Radu M. Giurgiu answers Zjef’s question about high tech ecosystem farming - I ask therefore I am #102

Time-table

0min40 - Introduction to Radu Mircea Giurgiu.
4min10 - Radu & Zjef’s ecosystem history.
5min50 - What are ecosystems, why is it so hard to replicate them and why are they so important?
11min00 - Ecosystems in space. About the Melissa Project by the European Space Agency.
21min12 - Radu’s work at Semilla IpStar. Bringin technologies from the space industry to earth.
25min55 - The economic viability of ecosystem technologies
33min00 - How Artificial Intelligence can help us understand and create ecosystems
34min00 - About the attitude of politics to ecosystems and climate change
36min00 - How do we turn cities into ecosystems?
42min25 - Radu’s work and research at PlantGeek. Monitoring aquaponics, automation and artificial intelligence.
49min58 - How to incentivise ecosystem-research and how to make it more sexy.

I have known Radu now for a couple of years now, and every time I looked at where he came from, and how he developed his career I’m thinking: Damn, that guy is making his dreams come true!

Radu Mircea-Giurgiu was born and raised in Romania, did a master in Controlled environment Agriculture (CEA) and then went on to do his phD in Germany on medicinal plants in Controlled Environment Agriculture. It’s around that time that I met him. We were both volunteering for the Association for Vertical Farming and created a project group called AMI. In that group we brought together many amazing people and created a concept called AMI or A M I . That’s an abbreviation for Aquaponics, Mushrooms and Insects. Basically, we wanted to connect all existing CEA food producing technologies to create a high tech ecosystem with no waste (or at least as little waste as possible)! With the team we did a lot of research, thinking and modelling, and from that we created banners, videos, a white paper and a lot of workshops, which we gave all around the world. In that way we spread the idea of ecosystem farming or AMI-farming, and helped the industry to adopt it.

Everyone in the group was super-enthusiastic about the ecosystem concept, but only a few made it their personal purpose. One of them is Radu - Another is Seppe Salari (whom I will probably also interview soon). Already during the AMI-work, Radu got funding for his own Research project in the University of Agriculture and Veterinary Medicine in Cluj-Napoca (UASVM). The project was called Plantgeek and he and his team investigated the technologies to monitor the aquaponics ecosystem.

Of course - he didn’t stop there. He also got trained by The Ellen McArthur Foundation to become a circular economy pioneer, he also became an ambassador for Thought for Food. But most importantly, he got funding for his postdoc and got connected to the European Space Agency and their amazing project around creating an ecosystem in space: The Melissa Project.

Within this huge European collaboration between many companies and organisations he started working for SEMILLA IPStar (The Netherlands). A company that takes space-technologies to develop applications here on earth.