Luca Gamberini and his team are exploring a new frontier for farming without harming the environment.
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00:00We want to access a fraction of that huge surface of the planet that is blue.
00:0714% arable land is what the agriculture system uses for 8 billion people.
00:14We cannot create new arable lands.
00:16What are we going to do in the future?
00:18We must explore alternative means of agriculture that do not affect that use of land.
00:24We need to explore different frontiers.
00:26My name is Luca Gambarini. I am vice president and co-founder of Nemo's Garden.
00:41Nemo's Garden is the first and only instance of human testing of controlled agriculture underwater.
00:51We make greenhouses, but we place them underwater.
00:56It's an air environment where plants grow.
00:59It's air inside and water all around it.
01:07Within the biosphere, there is a hydroponic system, a vertical farm.
01:11There is no soil inside and plants grow with different kinds of reservoirs that hold pods.
01:19These pods are a mechanical means to stabilize the seed and then have roots.
01:24Water streams flow through them, bringing them nutrients.
01:30Nemo's Garden was not easy to begin as a project.
01:34It was very hard to explain to anybody what we wanted to do.
01:37It was kind of ridiculous.
01:39Why would we want to grow plants underwater and what's the benefit?
01:44Water has a heat capacity retention which is very different from air.
01:48And we leverage that.
01:54You can have maybe 2°C or 4°C during the winter, but in the water it never goes below 12°C.
02:02During the summer it can be 35°C and plants might suffer from that.
02:07But inside the biosphere, we never go above 30°C, which is much more comfortable.
02:13That cooling effect is done without consuming resources.
02:17It's natural.
02:18Other benefits are that saltwater surface will naturally evaporate.
02:25Then fill up the volume with condensation, with humidity.
02:29This humidity is then harnessed from us.
02:32We collect it and use it for our plants.
02:36It's freshwater, which is basically rain.
02:40That's why we call it a biosphere because it mimics anything that happens outside in the larger scale environment.
02:47Within ImoxGarden we use absolutely no pesticides, no chemical treatments because we don't need that.
02:52No pest can reach our plants.
02:54We are underwater, between 4 and 10 meters deep.
02:58And that's again another resource that we have for free.
03:01No consumption of resources, of energy and no negative CO2 emissions.
03:07We're still very grounded in the idea that it is controlled environment agriculture.
03:13So it has to be data-driven.
03:18It's cabled from the biospheres directly to our land base, which we call control tower.
03:23We have data from sensors inside.
03:25And what we do is we collect water temperature, inside air temperature, humidity,
03:31CO2 levels, O2 levels, the illuminations in terms of measures of light and the spectrum.
03:37We have cameras so that we make sure that everything is fine,
03:41both for the divers and the underwater farmers.
03:44We can also monitor the plant growth.
03:46That visual data can also be streamed and fed to an algorithm
03:51that can actually give us information of how the growth is going.
03:54That information can be blended together with the data that we collect.
03:58We can see it from anywhere we are with a smart device.
04:02We don't need to attend the structures as much because we can remote control much of it.
04:09We have utilities such as pumps, which we can activate from remote wherever we are.
04:15We've had plenty of setbacks.
04:19Nobody has done that, so there is no book to go by.
04:22You can't read anything about it.
04:24We had to discover along the way.
04:26We are commercializing the idea,
04:28which means we need to make sure that the price is as low as possible.
04:33We need to rationalize it, we need to scale it.
04:35It's not easy.
04:36We need to confront ourselves with a market that is heavily subsidized.
04:40The price is low and we are used to it.
04:44We need to try the cost out.
04:46The price is low and we are used to it.
04:50We need to try the cost out.
04:52We are doing exceptional stuff, but we're still selling plants.
05:02I fell in love with Nemo during the years.
05:08We made the leap from something that was just fun
05:13to something that actually could help humanity.
05:19It also solves so many issues. They're so beautiful.
05:22It's really hard to put into words what it feels like.
05:26Underwater is a different environment.
05:28You are in space, so it is like being an astronaut.
05:32It's really hard to describe the relationship that you start to have
05:35with all the flora and fauna.
05:38It's really special.
05:41Nemo's Garden is a technology that can be replicated
05:44wherever there is a body of water.
05:46I like to think that Nemo's Garden can be the agriculture of the future.