so if we can do it here it can be done anywhere this is the most challenging place to do. this hobart's winters are dark with temperatures down to minus twenty five degrees celsius the ground is permafrost. longyou bunions fall apart norway is the world's northernmost town of any real size here one man grows herb's in vegetables benjamin vidmar a chef from florida. is there more to it than just a crazy idea. this one think it's good to and then this one tree for the fourth one is on the three of us and benjamin vidmar and his employee hague iska 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 christened puzzle i. think it is see that week of the human now off to remove the tower in. yet because we lift it from twenty four to five so yeah definitely. 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 of course provide the lights provide some humidity with us provide some nutrients. for. a three pm it's pitch dark outside. benjamin vid barnes worries he will be able to supply all his customers his capacities are strictly limited and demand is growing. spitzbergen lines 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 other stuff. some greens pretty. soon. and i talk to other chefs who also have received him and his promise to do. give in to make sure you know. it's amazing to have this fresh one given collects the leftover plant material for composting thank you every chance you take care you can just thank you. for about half the year it's freezing cold and dark and long years beyond just over two thousand people and three thousand polar bears live here the tourists mainly come to see the bears is

a hardcore travelers here for an adventure holiday. because of the cold and dependence on imports long europeans environmental footprint is this proportionately large benjamin hopes to reduce it. hello my name is benjamin button mar and during this tour with you today we will visit a little bit about what i do here what i grow also in the dome and then after we will go inside of the gallery of this. the kitchen and we have a place where we can eat and like a workshop so we will prepare some food together there's tomato and some fresh local bay so that we've grown here. recently from florida benjamin worked as a ship's cook and came to spitzbergen ten years ago during the arctic winter temperatures complains 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 dome 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 and pain 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 greenhouse. we can take some of this bay so today for the tomatoes we have a bit of green here we have some solid 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 his customers nothing goes to waste. so here we have the worms. and i use them to make compost here and i basically compost the waste that i get back from the hotels and restaurants. and the purple he uses

a bit of homegrown puzzles for the meal he'll be preparing with his visitors the highlight of the stay for the mainland little we to optic spitzbergen isn't the words of course you have to take our shoes off. so people on the warm food into 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 chiefs of the other thing you just send it in cold water. ok. there. so 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 the. typical meal this reindeer meets with vegetables and with potatoes and. only homegrown ingredients. it's highly unlikely one

will ever grow here it's imported from spain the ladies in cork the first bottle while the gents keep busy shopping vegetables at the desk actually do all of the course like called. the majority of tourists don't come from norway good they come from all corners of the world to this norton tip the most difficult tour because i had kosher begins from israel. and that was a good tour because they wanted they didn't want you know we had to have all new 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 like i learned a lot that looks beautiful guess enjoyed delicious meals here but what did they think of active gardening. think it's wonderful. you know now what happened with the name. and i'm going on.

to something. yeah basically i think yeah i think so reluctant to face american 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 we're just five minutes you can be everywhere. the school everything is just so perfect. to benjamin's children have left the island and communicate via the 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 me know it's the first marriage and the rest i'm so nervous i don't know if you notice. that the first no reason so i'm very i'm very happy but i don't want to tell you how to do it no 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 he's still got enough to deliver i think it would brother when we use the picture once have you seen the oh yeah yeah yeah because that easiest yes much easier we're running out of. that one very fun of a student from germany hope so the seeds for chris parsley and basil. yes it's do you see the crest is only six days old it's relatively fast that's what's good about it you can purchase quite a lot here tremendous going to the field he appointed c.e.o. . on this well aware that spitzbergen has a dismal carbon footprint she takes a strictly objective view of her work here. it's been present is them i noticed

personally i don't see spitzbergen as a place where people should never think because it's got such an extreme climate and it's so unsustainable to live here but i will never come a time when people don't live here anymore and that's happening so i think it's a very good idea to try growing our own plants here. standing here flags and supplants. benjamin has enough to keep them busy even through the dark winter noble it acquires or time of year. actually enjoy the dark season it's how do we cope with the light season and that's the challenge but even that's very relaxed don't have to do too much but when the light comes back we did very busy and you have to run all of the time so. you don't have a shot at all but for me the dark season is just taking you. mention vidmar isn't it though 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 but 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 here and i'm a big restaurant. because this little is really. on the menu will be very original especially for spitzbergen. we want to have more 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. and we want to do some different interpretations where the for example like a reindeer taco. benjamin intends to use only fresh vegetables he hopes to prove that a closed loop recycling operation co-work even here in the world's northernmost tell. this technique that we developed here can be used to grow food in this inner

city it 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 blame. the future of a coffee can. join linked to news from africa and the world or link to exceptional stories and discussions from the use of easy our wild website d.w. the postman fix up join us on facebook j w africa. sarno just couldn't get this song out of his head. musicologist began searching for

the source of these captivating sounds. and found that deep in the rain forest in central africa. the body aka people. only. knew. nothing else. in the let's say the in the closing table book left in the column will anyone feel the most money leave the whole costs he was. good by their culture that he stayed. only a promise to. the jungle and return to the concrete and glass jungle but. the result reverse culture shock above. the prize winning documentary from the forest starts april first on t w.