintain the same level of efficiency and the same expertise across every team, so our vision for farming is centralized and based on cloud-based software, so we simply We are configuring ourselves correctly. now our network operations center that will allow us to manage our future farms, from our site here, so we will be able to do that because essentially, when you look at urban farms, they will never be your multi-acre mega farms that In many of the commercial spaces there will always be smaller farms with smaller teams and it's not always justified on a small farm to have a biochemist, a plant scientist and an entomologist, so what is our vision for doing this? a central team that can manage and support all our farms remotely, so two-way communication can be monitored remotely, a series of software, so a lot of efforts are being made right now to develop our operations center network and our software suite that will allow our supervisors and hopefully all of these farms around the world to apply the same principles that we have learned here today.

This is really an absolutely true networking model and which is which is again I mean this is an interesting period because networking seems to have come into its own in the last 10 years and the other farm that you can really see is like kind of a command and control monolith, not just monocultural, but we visited a lot of farms and what was really interesting is that every time we met a farmer or a farmer they would tell us that farming is part science, part art, We actually believe that agriculture is part science, part science and I think we won't trust it until we can actually apply it, apply scientific principles. and we think the science is very reproducible, it's very predictable and it will allow us to scale the model, so the vision is to understand what it would take to grow good food, from the cultivars to the crop cycles to our pest management. tools and create the network structure for people, tools and software that will allow us to apply it quite economically and deploy it en masse globally, so if we have a farm in France, it would still be managed at that time. here for the team here that is Luffa's vision yes, but you also have a local team in France, do you think about the franchise because it is or is there a franchise piece of this model?

I think eventually, ultimately, as our technology matures and we're able to package it, the number of models becomes really interesting, franchising, licensing, uh, the vision for us is to partner with entrepreneurs and operators that can take the vision and apply it. . but we are still at an early stage, we are still at the stage where we need to develop more tools, we need to prove the concept, we need to build some more farms in some cities, operate them ourselves and prove that this is perfectly fine. viable, I mean, a company that I admire is Tesla Motors, where they are building their cars, but they are also starting to support other companies and provide them with the drivetrains for their cars, I think they are working. with toyota and farmland have embraced mercedes in these cars so we like to think of ourselves as building our own concept selling direct to consumer, refining our technology but ultimately working with great entrepreneurs, great visionaries to expand the model in cities. and we can't do this, we can't create an industry by ourselves here's another question here you are and you grew up in Lebanon you came to Canada when you were 12 12.

Okay, now you're in Canada when you were a teenager. We're not more than twice that now we're not much more than twice that I just celebrated my 32nd birthday, I think there you have it, okay, so twice 16 years old, not everyone at 16, well, number one, people You have to have the vision, but I think. Many people have the vision, but somehow you have also had the business skills to achieve it. This is not something you did out of your own pocket. This is something that took an entire business. Tell me how it worked for you. I sure understand it.

I mean, I had previous experiences before running a software company for several years, so I was exposed to business in general, but this project was nothing like I expected, from a challenge perspective, and I think that was what I expected. he really made it work for us. it's the fact that we have an amazing team, you know that from the beginning, when you know I had this aha moment about seven years ago, and the first thing I did was put together an amazing team and I think this is, you know? My best achievement is hiring the best people you know, I think we have some of the best people working at luffa and they are incredibly motivated, incredibly energetic, they come with various experiences, just to give you an idea, you know.

I brought in my right-hand man in communications, someone named Kirtland, you know, he had a lot of experiences, creating businesses, business plans and communications, he was one of the first to join me on the project. A good friend of mine was a general contractor who just loved challenging projects and he loved it, he just loved the impossible, he's one of those guys that says I can do it and this was perfect for him. Lauren, who was a recent McGill B graduate in biochemistry, was eager to take on a changing world. challenge and something that is new and finally we went to Anguilla and we brought from Anguilla Howard, who has a PhD in plant sciences and was a crazy guy in Anguilla who operated a 20,000 square foot farm applying the cultivation of 40 to 50 different varieties . of food for a hotel because they couldn't import food from it, so they fit in very well.

The team really worked together for several years to make this happen and we brought on more people over the years. A couple of years ago, one of my partners joined me. He's a... who ran a venture capital fund and just understands finance and understands how to take this project, which is difficult to finance because you're spending a lot. of money to build these farms, so he has been a key member that is helping us in the expansion of luffa and trying to find a way to make the financing of our future farms efficient, because it isanother challenge in itself.

So I guess I mean and it's definitely a challenge worth taking on, it's an incredible problem to solve and you know, if we can do it, we can revolutionize the way we eat and we can also revolutionize the way cities develop. So it's incredibly exciting and it hasn't been easy and it still isn't easy, but it's a challenge that's really worth taking on and I think we all see this as a professional job but also as an incredibly personal effort, yeah, and it seems to me that you're having so much fun oh yeah, I mean between oh, right, right, I mean, I think this is for me personally.

I'm a geek and I love it. technology and I love achievement and I love taking on new challenges and this just brings it all together this is my hobby first and my job second yeah yeah let me get back to financing where does your guy find the real money? Are we talking here in terms of uh well, not IPO, but in terms of stock offerings, certainly from the beginning, so the first project was almost impossible to finance? Actually, you know, family and friends, it's a lot of I love the money that put it together. We successfully raised our first round of funding last year and there was a really interesting shift in mindsets.

About three years ago people looked at us like we were crazy and just said, you know what, you know, we've seen this before, you know, a lot of companies have tried it for a lot of people, I've tried it before, it just doesn't work. You know, it doesn't work, too. challenging, it is not an easy project, no one really believed we could do it. When you built the first farm, we started to gain credibility and people started to look at this and say, well, maybe there's something there and you know we can still get a lot of money.

Many of the banks were interested because banks like you know that they They like structured, secure long-term deals, but we were fortunate to have found partners on the financial side who really understood the vision and who were willing to commit their funds and support and aligned themselves behind this, so we raised our first round of financing that allowed us to build our second farm and some of the next farms, so we did that last year and now we are at a point where we have two farms and companies and banks are starting to see this in a more positive light. little different, so I think it's a very natural progression.

It's very similar to a lot of other industries where you know from the beginning that you're on the cutting edge, you know whether you like it or not, you're on the and then quickly you're on the cutting edge and I think you know what we are, we're at the stage now. which we're getting into. space and people are realizing that this makes sense. I mean, the interesting thing about luffa is that we feel like we are in a race, where the finish line is approaching us. You know that tomorrow our business will make even more sense.

You know we are. We are not shrinking as a population, we have fewer resources, less land, less water, less energy, people are demanding more of what they eat, so the really interesting thing is that if we can make it work today, it will work even better tomorrow. and that's incredibly exciting even in the six seven years that I've been working on this. I have seen people. I've seen people go from this is interesting to this is a no-brainer. Isn't what they've done so interesting? That's because yes, it seems to me that any of those dimensions that you just talked about is energy, for example, if you look at something like this compared to a huge monoculture that uses all kinds of petrochemical products, it is obvious that the equation of the Energy is probably the strongest from a heating perspective.

The number one expense for a greenhouse in Quebec or in Canada is heating because it costs a lot of energy to heat your greenhouses. We get about half of our energy from the space farm underneath, essentially every dollar that's used to heat the building we'll get, so we start with a platform that has a temperature of, I'd like to say, Toronto or Boston, so it's a lot warmer to start with than if we were in the countryside, uh, and the cities, the interesting thing about cities is that uh, then the worst, the coldest time of the day is 4 a.m. in the morning, not for us, it comes around 6 a.m. in the morning, where we have a little bit of sun and a little bit of light to combat that and the reason for that is, cities will retain heat much better than fields, buildings and masses and masses of concrete will retain quite a bit of that. heat, so overall from an energy perspective this is the best place to grow food, it just makes a lot of sense not to.

I mention that we get about 600 thousand dollars of free solar energy every year from the sun, so the roofs I like to think of the faces of the roofs as the sexiest part of the building, they just make a lot of sense, so that's from a perspective growing. from a distribution perspective, you're right, you're, you're in, you're in your customer base, so you're traveling such a short travel distance to reach your customers, eliminating losses, we have no losses, we have zero losses. on the farm because we are harvesting what we need for the day and anything that is imperfect we still sell to our customers as imperfect and the customers love it because it is better value so nothing is wasted our policy is nothing is wasted and that when you look at In that, compared to the traditional model where you know 30 to 40 percent of food is wasted, look at the carbon cycle and how that affects the carbon cycle.

It's incredibly impactful to be able to use 100% of your production. there is an amount of energy, uh, benefits, uh, the land is another big one, I mean, we farm without using new land, you know, this space here 40 years ago was a farm, yeah, and then you know, for 37 years, this industrial building occupied that space in this entire area. It was designed, it became industrial and all these industrial buildings came up, but now it's once again a farm and it's a different type of farm, so we like to think of this model as if you really know the reason why the company is called luffa.

I mean, that takes us back in time, I mean, six and seven years ago we were looking for a name for the company and, luffas, wouldn't you know? I kept thinking about the plan, the loofah, because in Lebanon this plant grows on the side of the building, I don't think we grew it there, I think it just grows on its own and takes up all the space on the roof and my mom, already you know, put these trellises up to support it because we love it because it shades the building and cools it down. Below the building he gives us a pumpkin that my mom will use for cooking and we would eat luffas for a long time and when she plants it, when the fruit becomes so big, my mom would let it dry and we would make the loofah sponges that we would use to bathe, so here is this plant that just sits in a corner, never bothers anyone, uses absolutely ignored spaces and gives us food, cools the building, so when we look at luffa, we look at you.

We know what we are doing today, we see many parallels with the floors we are occupying, ignored spaces, spaces that were actually heat islands that absorbed a lot of heat and did not serve the building, the city or the occupants much. we transform them into lush green spaces, we grow food, we hire people, we pay taxes, which is another big problem, paying so many taxes, uh, and we do it really without asking for much in return, that sounds straightforward, so their vision is that, Ultimately this is a concept that you develop and I suppose others elsewhere are working on similar types of things, but you develop it and it spreads around the world and you are able to help feed this vast army of people that we have. . produced, I mean, we definitely think this is the future for fresh food, uh, I mean, in Montreal we know it's needed, we did the math and it takes about 19 roofs, the roofs of 19 shopping centers to turn a city like Montreal in autonomous. sufficient with their food production from the perspective of fresh vegetables, tomatoes, cucumbers, peppers and lettuce, and we have 19 shopping centers, so when you look at the implications, you can make cities self-sufficient with their food production and when You look at North America.

We have many commercial roofs for industrial warehouses that would be perfect to make this type of model, so we really believe this is the future. We believe that today the cost of technology is still a barrier, but as it was for electricity. automobile or solar panels, but as time progresses and we are able to innovate and in parallel to that, as energy costs increase, I think we will get to the point where we will know that we will reach the moment of crossing the chasm where this will all make sense sounds absolutely wonderful. I'm a question that arises from that last comment.

However, you have 19 shopping centers and what kind of fabulous visual image these shopping centers have. growing the vegetables they sell downstairs on the roof, sure, but what they told you that you should forget about that came from the challenge of building the building on the roof, sure, and then you'll have to go to each of those 19 shopping centers and rebuild substantial parts of them to support this as it stands today, that's the biggest challenge is that when you look at new construction you can work with the engineers and architects to design. the building to meet the demand, but when you look at existing structures, very few existing structures are capable of handling the loads and infrastructure of a farm without any modernization, so they can be modernized, but it is generally a task very expensive and very uh, you know, it's not a very simple process, uh, but a lot of new cities are being built, a lot of new shopping centers are being built, a lot of new shopping centers are being built, a lot of shopping centers are being renovated and La Key for us is to intercept these projects from the beginning before they are executed according to their plan and join the engineering team so we can design the farm from the beginning.

Are you getting any interest from major food companies like? I'm thinking about loblaws and sobes and so on because it seems to me that if I were running one of those I'd be saying even if I didn't let you know even if it makes sense in all these other types of shapes just the image of having the greenhouse on the roof of my shop and the people below knowing that the cucumbers came from above, isn't that it? Wouldn't that be a tremendously sexy concept? It sure would be. Do you understand that I mean absolutely? I had a lot of interest from people in the food industry.

I know there are several companies in the same space with a similar model where they want to build greenhouses on top of grocery stores. In reality we believe that it is so. quite challenging, uh, mainly because a grocery store's consumption doesn't necessarily match a farm's production, uh, I think we had a discussion with a fairly large store where they were telling me that they sold a couple. hundreds of lettuces a day and we harvest a couple thousand lettuces a day or we have that so there's a mismatch between what you can produce and what you need to sell and we think we really like the way we're doing the distribution because It requires our clients to truly become partners in this project and commit.

When they make a commitment, we have some certainty of how we should sell our food so that we know that when we harvest the tomatoes, they you know, customer, customer, by, that creates a very good level of consistency and really eliminates waste because you have a commitment in each end and that model really works well and also provides We are great, I mean, we get feedback from our customers on every basket that we sell, they tell us if they liked it, what they didn't like, what they would like to see change, the different cultivars, they give us suggestions. recipes and we can quickly start connecting customers and creating a kind of community where people can exchange ideas and we see that happening naturally on our delivery sites where we have some delivery sites that have over 100 subscribers, you can imagine 100 the people run in, you know, between three and six in the afternoon to pick up their baskets, guess what happens a lot, they exchange phone numbers, they exchange emails, recipes, sometimes they exchange vegetables and there is a sense of community. that takes place and those are just some of the things that we think are essential when you're growing locally, you need your food to no longer be a commodity, your food has personality and you're actually creating a community on the other side of the equation. also by bringing in things from other farms and cheeses and I guess it could even be wine, but you know a wide range of different types of foods, you're building a culture for sure.

I think Quebec is really interesting. because people don't when they think of quebecThink about a lot of food being produced locally and it really isn't true that some incredible treasures are grown in Quebec. I mean, we have some of the best food here and I think the climate really helps contribute to that, the problem has always been that it's very, very difficult for these farmers who love agriculture, their passion is agriculture, it's been very hard for them to become truck drivers and, you know, go to Montreal and Quebec City. and they sell their food, so they haven't really been able to grow their businesses because they haven't had the market.

We like to think that our market truly represents an online farmers market where we display all the treasures. from Quebec that we have discovered and essentially it is a direct link to luffa and the associated farm so you know who the potatoes come from. our potatoes come from Mario Bessette, who is in the Laurentians and has about 100 acres and Laurentians and he I like to call it steak and fries because he grows beef and has a lot of potatoes, but we've been working with Mario for three years and he went from cultivate one acre to cultivate two acres to now soon we will cultivate four acres for luffa baskets, so we and before that he grew very, very few potatoes and it was for a very local market, very, very, very concise, so If we can do more of that, we can quickly start promoting local production. across the whole spectrum, from the potato farmer to the carrot farmer, to the bee farmer, to the dairy farmer, and then on top of that, there are a huge number of food artisans who are just magnificent, I mean, our baker, um, we.

We get our bread at a bakery called La Batapan which is just a couple of kilometers away from our farm and that bakery appeared when I ate my first piece of bread there, I fell in love and the owner is a chef who created the bakery because he couldn't Find amazing bread to serve in your restaurant. So he said, I'm going to make my own and it started and they make amazing breads and to me that's a treasure and that treasure is inaccessible to all the people in Montreal because it's in a small area, so, bringing it. to our market, we become a good place for batapa and can connect the rest of Montreal with this incredible treasure.

Yes, I think there is a company called Turinsol somewhere on the west island and from what I understand it consists of three couples or something and they set up this farm together as some kind of corporation so that by farming with three couples you get away of the curse of farming, which is that you have to be there all the time I have. I've never heard of this farm and we work with about 40 or 50 different food producers, but we're looking to develop that. I think for us the criteria is to be certified organic or not use pesticides or herbicides. fungicides so you have to share the same vision as luffa you have to have safe food yeah and then it's so true that in farming you can't really escape you know it's a seven day job it's like running a hospital . you have to attend or a daycare, you really have to take care of your children, technology allows you to escape, uh, it's really interesting because we monitor our farm remotely all the time and it allows us to go on vacation, it allows us to be on the beach and having our iPad and just looking at the temperature, looking at the weather cameras to look at the plants, that's another area really where technology has been very useful and people also listen to it all the time because you're spreading it across a fairly large group of people. , how many people do they want, I think the company has over 30 people right now, we have about 15, that's what I like to think as they are working on the future, they are working to improve the model, expand the model, they are really the people who are dedicated to making this a phenomenon and we have about 15 people who are in operations, from agriculture to distribution, customer service, etc., so you have half of your resources committed to research and the development.

Indeed research and development and corporate development yes, yes, that is an absolutely very high proportion and I think we always look at Lufa as a technology company. You know, we, we, we're just getting started. There are many more improvements that we can provide. uh, from cultivar choice to growing methods and even just making the experience more user-friendly for our customers, I mean, I remember, uh, you know, there was a time where a subscriber came in and said, uh I was really they were frustrated I was picking up a basket here in luffa and I was very very frustrated he said I came in here and I wanted to park and I couldn't find a place to park he said you know I don't know even if you The vegetables They are amazing, even if you are saving the world and saving Africa.

If you can't put a parking spot here, I'm canceling my subscription and my first reflex was, "Oh my God, you know we're here, you know, working seven days a week." we're exhausted, we're tired, we're trying to innovate to try to change the world and you're telling me about parking and and it's irritating and then it quickly occurred to me that you're right, you know, if we want to make This is a phenomenon, we have to be able to provide it to people what they need, we can't just tell people you know, sign up for luffa, support luffa, no, we have to buy this because it's better, because it's better food, it tastes better.

It's better quality, it's better value, you know, I think Elon Musk said I don't want people to buy my car because it's electric, I want them to buy it because it's an amazing car, that's how we see ourselves and it's because That's what we've got 15 people dedicated to improving that experience and making it so that it's not really magical. This is an absolutely geeky corporate model. We are all geeks at heart. We all love technology. We are all programmers. And we, your future is. all over the world but you are and you are taking very fast steps to grow even now tell me how you see your implementation of course I mean we are at a point now I always like to take different industries as a comparison I like to compare what what we are doing today with the electric vehicle, sometimes we think about what we are doing as the electric vehicle of agriculture to a certain extent and we are at a stage where we have the concept, uh, we have tested the concept to a certain extent, but still we are not ready to implement it en masse, if I can say that we still have to demonstrate certain, certain steps before this can really be before we can You can go out into the world and say that you know this is changing the rules for the development of new buildings.

Every new building must include a rooftop greenhouse, so I think we're at a point where we still have a number of demonstrations to do. We have to demonstrate that the concept is expandable in multiple cities. We have to show that we can get to the point where we are feeding, you know, five, ten, twenty percent of a city, with us, with this model, but for us, the future. is seeing this expand in every city, I mean, more and more of us live in cities, uh, and this is where this is for us, uh, it just makes a lot of sense, I think over the next five years we still have a lot of work. to demonstrate the technology, but eventually our goal is to change our vision as a city of rooftop farms.

We want to make sure that cities understand that this is the way to develop sustainably and that consumers realize that it is. can we get our food locally is in the immediate future that you have so you have prime number one in montreal farm number two in montreal farm number three in montreal or we hope that farm number three is actually in boston we have a team in Boston from two people in Boston who are dedicated to launching projects in Boston. We looked at Boston mainly because it is a very similar city to Montreal. We have several of our team members and founding members that are from Boston, so we see Boston as really the next city that we want to expand.

It's interesting because you obviously also have a very international flavor among your people, you have a group of people united by ideas, visions and interests. I'm a big believer that you live in a world that you know you don't live in and I mean, I think we have to understand that for this to happen you have to bring in people from all over the world. when every time we take a group photo it looks like a United Colors of Benetton commercial, you just have everyone represented there and we all love it because it brings new ideas, new ways of doing things and when it comes. to expansion, it really simplifies things because we literally have a person in every expansion city that we want to be in, we have people from Boston, we have people from France, we have people from Chicago, Toronto, so it really helps from that perspective too are those the next cities that I was going to say what is city number three what is city number four I think at the moment our focus is to get Boston up and running I think once there is a series of cities that will be finished after that, but we haven't done it yet, you know, we haven't really finalized, you know, that part of our expansion, but our focus is really on growing Montreal, we have a lot of projects here in Montreal, Montreal and surrounding areas, but also in Boston, yeah , and you will need in each city that network of people who can connect you with the other food artisans who will share the basket, sure it is a small team in each city, but the planned scientific team really remains. centralized here, that's how we're going to be, it's kind of fascinating, isn't it?

Because in one sense it's very centralized in that sense and in another sense it's very decentralized, I mean, you have to find another safe baker in Boston. absolutely absolutely in Toronto and the flavors are very different the language is very different but that's what makes eating local think globally it's just a local thing this is a really great example I mean some things are just done better at a global level. scale uh sometimes I like to think about what we're doing from an agricultural perspective: we're bringing to agriculture what Starbucks brought to coffee, you know, a very standardized way of doing things where you know you can come up with the best processes the best methods the best software the best tools the best communications but on the food distribution side it's incredibly local, you know, it's hyperlocal and even the decisions about what to grow, sure, I mean when we launched this project.

We had three rows of eggplants, you know, because I'm Lebanese and I quickly realized that there are not that many Lebanese, but our system automatically adapts if we don't sell as many eggplants, we grow sack plants, so we can adapt to each city in the that we are based on the micro micro requirements that exist now or possibly in the future, any public component of this because it would make sense for a government. To say yes, we would like to make this happen, it makes sense in many ways, we will give you a little incentive, we will give you a tax reduction, whatever it is, one of the challenges and opportunities that you already know about.

What we have had is in this first form. We don't have tax exemptions. I think we pay taxes right now as if we were. We pay about 20 times more taxes per square meter and square foot than a traditional farm. They are charging us taxes as if we had an office here because to date the assessors do not consider the farm and it has been a challenge because it does not create a level of play because we were where they have the greatest expenses to be able to operate and innovative projects in the heart of the city, We're seeing cities like Boston, New York, that are really starting to think about how they can promote urban agriculture, creating incentives in place, eliminating any taxes on urban farms because they understand that agriculture is not necessarily, you know, it's not Like running an IT business, the ability to pay these taxes is not necessarily the same.

So this project we have had to do financially independently. but in some ways it's been good because it's really forced us to look at our efficiency and create a form of farming that is truly independent. I mean, in my opinion, the first rule of sustainability is financial independence. If you're not profitable, you're not profitable. sustainable and I know that it is not applied perfectly because there are some inequalities in the model, but mainly the price of fossil fuels distorts the whole equation, but for me this project has to be financially viable and without incentives without help and if there are incentives, obviously we will benefit from them, we will accept them, but we are sure that it can be grown locally, reduce inputs and have a direct link with the customer.

This type of agriculture works even without incentives. but it could help you grow faster, absolutely sure, basically, research tax creditsscience are those of an event, the credits for scientific research in Canada, I think it's a great program because it really allows you, which is one of the reasons why we invest in technology, I mean, if we were in the US. You know, I know certain states might have similar credits, but it may not be the same scenario. I think Canada has really done something great by establishing these R&D credits because it allows people to hire scientific equipment, invest in technology and invest in projects that can be exported around the world and I think that by creating our network operations and the software package that will manage our farms, we will be able to stand out. uh for having done this and I think being able to benefit from the research and development credits is definitely a big plus, mohammed hayes, the young visionary who created the world's first rooftop farm.

If he enjoyed this interview, he might want to watch it too. our interview with brian brett, the poet-philosopher who wrote trauma farm, a rebellious story of rural life or our conversation with vandana shiva, head of navdanya, a notable network of seed keepers and organic producers in india for the green interview. I'm Silver Donald Cameron, please join. us again soon