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they want to keep the continents future to. be part of an enduring african youngsters as they share their stories their dreams and their challenges. the seventy seven percent. platform for its charter. the fleet. so if we can do it here it can be done anywhere this is the most challenging place to do. bars winters are dark with temperatures down to minus twenty five degrees celsius the ground is permafrost. long your bunions fall apart no way is the world's northernmost town funny real sides here one man grows herb's in vegetables benjamin vidmar a chef from florida. is there more to it than just

a crazy idea. for think it's good to miss one tree for the fourth one of them. benjamin vidmar and his employee higgins ska harvest the crops grown in the lab as he calls this room with its almost tropical climate in the midst of a frozen wilderness the chefs are waiting for his crescent puzzle i. think it is see that we've got the humidity up now off to remove the tower and. yeah because we lift it from twenty four to five so yeah definitely. i think they learned to farm by trial and error given the lack of experience to draw from what's obvious is that the greenhouses are of no use outside during the long arctic nights. in the dark season and we grow mostly endorse and we have to

first provide our lights provide some humidity we have to provide some nutrients. to three pm it's pitch dark out. benjamin vid man's worries he won't be able to supply all his customers his capacities are strictly limited and demand is growing. spitzbergen line is over a thousand kilometers north of mainland norway all the provisions have to be flown in. benjamin vidmar is the only supplier of fresh local ingredients to the cooks and chefs here. this fellow surf. both. get some greens pretty. soon. and the photo shows also on the recipient is probably good to

see you have been fried chicken. it's amazing to have this fresh and small but given collects the leftover plant material for compost thank you everybody should take care of this thank you. for about half the year it's freezing cold and dark and long year beyond just over two thousand people and three thousand polar bears live here the tourists mainly come to see the bears these are hard core travelers here for an adventure holiday. because of the cold and dependence on imports long europeans environmental footprint is disproportionately large benjamin hopes to produce it. hello my name is benjamin button mar and doing this tour with you today we will visit a little bit about what i do here what i grow also the lob in the dome and then after we will go inside of the gallery there's like a kitchen. we have

a place where we can eat and like a workshop so we will prepare some food to gather tomato and some fresh local bay so that we've grown here we have a rigidly from florida benjamin worked as a ship's cook and came to spitzbergen ten years ago during the winter temperatures complan just to minus twenty degrees celsius in the dome but in spring things begin to change. we have some days you know over the in the midnight sun this sun in theory twenty four hours a day so it just moves around in the sky and it can get like twenty five thirty degrees in here i really like to do some root vegetables carrots potatoes would be nice but don't the sticks out like a rock from the snow drifts all around. you have to understand it's very simple this don't but this i've been speaking about it for so long that people got so sick of hearing about it you know and you just have to think it was empty like this there was like nothing here and i said i want to greenhouse i want to greenhouse

and it's because i was growing endorse we're going to go there next so for me growing endorse it didn't make sense to run the lights for eighteen hours a day when we have twenty four hours of light i'm paying electricity for nothing so i was trying to think of the smartest way to organize it so i said i have to get outside this all started as an experiment and it started for me wanting to have the freshest food possible that's only i didn't started to save the world i didn't started to i just said you know i wanted to have the freshest food possible. and now visitors come to see and taste that freshness and feel the abrupt change from arctic wilderness to green house. we can take some of this bay so today for the tomatoes we have a bit of green here we have some solids and parsley we have chilies there are growing there we have some cute cumbers there is even experimenting with growing

tomatoes here. they'd be the northernmost on earth right next to the northernmost compost heap that receives all the leftover vegetable matter he collects from us customers nothing goes to waste. so here we have the worms. and i use them to make compost here and basically compost the waste that i get back from the hotels and restaurants. and purple. he uses a bit of homegrown basil for the meal he'll be preparing with his visitors the highlight of the steak for the mainland little wages to optic spitzbergen isn't the words. of course you have to take our shoes off. to people on the warm food to people in the cold food i think is good the most important thing is that we need to start to desserts so we need five feet of the other thing you just said it in cold water. ok.

that. it's not really possible to be one hundred percent self-sufficient here it would be very very expensive and difficult to grow everything that we need to survive so we don't even look at that we look at the growth percentage like a portion of that a typical meal is reindeer meets with vegetables and with potatoes and. only homegrown ingredients is basil. it's highly unlikely wine will ever grow here it's imported from spain the ladies in cork the first bottle while the gents keep busy shopping vegetables i think that's actually do all of the i'm like culture. the majority of tourists don't come from norway good they come from all corners of the world to this north and tip the most difficult or as i had thought kosher very good news from israel. and that was a good thing or because they wanted like they didn't want you know. we had to have

all new to have the by cutting boards have been my part and i said oh that's not in the budget they say ok we buy so they bought everything and like we did it was fun i learned a lot that looks beautiful scarce enjoyed delicious meals here but what do they think about it gardening. think it's wonderful. you know now what's happening with nature and. i'm going on you have to do something different yeah basically i do yeah i think so reluctant to face a marriage and i think. i'm here with my family and we really love it here and it's like we always want to go away but then soon as we go away we all miss it so. so then we run back here is this i think it's such an easy life here it's like we live in a bubble you know it's like it's not a real world here everything was just five minutes you can be everywhere in the

school everything is just so perfect. to benjamin's children have left the island and communicate via internet from the mainland. benjamin may feel completely at home and spitzbergen now but not quite yet in mainstream norwegian society and have people like you know it's the first marriage and the rest i'm so nervous i don't know if you want to. know that you know the first no reason so i'm very i'm very happy but i don't want to tell you how to do it i know normally when other people come that i'm kind of like you know the one who's here the local one but. at seven pm benjamin's work day is far from over but he's still got enough to deliver i think it was better when we used the bigger ones have you seen the oh yeah yeah yeah because they are you serious yes much easier we're running out of. that one they're fun a student from germany hope so the seats for chris parsley and basil.

do you see it sex how the press isn't he six days old it's relatively fast but that's what's good about it you can purchase quite a lot here. in the medical field he appointed c.e.o. . john is well aware that spitzbergen has a dismal carbon footprint she takes a strictly objective view of her work here. it's been presented them i noticed personally i don't see spitzbergen as a place where people should live and because it's got such an extreme climate and it's so and sustainable to live here but i will never come a time when people don't live here anymore and that's actually so i think it's a very good idea to try growing on plants here. standing here close on supplants. benjamin has enough to keep them busy even through the dark winter noble it acquires or time of year. actually enjoy the season but

so how do we cope with the light season and that's the challenge. season that's very relaxed don't have to do too much but when the light comes back we could very busy and have to run all of the time so that challenges you don't have a shot at all but for me to start season and just take it easy. benjamin vidmar isn't about to take it easy he's chasing a dream he's got plans to open his own restaurant after all he's a chef by trade and he wants to make sure that the restaurant doesn't produce any waste he's already got the financing and partners lined up for our kitchen counter for food in here and i'm a big restaurant. because the question is really. on the menu will be very original especially for spitzbergen. we want to have more of like an arctic fusion menu and we don't want to have any burgers or any pizza so we wanted to like for example ingredients that you find in the arctic

cod salmon arctic char sea read reindeer lamb and we want to do some different interpretations were there for example like a reindeer taco. benjamin intends to use only fresh vegetables if he hopes to prove that a closed loop recycling operation co-work even here in the world's northernmost tell if this technique that we develop their careers to grow for them as inner city can be used to grow food on different islands so it has many. applications to other places as well so if we can do it here it can be done anywhere this is the most challenging place to play.

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