Delivering Hydroponic Salad via Drones and Being Paid in Bitcoin [An Interview]

Hydroponics, drones and Bitcoin. Three technological concepts that are used in a new project from the Parallel Garden team in cooperation with Parallel Polis. As we enter an era of social distancing, delivery of food by drone can be a pioneering act. We bring you an interview with the authors of the Hydroponic Flyer 2020 project.

Michal Zatřepálek, Radim Kozub and Jakub Hamata have been meeting since the beginning of 2019 in a working group called Parallel Garden. It is an initiative that originated in Parallel Polis (Prague, Czech Republic), and the team combines experience from the founding members’ careers: project management, law and landscaping.

In recent months, they have been honing the method of hydroponically grown salads indoors. Now they’re introducing their project to the world and would like to sell the hydroponic salad for Bitcoin and deliver via drones. First such delivery will be documented in a live stream on April 30th.

Parallel garden team. From the left: Michal Zatřepálek, Radim Kozub, Jakub Hamata

I asked the Parallel Garden team for details about their new project. Answers by Michal Zatřepálek.

What was your initial motivation for hydroponic gardening? Have you already had any experience with this area, or have you tried everything from scratch?

We started building and operating hydroponic systems from scratch. Our colleague Jakub Hamata, an expert in the field of landscape management, who in the past was even involved in projects in the Maldives and Zanzibar, of course already had perfect knowledge and experience with growing plants, but even he did not work with hydroponics before Parallel Garden.

It was a completely new topic for me and Radim. However, the use of hydroponics has long made sense to us as a component of our second Skywalk systems project, in which we use the heat generated during the operation of cryptocurrency miners. This created the initial motivation to gain an authentic experience.

Jakub was the first to propose building our own hydroponic system. Soon after, we succeeded in pursuing our visions and gaining support from the Parallel Polis community, which allowed us to place our first system under the main bar in Bitcoin Coffee right from the start.

We managed to harvest the first salads with no problem, and thanks to good communication on social networks, we received many positive reactions and offered cooperation inside and outside the community around Parallel Polis.

As a result, other colleagues began to join us and the ambition of our project increased. After a few months, we agreed to intensify our development and establish the Parallel Garden brand as a startup with a community dimension.

Parallel Garden logo

What does it actually mean that something is grown hydroponically? What are the advantages and disadvantages when compared to conventional gardening in a soil? Is there a difference in nutritional values?
Growing hydroponically generally means growing plants without using the soil. The plants germinate in a solution of water mixed with fertilizer. Although this cultivation approach seems futuristic and perhaps unnatural, it has been used thousands of years ago in some parts of the world.

A major shift in the efficiency of hydroponic cultivation began in the United States in the 1960s, along with the use of artificial lighting.

The main advantages of hydroponics include up to thirty times the saving of water consumption compared to conventional agriculture, as it is a closed system where water is constantly circulating.

The issue of drought has been significant in recent years, so we can expect to hear more about hydroponics in this context. Another advantage of hydroponics is the closedness of the cultivation system and full control over all inputs during cultivation.

So this is one of the ways in which we can sustainably achieve organic farming without the need for chemicals and pesticides. The possibility of vertical cultivation is also a major advantage, as hydroponics allow us to grow in multiple levels on a small floor space, and thus use the space many times more efficiently.

In times of constant population growth, the topic of efficient use of space for growing and feeding people on the planet is becoming more and more relevant.

From a nutritional point of view, hydroponics production can already be at the level of top bio production. It is not uncommon for renowned restaurants in the world and in the Czech Republic to use organic vegetables and herbs grown from hydroponics.

In the underground of Parallel Polis we can find your prototype of a hydroponic rack, in Bistro 8 restaurant there is a vertical hydroponics adapted for restaurant operation. Do you want to start the production of standardized systems for households?

Yes, that’s our aim. After a year and a half we have 12 active hydroponic systems. Thanks to the first models and our closest community and supporters, we were able to operate and test the systems in real operation, speeding up learning and refining details.

We are now responding to increased demand during the quarantine period and are completing a standardized model of vertical hydroponics on a household wall with a capacity of twenty plants.

Hydroponics must serve not only as an element for the self-sufficient healthy production of some vegetables and herbs, but also as a pleasant aesthetic element in the interior. In the current phase, we want to implement ten of these hydroponics for households and start with higher production volumes of this product line within a few months.

In Parallel Polis, we continue with the first harvests of a larger type of vertical hydroponics with a capacity of 120 plants, which is intended for cellars or underutilized areas of restaurants, apartment buildings and companies. Fresh salads from this hydroponics system will be delivered by drone to the first customer outside of Parallel Polis on April 30th.

Do you already have an estimate of how much such a hydroponic salad will cost? When taking into account the acquisition costs of equipment, operation, maintenance ...

The economic sustainability of growing in our hydroponics is one of the main goals of our project, so we follow these metrics from the very beginning and publish them on our GitHub account . We have a lot of data about each of our hydroponic systems, because it is part of our approach to building a project.

Open-source, measurability, transparency and continuous learning and optimization. Our interim record is the cost of $0.4 for a grown salad in proven organic quality. We are talking about quality grown without chemicals and pesticides and fertilized with a fully organic fertilizer. The quality is comparable to the salad grown in a small household/restaurant garden.

We achieved the record with the vertical variant of hydroponics, where the emphasis is on the lowest possible cost of a high-quality plant, with the proviso that the design can be more industrial in nature. With each optimization of the system, we reduce the cost of an individual organic salad and we will continue to do so thanks to scaling.

Let's move on to the Hydroponic Flyer event. Has the drone delivery been on you roadmap since the beginning, or is it a reaction to the current situation and the need for social distancing?

Partly both. The theme of drones as a modern technology has been live in Parallel Polis since its foundation. The specific idea to do this project arose in November 2019, as a fusion of our team's capabilities. In November, thanks to previous Parallel Garden activities, we connected with the community of drone racers.

We were fascinated by the connection on both sides, and during one evening debate after the Enviro Meetup, we came to the idea that even a one-kilo load would not affect the flight of the racing drone too much.

Thus emerged the idea for ​​the Hydroponic Flyer 2020 project, which is: To conduct the world’s first drone delivery of a hydroponic salad sold for Bitcoin. It is a practical implementation of an independent model (peer-to-peer type) in self-sufficient organic farming, economics and logistics.

The parallel approach in the practical project and, moreover, in the current situation of quarantine, makes the project even better understood by the general public. At a time of stricter hygiene requirements and social distancing, which we are all experiencing, urban cultivation in hydroponics and contactless drone delivery seem to be a completely rational alternative.

Test drone delivery in the interior of Parallel Polis.

Won’t a drone delivery within city limits run into regulatory barriers?

Of course, the intensity of regulation in this area is one of the challenges. Drone flights are comparable in regulatory requirements to sports aircraft traffic. Simply put, the current legislation certainly does not create a friendly environment for the application of drone technology.

Our approach is clear in such cases: We do not give up and we go looking for a solution to just do it. At the same time, we want to open a dialogue on the meaningfulness of current legislative restrictions and encourage the search for alternatives. This is a part of the "parallel" approach to modern technology.

What is the drone flight range in urban areas? And how far do you intend to fly on the first delivery?

The range differs for each type. Buildings generally reduce the signal range, which is also one of the important challenges for the future use of drones in delivery.

However, every challenge is solvable, and with our first delivery project, we have the ambition to signal that there are already teams that are able to successfully organize the first flights, including the legal consequences, and that it is time to have a constructive debate for the future.

The first delivery, which will take place on Thursday, April 30th, 6 PM (UTC+2:00) will be a delivery over a few hundred meters of distance. We’d like to open the topic and public discussion so that we can follow up with other official flights in wider cooperation. We are interested in building regular drone delivery lines for our hydroponics.

Watch the world’s first drone delivery of a hydroponics salad sold for Bitcoin - April 30th, 6pm (UTC+2:00)!

More information via the Facebook event.

This interview was originally published in Czech on Roklen.cz.