Dissatisfied with the results, he and his students proposed a 30-storey vertical farm equipped with artificial lighting, advanced hydroponics and aeroponics that could produce enough food for 50,000 people.ĭespommier’s grub-growing skyscraper was never built, but the idea certainly took flight all over the world where land for agriculture was scarce but power supply was constant - crowded, bustling urban centres come to mind, as the primary goal of vertical farming is maximising crop output in a limited space. The practice of producing food on vertically inclined surfaces first became popular in 1999 when Dickson Despommier, professor of public and environmental health at Columbia University, challenged his students to calculate how much food they could grow on the rooftops of New York. Vertical farming may seem unfamiliar to many Malaysians because space has never been an issue for us. The big dream, however, is more than just an urban vegetable source - by continually reinvesting its profits in R&D, Babylon aims to eventually engineer and build low-cost vertical farms in impoverished areas of Southeast Asia to help eliminate food scarcity caused by unfavourable farming and economic conditions. An urban vertical farm set-up today based in Kota Damansara, Selangor, Babylon focuses on producing high-quality hydroponic vegetables and herbs without sunlight and soil, with everything grown indoors and as close to the city as possible while using up to 90% less water than traditional farming.īabylon focuses on producing high-quality hydroponic vegetables and herbs without sunlight and soil When the grant funds were disbursed at the end of the four-month incubator programme back in 2016, Thomas, along with co-founders Abang Dzulqarnaen, Eshton Thomas and Joel Tan, went ahead to establish Babylon as an agricultural company committed to continuously innovating and harnessing new technologies to further their business. The name Babylon Vertical Farms was assigned to the project he submitted at a start-up incubator organised by the Malaysian Global Innovation and Creativity Centre (MaGIC). Either way, it points to the idea of a garden established in non-traditional formats, which Thomas was already deeply inspired by as a possible solution to the issue of food security in Malaysia and beyond.
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More important is what it is, for which there are multiple theories - some researchers proposed that these were rooftop gardens, while another theory suggested that the gardens were built within the walls of the royal palace at Babylon, and were actually roof gardens laid out on a series of ziggurat terraces irrigated by pumps from a nearby river. Perhaps he was thinking about the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, the only one of the Seven Wonders of the World whose location has not yet been conclusively established. When a friend suggested ‘Babylon’, it really piqued my interest.”
“But I don’t like names that are too on the nose or too obvious.
“As you might imagine, some people were not pleased when I told them the name,” laughs Babylon Vertical Farms co-founder Stuart Thomas. From a religious standpoint, the word “Babylon” - although derived from the Akkadian word that means “gate of god” - is an evident counterfeit of God’s eternal city, and has transcended its historical significance to become synonymous with sin and pride in Western art and literature.