i guess i didn t have those answers, but for my own personal being, do something that made the livelihoods of my family and the people around me an the people i care about who are you know, marines and returning military people, what could we do to make them and their livelihoods better. it was karen s idea, well, how about teaching what we do. we created a small scale organic farm using hydroponics and the yields are much greater than traditional farming and we convert, we designed an entrepreneurial training program for returning vets to help them transition into self-employment. karen, it s gone tremendous. you just graduated a bunch of folks. walk us through now where you guys are. well, we have day one of our new class today, but we offer a six week training program to teach organic sustainable
to do this, this would be much harder than it is in 2012. can you give us a sense of the new tools you re able to benefit fr from? i would say that the technology is not knew. hydroponics has been around since the floating aztec gardens or babylon. it s been around a long time. what we do is teach how to utilize hydroponic crop production, but also, we work closely with whole foods market because they ll accept new crop producers. so before someone actually plants their seed, we re able to make sure that crop is sold. and in the past, particularly in the united states, we ve been fairly rich in natural resources and cheap lash. that s another reason why it hasn t taken off, but now again with places like southern california not having water and natural resources and labor being harder to find, that s where technology i guess becomes more of a need. yeah.
correct. in fact, they are all tied together. right now elaborate. right now outdoor farming in the united states uses 20% of our fossil fuels, 20%. t. boone pickens said that s about a $700 billion nut, and we and we import that oil. what if we didn t have to do that? we all want to. how? if you use hydroponics with low energy l.e.d. lighting and grow your food next to where you live. there s no transportation costs. by virtue of the vertical farm reducing the carbon footprint. period, that simple. all you have to do is do it. hold on. one more problem. i ve got solutions. i see that. i like this. so, okay, fine. we can reduce our carbon footpri footprint. right. we can get better food for ourselves and children. we can learn more because we re involved with the verticality of our food sourcing, it s fun for
operation that is redefining urban farming using hydroponics, no soil, the plants derive nutrients from the water itself. i guess any rooftop in theory, the right size, is a potential place to do something like this. potentially. new york has acres and acres of under utilized roof stop space. while the city doesn t have a lot of land, one resource, underutilized resource is rooftop space. there is a lot of other conditions that go into it. the roof has to be structurally sound, zoning, building codes, a number of other things. theoretically, there are a lot of roofs. reporter: for now the team grows mainly lettuce here, several varieties and basil, the secret is controlling temperature and irrigation in the green house throughout new york s punishingly hot summers and bitterly cold winters. we have sensors located all over the greenhouse inside and out, collecting data constantly, 24 hours a day.
was making a phone call. and just unloaded and came back in. reporter: the $300 shop-lifting spree continued until the young woman finally paid $20 for something and left. so, we just upgraded to, you know, more cameras around the store. and it s definitely paying off. reporter: the trouble with video surveillance is you often don t know you ve been ripped off until you ve seen the recording after the fact. that s what happened to the partners at the hydroponics store, and they would have been out of luck, except for the young shop-lifter, who thought she could extend her luck. she s filling out a raffle ticket right now with her name, her phone number, her address. brilliant. a little on the not bright side, absolutely. absolutely. reporter: the raffle ticket led a sheriff s deputy directly to 20-year-old elizabeth null. she has been disqualified. i love that.