Rejecting casinos, Onondagas invest in an experiment: futuristic greenhouses

Nation, Swedish group say their product's day will come, but experts question the short-term business plan.

You’d never guess who controls a Swedish company that plans to build 25-story-high, globe-shaped greenhouses that could cost $280 million each in cities around the world.

It’s the Onondaga Nation.

The Native American nation — whose only businesses are a cigarette shop and a sports arena — owns 85 percent of Plantagon International SA, a company that quietly has been pitching its futuristic-looking greenhouses to officials at the White House and to government leaders in Europe and Asia.

Oren Lyons, the Onondaga faithkeeper who chairs Plantagon’s board of directors, predicted Plantagon will build its first three spherical greenhouses in 2012.

The high-tech greenhouses will grow four times as much produce per square foot as can be grown in traditional one-story greenhouses, he said.

The smallest of Plantagon’s patented designs is a five-story globular greenhouse that would cost $10 million to $20 million and would grow enough produce to feed 10,000 people per year, according to Plantagon officials.

The largest is about 25 stories high with a skyscraper of a price tag — $280 million to $550 million — that will feed 350,000 people per year, the company says.

Plantagon has raised $1 million from shareholders, according to its 2009 annual report.

The company will pay a maximum of 20 percent of the cost of building the first three greenhouses, said Plantagon CEO Hans Hassle, a Swedish businessman.

Plantagon is seeking investors for the balance, Hassle said.

“There is so much money around when it comes to green things,” he said. “Cities all over the world want a green image. The investors see this as a good business opportunity.”

Plantagon intends to build in the United States, Sweden and Asia one greenhouse each in 2012, Hassle said.

There are skeptics.

No one has built a large vertical greenhouse anywhere in the world, let alone one that looks like Plantagon’s.

A handful of Central New York horticulture and greenhouse experts say Plantagon’s vertical greenhouse would cost too much to build and would require too much energy to make it financially feasible.

“It’s totally nonsustainable. I don’t know anyone with any real information about greenhouses who would support this,” said Louis Albright, a Cornell University professor of biological and environmental engineering who specializes in greenhouse engineering.

The Onondagas see the proposal as a business alternative to casinos, which they rejected for spiritual and cultural reasons, even as other Native American nations got rich off them. The Onondaga government, unlike many Indian nations, is run by a traditional council of chiefs, appointed by clan mothers. They oversee a cigarette shop that sells about $29 million per year in untaxed cigarettes.

The only other large Onondaga Nation business operating on their 7,300-acre territory is an 1,800-seat arena for ice hockey and lacrosse that cost several million dollars to build.

“We’ve never done anything like this. This is extraordinary,” said Lyons, an 80-year-old globetrotter who has addressed world leaders at the United Nations but chooses not to own a cell phone or computer.

To the Onondaga chiefs, the Plantagon greenhouses represent a socially responsible business, one that will provide fresh organic produce directly to urban consumers while reducing the environmental damage caused by diesel trucks that haul produce, Lyons said.

Lyons predicted vertical urban greenhouses will become not only profitable but also a necessary food supply in the coming decades because of global warming, rising oil prices, population shifts and shrinking arable land.

“The real need will come in 30 to 40 years,” Hassle said.

Sweco, which calls itself Sweden’s largest consulting engineering firm with $720 million in net sales in 2009, fine-tuned Plantagon’s design and did a feasibility study on the proposed greenhouses, Hassle said.

Sweco concluded the greenhouses, depending on their size, could turn a profit in three to 17 years, Hassle said.

CNY experts skeptical

Four Central New York experts in greenhouse engineering, agriculture or horticulture expressed doubts.

Albright predicted the energy costs needed to produce artificial light and to maintain constant year-round temperatures will make Plantagon’s concept not financially viable.

Plants need sunlight, Albright said, and vertical greenhouse designs, including Plantagon’s, leave most plants in shade.

Terry Ettinger, a State University College of Environmental Science and Forestry horticulture professor, had a similar reaction after attending an invitation-only briefing Hassle and Lyons gave June 1 at the Syracuse Center of Excellence.

“I simply don’t see how it would work,” Ettinger said.

Even though the cost of diesel fuel occasionally skyrockets, it still cost less to truck most fruits and vegetables from Florida to Syracuse in the winter than to grow them year-round in Upstate New York in climate-controlled greenhouses, said Marvin Pritts, a Cornell horticulture professor.

Pritts’ research has included growing strawberries in the winter in an Ithaca greenhouse.

Energy costs have derailed other vertical farm proposals, said Raymond Cross, president of Morrisville State College, which specializes in agriculture and technology.

Morrisville State conducted a feasibility study with the O’Brien & Gere engineering firm on a proposed vertical farm in Brooklyn, Cross said. Students in Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation designed a 10-story “vertical farm” at the Gowanus Canal site.

After crunching numbers, Morrisville advised investors eyeing the project that it would not make a profit, Cross said.

Creating a buzz

Nevertheless, Plantagon’s greenhouses are creating a buzz, especially in Europe.

Plantagon was named one of six finalists in 2010 for the annual Sustainability Innovation Award given in Stockholm, Sweden, by the Globe Forum, an organization that brings together innovators, entrepreneurs and investors.

In 2009, 100 entrepreneurs attending a Globe Forum convention in Sweden voted Plantagon’s greenhouse the winner of the convention’s innovator competition.

Lyons, Hassle and three other Onondaga Nation chiefs also talked about their greenhouses for about two hours June 2 in a meeting at the White House with officials from President Barack Obama’s administration, Hassle and Lyons said. They said the White House requested they not reveal the names of the officials.

The U.S. ambassador to Sweden, Matthew Barzun, gushed about the Plantagon concept May 4 on his Internet blog after meeting with Lyons and the chiefs in Stockholm.

“They’re (Plantagon representatives) now in discussions to deploy their vertical farming technology in three Swedish cities while planning to build a Plantagon in upstate New York,” he wrote.

The Onondagas have also discussed Plantagon with U.S. Rep. Dan Maffei, D-DeWitt, Onondaga County Executive Joanie Mahoney, Syracuse University Chancellor Nancy Cantor and Andrew Maxwell, the director of planning and sustainability in Syracuse Mayor Stephanie Miner’s administration.

The Onondagas hope to erect the U.S. greenhouse in Syracuse, possibly along Onondaga Lake, Lyons said.

“We have opportunities to build all over the world. Naturally we want to build here,” Lyons said. “This is our homeland.”

Plantagon’s plan

Plantagon has its own website and a Facebook page with 478 fans.

A video showing three minutes of computer-generated Plantagon greenhouse images has had more than 12,850 views on YouTube.

“Many of us know by the year 2050 we won’t have any more land to grow food enough to feed us. At the same time, 80 percent of us will reside in urban centers. We have to find ways to grow our food inside our cities,” Hassle told the entrepreneurs.

“Many people tried this before. But the real innovator — I’m just the CEO of the company — is an old gardener. He came up with this idea already 20 years ago. He was thinking of how to use the space in a normal greenhouse. A normal greenhouse is flat. If you want to grow much food, you have to build a big greenhouse.

“He was thinking of how to grow food vertical. Many people have tried. But the problem is the light in the middle and how to harvest if you build it really high.

“Our solution is very simple. It looks more dramatic than it is. It’s a huge glass globe.”

Plantagon intends to grow produce in containers. The containers would rest on rails that spiral up the inside of the sphere. A machine run by a 1.5-horsepower motor would continuously move the crops from the bottom of the sphere up to greater sunlight. Produce would be harvested when it reaches the top.

Hassle agreed with the critics that the greenhouse would have trouble turning a profit if it had to pay market rates for heat and light.

He said the greenhouse may use solar and wind power. It will try to use wasted resources — such as water from a municipal sewage treatment plant.

Plantagon has not decided how it will power the greenhouses. The energy sources used will be dependent upon where the greenhouses are built, Hassle said.

Hassle said he’s not surprised some New York agriculture experts are skeptical.

“It would be really strange if they didn’t have doubts. It’s a new innovation and an unproven technology,” he said.

How it started

The Onondagas’ involvement in Plantagon results from a friendship that developed a dozen years ago between Hassle and Lyons, who travels to Sweden several times a year.

Hassle, 50, lived for months in 1986 with an indigenous people on the island of Siberut, near Indonesia. After returning to Sweden, he led several communications businesses that specialized in corporate ethics.

The two met around 1998 when Hassle was involved in producing a documentary about Native American leaders.

For the next four years, Hassle and Lyons teamed to present seminars on corporate responsibility and Onondaga philosophies to business and civic leaders in Europe, Hassle said.

Ake Olsson, a farmer, construction worker, blacksmith and mechanic who lives in Norway, was in the audience at one of those seminars in 2000. Shortly after that, Olsson showed up unannounced at Hassle’s house with plans for his vertical greenhouse, Hassle said.

A few years later, Hassle said he was dining with Lyons at the World Trade Center in Stockholm when Lyons asked him if he could suggest a business for indigenous people that didn’t involve running casinos or selling tobacco.

Hassle said he suggested Olsson’s vertical greenhouses.

Hassle said he met with the Onondaga council of chiefs in their longhouse for the first time in 2003, he said. It took another four years for the Onondagas’ chiefs to reach consensus that the nation should go into the business.

When Hassle traveled to the Onondaga longhouse in January 2008, the chiefs signed legal papers creating the company.

According to Plantagon’s most recent annual report, the company had $1 million in assets at the end of 2009. Shareholders had contributed $1.27 million since the company was formed, with nearly $919,000 received in 2009.

Hassle and Lyons would not disclose how much of that Onondaga contributed.

The Onondagas are taking a financial risk, Lyons acknowledged, but he said the bigger risk would be to do nothing to prepare for climate change, rising fuel costs, and booming urban populations.

“If you’re not prepared to feed yourself, you’re not prepared for what’s coming,” he said.

Contact Mike McAndrew at mmcandrew@syracuse.com or 470-3016.