 Growing your own vegetables, even in the most forgiving of climates, is a challenge that many of us are all too familiar with. But for Svalbard's residents, polar sun cycles that seed months of total darkness in winter and midnight sun in summer make conventional farming here near impossible. What's happening now, we're all kind of disconnected and that's what I've been trying to do is reconnect everybody back to to where the food comes from because we all take it for granted, you know? Good morning! Have some greens for you. Some radish for you. And some clover. We started to plant your other ones, so once it's ready then we will start to follow that, but for now we have this, so yeah. And the other ones are there, I can take the waste. Thank you. Long travel distances for food or for waste disposal of almost 1,000 kilometers between the Svalbard city of Long Yibyan and the Norwegian mainland mean that residents here are some of the world's highest energy consumers. Recognizing a lack of available fresh local food, international chef termed Long Yibyan local, Benjamin Vidmar saw an opportunity to change the way that food was viewed. So we started this in 2016. And we ordered it from Alaska, this dome, and then we put it back together and we had to put a lot of concrete around the perimeter so it's secured to concrete. Here we focus more to the leafy greens, herbs, we do some microgreens. Now we have some beets there. There's kale, radish, daikon radish, so yeah, we've just been growing. But we can grow and these kind of like the cold weather, so we don't have to warm it too much. We don't use any heat inside of here, it's only from the sun. So it can get up to 30 degrees when the sun is out and it can go down to 5-10 degrees when the sun's not out. Now it's about 8 degrees in here. And this dome is only used in the in the summertime? Yeah, only when we have light. So from end of May to about end of September, we can grow out here. And then the rest of the time we grow indoors. Fantastic. And leafy greens you've found to be the most kind of, I suppose for your system, the most kind of economically viable to keep this operation running? Yeah, well the thing is it would be so nice to grow tomatoes and cucumbers and potatoes, but we wouldn't make much money from that. So and all of this stuff comes by flight, so it's very expensive to buy and it doesn't transport very well. So so that's why we've been kind of focused on that. Using two main facilities, Benjamin and his team are able to grow in both the summer and darker winter months. By working around seasonality, Benjamin uses both indoor and outdoor facilities in order to maximize his productivity while minimizing any waste and energy consumption. So I normally just go through and open everything up. This is radish, the daikon radish. This is also more radish. And a mirror, because the mirror, yeah mirrors, he's the, he's the, we're the main two behind it. I just need to water these. But I, we're the main ones behind it. So like I kind of take over the greens and you know, keep them growing. And he does the delivery and he also takes care of the basil. And things like, things like composting. You mentioned that you're using compost from yours and other businesses. Have you seen it kind of rise at all in that since you've been actually don't want it to rise so much. No, because we don't have the space or the facilities to deal with it. So now we only compost what we deliver. Yeah, yeah, sure. So when this goes out, we take it back. But if you were upscaling that? Then we would take more. Yeah, for sure. We would take more because we would need to, but for now it's very small scale. But the thing is we make the possibility for our guests to compost. Who else is doing that in town? Everybody else throws it down the drain or they throw it in a garbage. So it's nobody else doing that. So tomorrow I will take this one, maybe this one, this one and this one. And I will put under the light and then it takes about another three days. And then we can deliver it. OK, what is the light to? It's going to turn green because now you see they're a bit yellow. OK. Longyearbyen's busy restaurant industry has absolutely welcomed a new option in Ben's locally produced grains. High-end restaurants like Funken Lodge now use Ben's homegrown ingredients to give their dishes a unique arctic edge. My name is Jelena. I've been working in Svalbard at Funken Lodge for six months now. Oh, it's... What do you get from the chips? I mean, this is amazing. Yeah. Especially, I mean, we are almost at the North Pole. Yeah. So this is exclusive, I would say, for Svalbard. And also it's sustainable and it's really cool. I mean, you don't even have this like in Gothenburg where I'm from. Yeah. I mean, if you don't have fresh things, you can never make good food. According to me, it tastes better. And of course, I mean, we grow it here. So it's always fresh. If we order from the mainland and it goes by plane, it's also bad for the environment. And also it usually just dies on the way here. So it's just bad and we need to throw it away. Anyways, so it would be best for everyone and for Svalbard's restaurant in general, if we could grow as much as possible here. So hopefully we'll get there. So, I mean, we're on a good way. Outside of growing vegetables, Ben also operates tours of the local area in his custom-built restaurant on Wheels. It gives Guess a unique insight into his operation, as well as a chance to experience local foods like Arctic reindeer, paired with his very own grains. Yeah, so it's a restaurant bus. We do tours, do the Arctic Toppa tour, we do Northern Lights tour. So you sit in there, you can drink wine, we serve some snacks, and then the kitchen is on the side of it. So the kitchen is like a food truck. And then the bus is like the restaurant. And you serve your produce and stuff. Yeah, that's the plan. Now we want to make like a set up where we grow our food, we serve it with our tours. And yeah, I can show you around, if you want to have a quick look. So once we get a piece of land, we will park the bus, we will park the kitchen, we will move the dome, set it up there. We're gonna buy a new greenhouse that's like a hybrid system that it's in the summer. It has like a reflective flap, so we open and we can use the sunlight. And then in the winter we close it and we use lights. So I don't want to use electricity all year. I want it to be smart. So when we have sun, we're gonna use sun. And when we don't have sun, then we will use electricity. Although it has taken Ben a considerable amount of time and energy to gain support for his project, local perceptions about growing are slowly changing. So what do you think about it? Do you think it's worth trying to grow vegetables here versus shipping them in from the mainland? Yeah, definitely. It's a step in the right direction to become more sustainable. So it's cool. It's a cool thought. I think people also worry about the environmental footprint that we make while living here. And we've been nice to reduce that. Since we've been doing this, there's been so many unintended consequences. Now everybody's trying to grow food and everybody's inspired to do something different. And they're all growing base and they're all sharing pictures of it and the University of Trump so people came here and they're like all PhDs and professors and this and that and they came here and they said, wow, if he can do this, we can do it. So now they want to set up some growing stuff in Trump so they're gonna name it after me as well. So this little project is inspiring so many other people and making people think that it's possible. You don't have to wait for it. What are we waiting for? That's the thing. What are we waiting for? We need to do it now. That's what we're doing for Trump. We're working to do it now.