S3, E17: Designing for a Healthier Tomorrow: Sustainable Greenhouses with Josh Holleb of Ceres

This transcript is digitally generated and may contain some errors.

Good afternoon. Or good morning, depending where you are. This is Jackie here from constructive voices. And I have a very interesting guest for you today, Josh Holleb, who is going to introduce himself now. He has got up at what I call fondly ridiculous o’clock to fit in with my time zone. So thanks for doing that. Josh, do you want to start off by introducing yourself and telling the audience a bit about your background?

[00:00:36] Josh Holleb: Yeah. My name is Josh Holleb. I’m my title’s systems integration specialist at series greenhouse Solutions.

We’re a Boulder, Colorado based greenhouse engineering and design firm.

We’ve been doing this for about 13, 12, 13 years now.

I have a background in construction, running organic farms, which eventually wove its way into cannabis as it legalized, which then eventually turned into trying to find a more efficient way to grow plants than indoor growing with high pressure sodium lights, which led us down this path into sodium super efficient and hopefully well designed greenhouses and things that are connected with greenhouse growing.

[00:01:25] Jackie De Burca: Now, Josh, before we delve into your company, which you co founded, what are your own visions for how your business can help to make a more sustainable world?

[00:01:36] Josh Holleb: Yeah, you know, our motto has always been designing for a better tomorrow, a healthier tomorrow, a healthier future.

I think the goal has always been, how can we do this better?

We live in Colorado, where we have very hot summers and very cold winters and 100 miles an hour winds, and it’s a hard place to grow things.

And we were working off really a European, the world is really working off a European model of greenhouses, and it wasn’t being questioned. And the Netherlands, it’s never that hot or that cold or that windy. And so we just were like, we need something different.

And so that’s, that was the baseline, and we’ve been working off that baseline ever since we got started.

[00:02:35] Jackie De Burca: Just talk about how. I mean, you’ve sort of described some of that already, but how did you come to, you know, co found the company? What was it that inspired its creation?

Apart from what you’ve just mentioned about Europe, obviously, it’s a huge decision to set up a business like that.

[00:02:52] Josh Holleb: Yeah. So I was actually farming and building greenhouses and other things, kind of one off custom projects, because I was a builder for farmers or people trying to grow things or raise animals.

And we have a little local newspaper in Boulder, and there’s a spring edition that’s like the gardening edition, you know, and I saw a little square ad that said, series greenhouse solutions. And I was like, that’s so odd, because I’m very plugged into this scene, and I’ve never heard of this thing before in my town.

So I reached out. I don’t remember if I might even have called it. There might have been a phone number at that point.

And I met Mark Plinke, who’s my partner in this business.

And Mark is a. Is a german chemical engineer. And so he was thinking about this as a third career, but with a very data based engineering science brain. And I was coming at it from a very much built environment plant place, because I had been working with plants for a while now.

And so I went and met with him at his house, and I said. I said, what are you doing? He told me, I said, well, here’s what I do, and here’s what I can do to help.

And he said, yeah, you should do that with us. And so he had a very. He had built a few small greenhouses. He’d gotten a USDA grant, which is a department of agriculture grant. He built a greenhouse. It worked okay, learned a lot. He built a few small greenhouses in his neighbor’s backyard who were excited about what he was doing.

And then we started to change the design and make adjustments and think about how easy it was to build because constructability matters, and then how the plants were doing. And from there, we were two people, three people, and we’ve evolved into. We fluctuate between 25 and 35 people, and we have projects all over the world now that we’ve been working on.

[00:04:58] Jackie De Burca: That’s an amazing story, isn’t it? So from that initial meeting to where you are now, Josh, you’ve obviously created, along with your team, lots of different models of greenhouses. Do you want to go through what’s available currently?

[00:05:13] Josh Holleb: Yeah, we really have a baseline design concept that goes through all of our greenhouses, which is we orient east west. So our long access is east to what? Our long axis is east to west, which is unusual for greenhouses. We use a lot of opaque, insulated, insulated metal panels, or sandwich panels, I think is mostly what we call them in Europe. So we use a lot of insulation in our greenhouses. We have a slightly different gable design than most greenhouses, but we take in south sun, and we insulate north walls, and then we use unique glazings. And for depending on what plants we’re growing in the greenhouses, we kind of customize, but we do little greenhouses. We’ve got, I think our smallest right now is 18 foot deep, and we call that a backyard kit. And then it goes into high yield kits. So we do a lot of 3000 square foot, 300 square meter standalone greenhouses. That’d be a small commercial greenhouse or a large residential greenhouse all the way up to 60, 70,000 square foot cannabis, high tech sealed cannabis facilities that have no venting and use heat pumps for heat cool and dehumidification, complete climate control. We’re working on a lot of large scale international ag projects right now.

We can do full water recapture. We’re developing a spaceship that we can detune for someone who doesn’t need all the technology or for people in the deserts who have no water.

We can grow with very little water.

It’s really exciting to see where it’s gone and knowing that we haven’t figured out all the things that we’re going to do or what are going to be needed in the growing space.

[00:07:11] Jackie De Burca: So it sounds to me, Josh, like you’re also having, like, a really interesting journey as you go along and, and create according to the various jobs.

[00:07:19] Josh Holleb: Yeah, we are. We are, you know, sometimes to a fault. Constantly evolving.

It’s often, where can we, can we please do the same thing twice? One time?

[00:07:31] Jackie De Burca: Difficult.

Yeah, I can imagine. So that sounds really cool. Everything sounds, you know, interesting. Going to work is obviously interesting because there’s always something new happening now.

[00:07:42] Josh Holleb: Yeah. I mean, this has been 13 years. Never have I stuck with something for 13 years, and somehow it’s still exciting. So that’s. That’s a good sign, I think.

[00:07:54] Jackie De Burca: Yeah, that’s an excellent sign. Now, apart from all the various sizes and different insulations, according to, you know, what, what the needs are and everything like that, you also have lots of different locations where they can be used and different purposes. Josh, do you want to go through those?

[00:08:12] Josh Holleb: Yeah.

Our traditional design, we were just having this discussion internally the other day, works the best north or south of 27 degrees latitude and so less equatorial locations.

We do really well in, in cold places. We are growing. We have people growing a lot of food in Canada, northern Wisconsin, Maine, New Hampshire places, Idaho, places where you really can’t grow year round. We have a lot of success there.

And so the same would work in South America, south of the 27th latitude. But we don’t have a ton of south american projects.

But we’ve designed things in Europe, in Bahrain. We’re working in the Middle east right now because we have infrared blocking and absorbing glazing technologies to help cool things because you can’t grow lettuce in the Middle east unless you can somehow cool a greenhouse.

And now we’ve actually developed a tropical style structure, which is actually a different shape because the sun angle is quite different with the thought of hurricanes, birds and rodents in mind for food production in tropical areas.

[00:09:41] Jackie De Burca: Fascinating. Really fascinating. Now, all of this tickles my imagination, I have to say. And it makes me wonder, because we do do a lot of interviews on constructive voices that are aimed and honed on nature positive outcomes and so on. And I just wonder how you would feature your greenhouses in various ways to achieve more nature positive outcomes.

[00:10:06] Josh Holleb: Yeah, I mean, you know, we, we have, we think about this often and we have the greenhouses and we also have a house that we’ve designed that’s kind of a kit house. So we ship a kit and it’s passive design, passive style, not certified, highly efficient, with attached greenhouse as well. And for all of these, we encourage electric climate controls, heat, cool and dehumidification on our house kits. We actually have a location where we’re creating shade for the house to keep direct sunlight out in the summer. But it’s also designed specifically to hold solar pv panels. So the general idea for us is, what are you trying to do? How do we get you there? In the absolute most efficient way possible, which usually means spending a little more money to purchase, design and purchase the building, but it also means that you’re ideally net positive, if not net zero over time.

[00:11:14] Jackie De Burca: Sure.

[00:11:15] Josh Holleb: And what we find is that especially with our greenhouses, they become little bursts of life. And so, you know, I was just in Wisconsin, in northern Wisconsin, we have a farmer. It’s pretty cold and gray in Wisconsin. In the winter, she grows lettuce.

She has a small CSA, it’s an organic farm.

She’s able to grow lettuce year round, all winter for restaurant clients without heat or supplemental lighting.

The balance there between inputs and outputs is really cool. Balance. Normally, I’d say in central northern Wisconsin, you have to heat it to actually grow lettuce. You can maintain lettuce, maybe, but to grow she uses our gas system, which is our ground air heat transfer system. It’s a climate battery system that we’ve tweaked and engineered. And she’s growing lettuce all winter.

And while she’s doing that, she’s starting her field crops in January or February so that they’re extra healthy. When she’s ready to put things out in April or May, her farm explodes way faster and healthier than all of her neighbor farms because she’s got this little life pod that she’s working with. And so, you know, it’s a built building and it’s kind of a functioning machine, and then it just like, explodes. Life explodes out of it. And it’s really cool to see that.

That’s what the plant life. And then there’s the whole community aspect to it also that these buildings do, which is a whole other story.

[00:12:55] Jackie De Burca: So going back to the concept of the fact that you’re working with, you know, Europe, which is obviously where I am, as I’m in Spain, I’m sure you’re going to say to me, how long is a piece of string or something along those lines? But let’s say I was to order a residential kit.

What kind of price ranges are we looking at?

I knew I’d have that reaction.

[00:13:20] Josh Holleb: I work with the big greenhouses for the most part, we are in the.

Let me think about this. 20.

So we design and supply.

We design a greenhouse and supply the materials, but we don’t build the greenhouse, especially in Europe.

But in Europe, it’s actually easier for us to potentially build the greenhouse because there’s just more of an infrastructure in place for that. And we actually do have a manufacturing partner in Sud Tyrol in northern Italy that we use to supply some of our european structures. But we usually say that we’re at about, for a vented greenhouse, $2,500 per square meter or $250 per square foot would be a built, functioning greenhouse.

The european greenhouse market is quite different than the american greenhouse market.

And so I don’t know if that sounds expensive or not, but that’s where it lands in the US anyway.

[00:14:21] Jackie De Burca: Yeah, I don’t know. I haven’t priced it, but I was very curious.

Yeah, no, we’re growing away, but of course, I’m in Spain, so it’s a different environment. Of course. So let’s. Let’s just go back to the ground to air heat transfer system, because that’s really important. Can you talk us through that in a bit more detail, Josh, please?

[00:14:40] Josh Holleb: Yeah. So the concept of the climate battery is not something that we designed.

It’s used often in permaculture. I learned it through permaculture.

But the general idea is that you’ve got pipes in the ground and a fan, and you move the air from the greenhouse to the ground and then back into the greenhouse. What we’ve been able to do is, because Mark’s an engineer, understands airflow, we’ve engineered it to a point where it is highly functioning, as efficient as we can get it.

And so the way we use it is.

We can scale it for any greenhouse. It can have one fan, or there can be five sections with five fans.

But when it’s, we’ll say summer, and it’s hot in the greenhouse, we can intake that hot air from the greenhouse and we blow it underground, and then we design it so that it’s at optimal piping lengths underground to transfer the heat out of the air into the soil. And then when the air comes back into the greenhouse, it comes out cooler. So we’re heating the soil and cooling the air.

In the winter, we can actually pull cool air from the greenhouse through the warm soil and heat the air, and it can work on a much more micro basis. Where we live in Colorado, it’s sunny during the days. In the winter, we’re actually cooling the greenhouse on a winter sunny day, heating the soil, and then using that heat at night to heat the greenhouse at night. And so that that Wisconsin farmer that I was talking about who can grow lettuce all winter, she can do it with her GATT system. It keeps her greenhouse at 48 or 50 degrees fahrenheit. And with one fan, she has two fans. With two fans, she’s heating her greenhouse. It will never freeze all winter long.

[00:16:45] Jackie De Burca: And another aspect is the ETFE glazing material that obviously enhances plant growth. What makes this superior to other materials? Josh?

[00:16:55] Josh Holleb: Well, so in the US, we have less glass greenhouses. The big conservatories are glass, but we don’t use glass in the same way that Europe has ETFe. It’s, I mean, I’m probably going to butcher it. And again, Mark, my partner, is a chemical engineer. So this rolls off his tongue, but it’s ethylene tetrafluorethylene.

And I don’t actually know what that means, but I do know what it does.

Traditionally in the US, we’re using, if we’re using a glass roof, we have to put a film on it for life safety so that if it breaks, it won’t drop and kill someone.

And that film usually blocks a lot of light and uv light and a bunch of other things. And it kind of makes using a glass roof not sensical.

So most people use polycarbonate. In the US, polycarbonate degrades with uv, and so they have to put a uv coating on polycarbonate. And so it’s a very durable glazing material, but it’s not the most effective blazing material. So we found ETFE, which is available, and I think, you know, as Mark would put it, a bunch of the big soccer stadiums in Europe are using ETFE over their roofs to allow in sunlight, but not weather.

And we are. We have a long supply chain. We do have some us manufacturers of ETFE. We also get it from Japan, we get some parts from Germany. And we’ve designed a system. So this is a. It’s a fluoride film.

It is highly durable. It lasts, you know, we say it’s a 30 year film, but no one really knows because it’s kind of new. It is full uv transmissive and highly light transmissive. We can. We can get it in different thicknesses based on weather. The biggest driver is hail.

Hail dictates how thick of a film that we use.

It can be diffuse, it can be clear.

And now what we’re being able to do is add infrared blocking or absorbing, which means we can not allow the heat to come into the building, but still allow the sunlight to come into the building, which is pretty fun. So somewhere in Spain, we might. Somewhere that’s hot all the time, we might actually use an infrared blocking film on the roof of the structure and never let the heat in.

But somewhere here, like in Colorado, we might use that, a regular film in the envelope of the building, which we’re letting in heat and light, but then add a secondary movable film with infrared blocker to let heat in or not, depending on the season. So in the summer, we might close the film and block the heat so that it goes back up towards the ceiling and then exits. But in the winter, we might open it to let the heat in to warm the greenhouse. So we’re starting to get to a point with ETFE, and then we can also do it multiple layers, single layer or double layer. We’ve actually done trip the first world’s first three layer ETfe install. I’m not certain that was the most effective use of time and money, but it’s doable. So what we’re learning is we can really control light levels, heat levels, and the most important thing is allowing in uv into the greenhouse. Uv is a. Is a mild stressor for plants, but in a beneficial way. Molds and pathogens and bugs don’t like uv. It actually knocks them down. And so we see greenhouses that allow uv into the space are much healthier.

It mimics outside better. So it’s a really exciting technology for us. It’s recyclable, it is long. Once it’s installed, it lasts a long time.

And high light transmission, uv transmissive. So it’s really exciting for us.

[00:20:49] Jackie De Burca: That’s cool. Now obviously, one of the things that has been grown a lot is cannabis. And you were featured in marijuana Ventures, 40 under 40. So I suppose this is like the Forbes for cannabis, I assume something like that. No smaller scale.

[00:21:09] Josh Holleb: I wish I was in the Forbes top 40.

[00:21:13] Jackie De Burca: But anyway, of course, that is still very nice recognition. And how has that influenced your career, Josh?

[00:21:19] Josh Holleb: You know, cannabis played a pretty important part in the evolution of series I. A past career that was in cannabis because I was a builder.

And through a sequence of events, the housing market in the US collapsed in 2000. 820 ten. That’s when cannabis legalized in Colorado, where we are. It’s the first state in the country where cannabis legalized. I had a whole building crew. I had everyone. And so people were just renting out large warehouses, and so we just moved in and started building out, built environments for them. Not knowing a ton, but having enough skills to do things, good things. So I learned a lot there. I actually ended up owning a retail store. We call them dispensaries here, as well as a grow just through equity of building.

And so we started series. It was not at all cannabis focused. We were building greenhouses for people to grow food. We were building for schools. But as cannabis commercialized and became more legal, cannabis was an obvious place where there was money and interest in controlled environment, agriculture, really. And so the cannabis guys were willing to take risks and push the limit of what people think greenhouses can do, and we were there to supply that for them. And so we were able to build some really, really cool, technologically advanced, led dimming, interesting glazing technology, large scale commercial greenhouses. And it pushed us, and I think it pushed the greenhouse industry pretty far, pretty fast.

We are still. I mean, we probably have 40 submitted large scale permits in Greece and several in Spain. You know, Europe hasn’t really turned on yet with the cannabis growing, but it’s now a smaller portion of our business. It was pretty. It was integral to our business at one point, but it’s there, and it will continue to be there. And it’s been a really great experience for us to have that push of both interest and money to get us moving at kind of warp speed into more high tech and high efficiency design.

[00:23:34] Jackie De Burca: Now, just staying with cannabis, even though I realize is not as important as it might have been. But what do you see from your experiences, Josh, what do you see as the main challenges and opportunities in that industry, and especially when you’re thinking about sustainable cultivation practices?

[00:23:50] Josh Holleb: What was interesting is that when there was not very much of it, it had very high value, which allowed people to do all this cool stuff. But the reality is that as a market, any market levels out, that value is not going to stay so inflated. What it allowed us to do is to develop these really high end, but highly effective and high efficiency greenhouses that, once purchased and built, are really, really cheap to operate relative to indoor grows or other ways to grow cannabis. And so we were able to just play with and tweak operation sequences and different systems that we were installing to make these things highly effective over time. And so we’re growing cannabis in all these weird places, you know, near Detroit and Massachusetts, in greenhouses which are not ideal greenhouse environments. We’re able to use the sun when it’s there, and we’re able to use led lighting, dimmable led lighting technology when the sun’s not there, light deprivation, as well as shade systems to figure out just the most efficient sequence of how to get a consistent crop over time, using the exterior conditions when we have them and using our interior systems when we need them. And that’s been a really fun kind of a dance, but a really fun learning process over time.

[00:25:19] Jackie De Burca: Let’s go back to the built environment. And one of the things I noticed when we’re searching before our chat today is that you also have glass architecture on your website. How is keddies working with this?

[00:25:32] Josh Holleb: Yeah, this is. This is newer in the past three years or so for us, and this is our. Our standard building. We think of ourselves as an engineering firm. I’m not an engineer, but we’re designing with efficiency for the most part. So our greenhouses are not always the most beautiful things. They’re highly effective, but we’re not designing them for style. We do have architects on staff. It drives them a little bit crazy, but they understand that efficiency and functionality is more important than the style, for the most part. But there are plenty of times where I. We need an event space, someone wants to do weddings, or we’re doing a large rooftop garden that’s growing, but also part of the hotel and needs to look really good. And so we have a. The architects are happy, but now we get to design things that are much more aesthetically pleasing.

And so we still try and maintain as much functionality as possible. You can’t have a wedding venue that. Where it’s cook 40 degrees celsius and people are sweating through their wedding outfits.

But. So we now have. We have a hotel here in downtown Boulder. They have an open space next door and they need to develop it, but they have some weird parameters. So we’re now working on one of these, a glass house. We call it enclosed space for them to be able to use it year round, summer and winter, and for it to look nice and function appropriately.

We see a lot of things in Europe that are pretty fun.

Grocery stores in Germany that have greenhouses on the roof that are growing the basil that they sell downstairs. These are.

[00:27:18] Jackie De Burca: That’s very cool.

[00:27:20] Josh Holleb: Yeah, it’s fun.

There’s no transport.

There’s a lot of cool things about it. It opens people’s minds, which is probably the most exciting part of the whole thing.

This is just another avenue of the work that we’re doing to keep pushing, you know, sunlight driven spaces into different places around the world.

[00:27:40] Jackie De Burca: Fascinating. Now, going back to one of the other subjects that I think is, you know, very, very important at this time in history, how do the greenhouses contribute to reducing food deserts and reconnecting communities with their actual sources of food and cannabis?

[00:27:58] Josh Holleb: I guess, yeah, I mean, this is the most fun part of the job.

We’ve been lucky enough to work with schools, elementary schools, high schools, universities where students get in the buildings, and I never had that opportunity, but I can imagine that if I was a fourth grader and I started working in a greenhouse, that would have been a formative experience for me. So in some regard, it’s just educational, getting kids or anyone really, in a greenhouse to see what’s possible. We are currently working with our local nonprofit here in Boulder, which is an exciting project for us. They run the biggest community garden in Boulder. It’s quite large, so you can go rent a little outside farm plot. They’re putting one of our greenhouses on their I on that site now. So now everyone who’s gardening in Boulder is going to be able to see this greenhouse as well. And, you know, hopefully just have a little bit of a mind burst. Wow, look at that thing. Then when it gets into food, you know, we have commercial lettuce growers in Ottawa, Canada, year round. Commercial lettuce grower. Their lettuce otherwise would be coming from Yuma, Arizona or southern California. I mean, that is, we’re talking about across the US, southwest to northeast, and then crossing a border and, you know, as we saw in Covid, like, what if the trucks aren’t running or something? You know, it doesn’t. It’s not that far fetched that the trucks aren’t running and then you don’t have the food that you’re. We’ve grown used to having, you know, maybe we shouldn’t be used to having lettuce in Canada in the winter or tomatoes, but we’re used to it.

And then there’s a nutritional aspect to this whole thing is that, you know, I don’t have the, I don’t have the data to show this, but I believe that a local tomato that’s ripened in the greenhouse near me and then at the store a few hours later is healthier than the green tomato that was shipped from Mexico. And people can notice it and see it. And so there’s all these different, you know, it’s like a spider web of reasons why having the greenhouse close, seeing it, tasting the food out of it, knowing it’s not coming from far away, all yield just a better result in the end. And it might cost a little bit more money to buy it because it’s not grown at such large scale, the food itself.

But, you know, food is. I don’t know, food is medicine. Food’s a lot of things. And I think, I think if people know it’s good and they can afford it, for the most part, it’s a really positive experience.

So, yeah, the greenhouses, you know, on a huge level, they’re very cool to see, to taste all that. And when we land them locally, we’re doing a lot of work with native american tribes and First nations in, in Canada, and they are very focused on food sovereignty. I mean, these are sovereign nations within our country, and they’ve been, you know, not dealt the best hand by traditional white America. And they’re, they’re like growing food now, and they are food deserts and they are, they have, they have nutrition issues and they’ve got all. And they are trying to take this into their own hands. And so feeding themselves, teaching the next generation, it’s, it’s a, it’s a very holistic, positive thing that I believe comes out of these greenhouses.

[00:31:36] Jackie De Burca: Absolutely. There’s a spanish author who’s very well known called Mariano Bueno, and he’s an ecological farmer, and he teaches and writes about the fact that the food that’s grown very close to us is way more beneficial. So without getting, like, stats and all that stuff. And it’s, I suppose, I guess his ideology is kind of a mixture of the nutrients, of course, are going to be in a much stronger state, and it’s connected through the environment that’s right beside you. So therefore, it’s kind of, like, localized through the environment that you are in each day. It’s quite a fascinating topic, I think.

[00:32:16] Josh Holleb: Yeah, I get it and I believe it deeply.

[00:32:20] Jackie De Burca: Yeah. And I’m sure the Native Americans, they’re going to get all that stuff quicker than some of us white people.

I’m allowed to say that because I’m white before I get into trouble. Okay, so moving on, can you share Josh, more about your visions for the high tech greenhouse cultivations?

[00:32:41] Josh Holleb: Yeah, this gets pretty exciting.

It kind of comes maybe from a darker place in a strange way, but the world is changing, and we don’t totally know where it’s going or what it’s going to do.

And I’m not one to say, oh, technology is going to save us. I think we should use less and try not need technology to save us and just be better to the world.

But the reality right now is that we live on the cusp of the desert southwest, and water is a huge right now. Water has, there’s no value associated with water money wise, there’s no monetary value with water. Very little. We believe water will be a very big thing at some point. Whether it’s. It will be, it will have a value, which is how this world deals with things, makes them important.

We have a. We can design a steel greenhouse, and we do this often where we can recapture 90% of the water we put into the greenhouse so we can be highly water efficient.

We’re working on a project in western Montana right now, and it’s a large ranch, and they host guests, and they’re trying to feed their guests very healthy food locally, but it’s very dry, there’s very little water. And they’ve just purchased a pretty significant greenhouse from us that will fully recapture and reuse water. It’s a really cool opportunity for us to put this technology we’ve designed into use into practice, and for them to use very little water to grow food and for us to learn. And so that’s very cool. And now these Middle east projects are coming in. I think we’re working on a project in Kuwait right now where it’s just too hot and they can’t grow things.

And you can pump a bunch of power in and create cooling with a heat pump or something and just use a bunch of electricity and cool a greenhouse.

But that’s not really helping anyone either.

And so now with this new glazing technologies, we can potentially block the heat from coming into the greenhouse, use much less cooling, and then start to grow food, and then do our water recapture in the Middle east as well and use minimal water. And so we’re trying to use as little as we can, but we have these technologies that we can deploy to to figure out how to still efficiently, hopefully sustainably grow food in places that are going to be very hard to grow food in.

And for us, I think that’s a very exciting thing to be working with.

[00:35:29] Jackie De Burca: Definitely. So, with all of that said, how do you see Sarah’s greenhouses playing a role in redefining both food and cannabis systems in North America?

[00:35:42] Josh Holleb: Hope that we become more localized.

That’s a big hope for me. I don’t know how people feel about that. I feel like our food should be coming closer to home, and my hope is, and I see it because we work more with schools and with nonprofit education centers that work with kids or veterans, that there’s a deep interest in this.

The greenhouses produce food, and they create community, and they’re also somewhat therapeutic. We hear that kids focus when they’re in the greenhouse class, and we know that veterans organizations with, you know, veterans with PTSD thrive in the greenhouse. I don’t know why, but anecdotally, we hear it all the time.

And so, you know, not like this is the savior of civilization by any means.

We’re designing a building, but when you go inside, it’s alive, there’s just life in it, and it feels different.

And so I think the goal is that we can feed everyone, but we can also maybe make the world a little bit friendlier, healthier, happier, maybe all of those things.

And those are not something you can really quantify, but it’s something that we feel when we’re in them and when we talk to the people who use them, and that. I think that’s the driver for all. For all of this.

[00:37:05] Jackie De Burca: Yeah. No, I mean, I think from what you’re saying there, Josh, it doesn’t surprise me to hear that, because at the very least, you know, people with PTSD and young people who don’t have that much connection normally with their own food and nature in general, of course there’s going to be this automatic reconnection, because if you think about history, industrial revolution onwards, you know, it’s only a few hundred years, whereas before that, we were around with all sorts of aspects of nature and dealing with things in a whole different way, interfacing things in a whole different way. So I think that’s way more natural to us in our genes, if you like. Let’s talk about some specific examples, because I really liked to hear what you said there about how they have transformed any particular local community or business or school.

[00:37:52] Josh Holleb: Yeah, I mean, right now, this is a project that we’re designing, but it’s based on. There’s an organization out of Milwaukee, Wisconsin, that was called growing power. And the founder was will Allen. And I believe he was an ex. I don’t know if he played in the National Football League or in the NBA. He’s a big guy, but he just bootstrap built greenhouses kind of right in the middle of Milwaukee and started growing aquaponics. So using fish to create food to feed the plants, and it was very cool. And I grew up close to there, and I learned a lot from that place.

His daughter, her name is Erica Allen. She’s now in Chicago, and she’s now do. She basically took the torch and brought down to Chicago. And her group is called the Urban Growers Collective, and they have an offshoot that’s called green eradic. And they’ve just installed a very large anaerobic digester on a site on the south side of Chicago, which is probably some sort of a food desert, not somewhere where you see a lot of good food, fresh food. And we’re designing for them right now a large seven greenhouse facility that’s partially production, predominantly education, and we’re just in the design phase, but they’ve seen how it works in Milwaukee and what does the community, and we’ve been able to work with them to see how they work and how they feel about this stuff. This is a really exciting project for us to land a fairly large greenhouse right in the middle of the south side of Chicago in a totally probably underserved community to grow food, but to provide a comfortable space, just like I was saying, as well as education. So that’s a neat one that’s happening, but it’s still conceptual because it’s not on the ground.

[00:39:49] Jackie De Burca: Sure. I guess you guys will document that, because obviously, on your YouTube channel, you’ve got, like, a decent following and everything. And you’re using the platform to educate and inspire, basically, aren’t you?

[00:40:01] Josh Holleb: Yeah, we try.

It’s hard to be everywhere at once. As we build projects all over the place. We try our hardest, and assuming that the client is okay with documenting the process, we try and document as much as we can. You know, a video these days, a video is. I can’t imagine a better way to communicate something than a YouTube video. As funny as that is, it’s highly effective.

[00:40:29] Jackie De Burca: Yeah, it definitely is. So, my God. Like, it’s an amazing. It’s an amazing story. It’s amazing work that you’ve done so far and what’s projected to be done and so on. Let’s just finish up. Josh with your ideas of how Ceres can help towards a more sustainable built environment whilst also benefiting future food production and involving communities. What’s your vision?

[00:40:56] Josh Holleb: Yeah, this is a fun one, when I get the blank slate to think about.

I briefly mentioned it, but we have this kit house that we designed. It’s called the Vesta.

She’s the Roman. Vesta’s the roman goddess of hearth and home, I believe.

And we were actually working with a developer in. In Canada and we kind of fleshed this out a little bit. But this house is a passive style house. So it stays shaded in the summer, but it allows sunlight in. In the winter. It has an attached greenhouse that if it’s sunny in the winter, it can heat the house. It can automatically open windows and let the heat from the greenhouse into the house. The house needs heat. You can grow food. We just built the first one, and the client is just. It is busting with life in the greenhouse. It’s kind of crazy. And it’s right next to the kitchen. And when I think about that, I think about, like a village of these things that have small heat pumps to heat and cool as needed, but they don’t need much of anything. But they have it because we don’t know what’s happening in the environment. And solar can easily run those heat pumps because it doesn’t need a lot of. There’s greenhouses attached. Everyone has a little chill space where they can hang out in the winter and drink their coffee in the sunlight, because I think it’s nice to have comfortable spaces for us to be able to relax and be in and produce some food.

And then you land a greenhouse right in the middle of the community, next to the park with the soccer field or whatever, and maybe a communal kitchen next to it.

And the community works the greenhouse and has a communal meal once or twice a week.

And, you know, that’s not. It’s not so far fetched, I don’t think. I just. I grew up in a somewhat communal environment with a very large family. And I know that people being together is important to learn different perspectives, you know, than maybe what just your parents have and to be a well rounded human. And I just think that, again, I don’t think buildings are the answer to the world’s problems, but I do think that living in a space like that frees up some mental space or changes mental space, where you’re eating healthy food, you’re feeling sunlight, you’re connected to plants, you’re connected to community. And hopefully that yields kind people doing good things.

[00:43:23] Jackie De Burca: Yeah. Wonderful. I think that it’s like what I mentioned before, you know, whilst we have our mod cons and we’re realizing that we have to do everything with way less energy, but yet be interconnected and having some of the old ways back, you know, where we actually. Those kids, they know where the food comes from. Now, many of them, unfortunately, these days in various countries, think that it just comes from the supermarket.

[00:43:46] Josh Holleb: Yeah, I mean, I would love the kids to just go out and grab some snap peas as opposed to a bag of chips. I mean, I would like to do that more than I do, too, because I know it would be good for me.

[00:43:57] Jackie De Burca: Listen, it’s been really, really interesting. Josh, are there any last words or anything that you want to add?

[00:44:04] Josh Holleb: You know, we tell everyone, regardless of if you’re working with us at Ceres or not, take time to think through what you want with a built structure. You know, we think about plant specific, and so make sure, take the time, spend a little more money in the design process to make sure it’s going to do the thing that you want it to do, because we too often see people who spend 75% of the money that they probably should have spent, but they have a structure that doesn’t do what they want. So really, the money’s kind of lost.

Design for us is a really big thing to make sure it’s going to function the way that this is.

[00:44:48] Jackie De Burca: Constructive voices. Fantastic. That makes a lot of sense. Great advice, Josh. Thank you so much. It was absolutely brilliant.

[00:44:55] Josh Holleb: Okay. Thank you. It’s been a pleasure.