Home » Travaglini (Planet Farms): “Water crisis? Confirm that it is time to rethink agriculture”

Travaglini (Planet Farms): “Water crisis? Confirm that it is time to rethink agriculture”

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Travaglini (Planet Farms): “Water crisis? Confirm that it is time to rethink agriculture”

“The water crisis we are experiencing is just another confirmation: food globalization has failed and is about to end. It is time to rethink the way we grow agricultural products ”. Luca Travaglini he is 42 years old. He is the co-founder together with Daniele Benatoff by Planet Farms. Launched in 2018, at the beginning it was not supposed to be a vertical garden for the production of fruit and vegetables: “I just wanted that the products of the earth no longer had to be washed before being consumed, that they were born from the most natural cycle of mother nature: nothing herbicides, nor chemicals ”, explains the entrepreneur.

A possible solution to the water crisis

Planet Farms and other hydroponic farming solutions currently cannot replace traditional agricultural production. “It’s a bit like formula one for the automotive industry”, admits Travaglini. But many technologies born of niche then, due to market needs or necessities, have become mass consumption.

The son of a family of industrialists active in the agri-food sector for over 50 years (Travaglini is the company that produces the machinery for drying cured meats all over the world), he sees in solutions such as the one offered by Planet Farms an answer to an urgent problem of our time: rethinking agricultural production, making it more sustainable, ending with a past of excessive consumption of terrestrial soil for cultivation that has been going on for millennia.

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“Today we are responding to two big problems: the water one, because water becomes more and more a precious commodity and we do not consume any other water than that which is inside every single leaf of our crops; and that of fruit and vegetable production, because today we can no longer produce where we believe it is cheaper to do so in the world, but thanks to technological solutions such as indoor cultivation we can do it anywhere, with zero impact. We represent a model of self-sufficiency “.

How Planet Farms works

How? Travagliani and his partner have created with Planet Farms an automated cultivation system that starts from the laying of the seeds to the packaging. Everything happens in a closed environment, which protects the plants from the natural enemies of crops. Therefore no pesticides or pesticides are needed. The air is purified by the industrial solutions of the Travaglini family, the water taken directly from the groundwater and fed into the system. Once inside, not even a drop is wasted: the plant takes what it wants, what is left over is put back into the system.

The result, according to company data, translates into a saving of water resources 95%. “The goal of vertical gardens is to try to make agricultural production more efficient, not wasting resources, trying to limit the consumption of water to the essentials. The only water is that which remains inside the biomass of the leaves, there is not a drop of water in these systems that is not used for its only possible purpose: to nourish the leaves ”, Travaglini reasons.

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The same applies to land use, reduced by 300 volte (one hectare of vertical vegetable garden is equivalent to 300 hectares of traditional agriculture). And, Travaglini guarantees, “zero impact on the environment”. Last year Planet Farms inaugurated the largest vertical vegetable garden in Europe, in Cavenago, in Brianza. Others are present in Como, in Emilia, one in London, near Cambridge. It is a company that employs 88 people and supplies products that are sold in 350 supermarkets in Italy.

Hydroponic agriculture, an 11 billion market in 2025

Planet Farms is not the only Italian solution of hydroponic agriculture. There are companies that cultivate through vertical gardens, or vertical farms, in almost all regions of Italy, such as that of the Lapietra brothers in Puglia, or Sfera, a company from Grosseto. The vertical vegetable garden market is a growing business, thanks to the urgencies posed by climate change and the need to find more efficient solutions in agriculture. Studies in recent years have recorded a growth of this business of 20% per year, with a progression expected at least until 2026, for a turnover that could touch the € 11 billion by 2025ten more than the low one billion reached in 2015.

But, Travaglini warns, “solutions like ours cannot completely replace traditional agriculture. We replicate mother nature’s best cycle, in its original form, every day. Technology often deprives nature of something, in this case it gives back ”.

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Perhaps solutions like Planet Farms will remain the formula one of food. Or perhaps over time there will be solutions that can broaden the applicability of this technology on a large scale. It is not difficult to imagine that the urgency imposed by climate change will decide this.

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