 I definitely think we should help Michael invest in a wireless presenter. That would be extremely useful. Now, I'm going to stand and talk like this. What I would have liked to do today is to actually bring the unit over, but unfortunately it was too big. There's no way I would have been able to carry it across the other end of Singapore. That sounds like a lot, but it's not really. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to tell you a little bit of where I come from. Most of you know that already. And the ideas behind hydroponics, how it works, where it comes from, and then what I'm working on. So where I come from is a land called South Africa, where we have a lot of space, a lot more than Singapore. And this is the Macawland flowers in the Western Cape. And when you talk about farming or growing anything, you usually think about something like this. And what ends up happening here is that you get a lot of water wasted, as you can see. And it's not really sufficient, or rather what I would say is efficient, because when you do distributed farming, what happens is a lot of the crop doesn't end up in the shops. Anything with slight blemishes or anything that's just short of perfect doesn't go to retail simply because nobody would buy it. So one of the things that people are thinking of is growing it yourself, and therefore inside of Africa a lot of people use gardens. Now I'm used to a garden like this. Something like this in Singapore would obviously cost you a lot more than an HDB flat. So for the past five years, since I've been here, my biggest frustration was that I couldn't work in a garden the way I used to. I'm going to carry on talking. Sure, sure, sure. You can see that side. Great. So just a little bit of history about how vertical farming and how how the product works and where it comes from. Yes, it was conceptualized in 1999 by Prof Despommier. I'm sure I'm not saying that right. And over the past five years there's been multiple different types of solutions that came up for different types of plants. And what happens is you end up saving a lot of space. You end up saving a lot of water simply because you're not watering the entire earth just to get to the roots of a single tree. You're only focusing on those roots. So the claim is, and it's a number that's being thrown around, that you're saving 90% of water. But I'm not really so sure about that. But it's still in the early stages and there's a lot of space for automation. So I think definitely if we're talking about how queer this is something that's really suitable for a lot of people, especially in Singapore. The sustainability issues mostly revolve around growing crops, that's what you call it in English. So English is not my first language. Staple food. Staple food cannot be grown using hydroponics yet when you're talking about rice, wheat, maize, those types of stuff. It's usually used over large swaths of land. So it's mostly focused on leafy greens at the moment. But again in Singapore that's a really good thing because salad here is really expensive. No, truly. And then the other issue with regards to farming is that you get less and less people being involved in growing their own food. It used to be that when last a few eaten anything that you yourself killed. Now these days it's when last a few eaten anything that you yourself grown. So it's becoming more and more concentrated and it's really a problem. So the idea behind vertical farming is that when you distribute it again instead of centralizing it what you end up happening is that you take away the factor of transport. Because most of the food, especially in Singapore when you're talking about 95% of our food definitely gets imported into Singapore and of that you're talking about 7,000 tonnes of food gets wasted every year. So the thing is if you grow things yourself you have more pride in it. Means you'll most likely eat everything that you make. But not just that, you'll also only harvest what you're going to eat. You won't overgrow, you won't overharvest. And the whole point is to bring the point of production as close as possible to the point of consumption. So the different methods. Let me just show you how it works quickly. It's very simple actually. You start with the germination of the seeds and you transfer it to... you grow your seedlings and you transplant it to your growth medium you use these little baskets to allow the water to pass over the roots and you stack them up in pipes that let the water flow past the roots and you feed them light and nutrients and then you harvest. That's a cycle. It's really as simple as that. How it only came across this in the 1990s I don't know but it's pretty awesome. So the one, there's about six units, six ways of doing it. The one way of doing it is to create a system whereby you have wicks hanging in the water and it simply draws the nutrients up to the roots. This usually would use some soil where the grunts can firmly hold themselves and usually you'll have an air pump with an air stone. The reason for that is to reoxygenate the water. Plants need nutrients, carbon and oxygen. The other thing is sometimes with a floating platform this you'll mostly see near the sea but not for growing plants. Usually they will grow seaweeds and things like that but it's the same premise. It's just a different setup. We actually float the platform inside the water as opposed to bringing the water up with the wick. After that, you'll see there's a different setup where the reservoir actually floats, pumps the water up and then it floods the entire system. The gif is not working at the moment but you'll see that basically what happens here is when the water flows up you'll have another pipe here where when it overflow comes back down it just flows back and circulates. Then again with soil you have the dripping solution same premise. You pump the water up, you let it flow down and you provide the necessary oxygen. One of the more recent popular ones especially for small desktop units is the misting solution where you have a nozzle that just sprays the water onto the roots as they hang. The most popular one for large-scale hydroponic solutions is what's called the nutrient film method. It just creates a thin film of water that passes the roots and it cycles back into the water. This is also the method that I've been using but you can see there's huge amounts of companies especially in the US it's very popular at the moment and in Japan. We're hoping that it comes to Singapore pretty soon. It's about seven vertical farms in Singapore. Two of them are used for educational purposes. One is for social purposes and the rest are all fish vertical farms. So we don't really have this type of setup at a large scale in Singapore yet. You'll also see there's two types, right? There's vertical farming on the horizontal plane and then there's vertical farming on the vertical plane. This one is a bit different from the other ones it's also a dripping solution. We have the gutter and the nutrient solution drips into the top and just flows past the root down and then they catch it back in the reservoir and pump it back up. So this is my solution. What I've done here is I've really struggled to figure out how I'm going to fit everything into one small space because I'm just getting my own space now and I'm not allowed to turn a place into a jungle as such. So I've... over the past few months I've been shopping around and seeing and looking into what format to use and the way I've done it was actually the wrong way of doing it because what you should be doing is you should be figuring out what you're going to grow first and then you figure out what you're going to build in order to house those. So what ended up happening is I ended up with a little bit of a Frankenstein. So at the bottom here you'll see the NFT the neutral method and at the top there you'll see the flood and drain. This one got added on later on as you can see. I ended up using one of our old bookcases to convert this. So what's going to happen here is you're going to have a tank at the bottom which will be around 40 litres of water which carries the nutrient solution as well and then the water has to pump up all the way to here which is about 1.85 metres up and within that gutter it will then flow down into these buckets which has a bit of a play there. The reason for this is because when you grow plants that specifically needs to flower and create fruit you need a lot more nutrients and a lot more water than you would in the traditional and you also need to hold that plant more steady. So at the top here I'm going to have chilies and tomatoes and at the bottom here which is the ones that's more suitable for leafy greens a whole range of salads and herbs including sage and rosemary is not needed and basil and all those. Yes Roland? Are you using the same nutrient mix of both species? The same what? The same nutrient mix? Yes, the nutrient mix is pretty standard. It's in terms of how you differentiate between them is in terms of the amount and the type of lighting you give it. So let's talk about the lighting. Lighting you're looking at three colour spectrums it's obviously blue, red and green but the very specific ones that's ideal for photosensuses is blue and red. Blue specifically around 448 wavelengths and red specifically around 624. So those three, those two that's why you'll see that most of the large scale commercial solutions it looks purple because they use a combination between red and blue lights. The combination for lights that you use to create a bigger plant to promote growth is a combination of one blue LED for every five red LEDs but if you want to promote growth of fruit you have to have more red. So you would then go and take one blue LED with every nine red LEDs. It's very much of an experiment you have to every time you want to install a solution you have to experiment with yourself and see what's optimum for the type of crop you want to grow. So here, when you talk about lights obviously to answer Roland's question as well the solution that I've come up with in order to make sure that these guys have more lights than these guys because they wouldn't need more is to just have a wooden frame added on top so that I can add more lights. I've had a lot of problems with this thing and one of the lessons that I've learned is don't skimp on the tools especially when it comes to drill bits because they break and if you're going to spend a third of the amount for a drill bit that's going to keep breaking you're going to end up spending more than you would have by just getting the proper good branded one. And PVC piping is a lot harder than you actually think it is. So I have one problem here that I would like to see if anyone here can help me with. I've got a couple of solutions that I was thinking of. I've got two pumps. One is from an aquarium for which the flow rate for this system is correct. It flows at around 8 liters per minute but it's not strong enough to get all the way up there. And the other one I have is strong enough to get all the way up to double but the flow rate is 50 liters per minute and that means I'm going to flood my place so I can't use it. So the solution I've come up with is either I use the reservoir at the top where I flood that reservoir and let gravity do the work but I only switch the pump on intermediately or I use a lighter pump and I found one for 30 liters per minute and then I use T-junctions to divert the flow part of the flow back into the tank and the rest upwards. Any questions? So with your light like this it means that it's basically where is it in your place? In my office? Yeah, I'm going to just stand it down there. I was actually hoping to add in the plants but I still had a problem with the flow so what I'll do is over this weekend once I've installed the solution I will start installing the plants and then I'll take a video to show everybody how it works and upload that on Hackware. I actually only have one more thing to say Saini is chasing me. I wouldn't be remiss to if I didn't say thank you to the guys from Upgrown this is my one picture. If I didn't say thank you to the guys from Upgrown they are distributor for Bright Agrotech who is the guys working with Kimbal Musk who is at the moment working on taking these solutions and putting them into shipping containers and just placing them all over the world to create microphones. So these guys have a distributor in Singapore and they haven't installed any of these commercial solutions in Singapore they are mostly dealing with the rest of Asia and China but they have helped a lot and if anyone wants their contact they do grow because they have to keep testing their systems they do grow incredibly amazing food stuff basil, rosemary, salads anything you can think of bok choy so if you want the freshest food you have ever tasted in Singapore let me know and I'll put you in touch with these guys Thank you Daniel Pumps