Grow-It-Yourself — hydroponics for people who are not farmers

How it started

Ten years walking past a shop in Sydney

There is a hydroponics shop in Sydney I walked past for about ten years and never once went into. I did buy a €150 system in Paris, of all the places in the world to buy one, and a $50 box in Manila not long before Covid arrived. Both sat there, more or less unexamined.

Then the travel stopped. I was in an apartment in Manila with more time than I had had in thirty years, a great deal of online work, and a box I had bought and never properly understood. Hydroponics turned out to be a healthy distraction and food I did not have to go out and buy. Covid is what made it happen.

What followed was not sophisticated. I worked out the basics of the box I already owned, then discovered YouTube, then discovered Lazada — and spent several hundred hours reading, ordering parts, building and piloting. Very old-fashioned: study it, then put it to practice.

And we ate it. Lettuce and arugula at more or less every meal. Fresh pesto from the basil jungle that took over the balcony. Dill on a fried egg, or on salmon. Those are memories I will keep — and they are the honest reason it stuck. Hydroponics made the locked-up days mean something beyond another day of working through Zoom.

Trays of dense, glossy basil in GIY hydroponic units, grown indoors during lockdown — **The pesto supply** It genuinely did take over the balcony. No complaints were recorded.

Dill growing in net cups on a hydroponic raft under grow lights — **The dill** Cut a few fronds on the way past, onto a fried egg. Two minutes from raft to plate, which is a thing you cannot buy at any price.

Mature loose-leaf lettuce ready to harvest in a GIY unit — **Salad, every day** Four weeks from seed. Cut the outer leaves and it keeps going for months.

Lockdown also gave me the time to study something I had always wanted to learn properly — Mastering Design Thinking at MIT. I took the idea in with me as the thing I wanted to scale. It became our Team 19 project, and we called it Salad as a Service. The question we set ourselves was deliberately larger than a product: how might this help people in food deserts, or in places where distribution makes fresh food hard to reach? The team ran around forty user interviews across the United States, Hong Kong and the Philippines — grocery-store observation, home growers, people who had never grown anything, and one family living in their car.

Three things came out of that research and every design decision afterwards followed from them: people are not held back by cost, they are held back by the fear of killing the plant; space is the binding constraint in cities; and gardeners want to be told what to do next, not handed equipment. Hence modular, stackable, and a subscription that guaranteed two harvests a month rather than selling you a kit and wishing you luck.

Then it was localised. The MIT project was global — American suburbs, Hong Kong apartments, Manila. What I did next, as a deliberate transition towards retirement, was run the pilot in one market and find out which parts survived contact with it. That is the whole distinction between a course assignment and a business.

Before Covid A €150 system from Paris, a $50 box in Manila
Bought on impulse, after a decade of walking past a shop in Sydney. Largely unopened.
August 2020 Beginning
Lockdown, an apartment in Manila, and several hundred hours of YouTube, Lazada orders and trial and error.
September 2020 Design ideas
First sketches of a unit simple enough that its owner would not need to understand it.
Nov 2020 – Feb 2021 Mastering Design Thinking, MIT
Hydroponics became the Team 19 project — forty user interviews across three countries, a life-cycle assessment that replaced plastic with bamboo, cloth and paper, and a business case built around subscription rather than hardware.
December 2020 Pilot 0.1
Built, run, and learned from — mostly about what people will and will not maintain.
March 2021 Pilot 1.0
The version that worked. Everything after this was product, not experiment.
June 2023 Asia Clean Energy Forum
On the panel for the deep dive workshop on the energy–food–water–climate nexus — because growing food where it is eaten is an energy question and a water question before it is ever an agriculture question.
October 2023 Handover at Crimson, Boracay
Around six thousand plants growing across five locations in one resort, and a trained team certified to run them.

Sohail Hasnie speaking on the Energy-Food-Water-Climate Nexus panel at the Asia Clean Energy Forum 2023 — **Asia Clean Energy Forum, 16 June 2023**Making the case that food grown where it is eaten is an energy problem.

The full panel at the Energy-Food-Water-Climate Nexus deep dive workshop, Asia Clean Energy Forum 2023 — **The deep dive workshop**Renewable energy solutions for low carbon and resilient agri-food systems.

What we built

Eighty per cent of the benefit, twenty per cent of the cost

That was the design rule, and everything followed from it. Not the most productive system that engineering could deliver — the most productive system an ordinary person would still be running in six months. Established technology, deliberately simple products, and nothing in the loop that needed an expert to keep alive.

Grow anywhere

Balconies, kitchens, corridors, courtyards. The unit went where the food was going to be eaten, which is the only place that removes the truck.

Shorten food miles

In an archipelago, a head of lettuce can cross two ferries before it reaches a plate. Most of its value and most of its freshness is lost in transit.

Work for women

The operating model was built around young women running community gardens as small businesses — agri-tech that needs a trained operator, not a farm.

The unit was designed to be thrown away responsibly. A life-cycle assessment during the MIT course took the first prototype — a plastic reservoir, steel frame, plastic net cups — and replaced the plastic with processed bamboo, the lid with cloth and the net cups with paper. A five-year service life, then almost nothing left to landfill. There is not much point growing food sustainably in a box that isn't.

An early wooden hydroponic unit with seedlings under a grow light — **An early unit**Plywood, net pots and a light. The point was never the hardware.

A cardboard mock-up of a two-tier growing unit, marked up by hand with dimensions and reservoir volumes — **Prototyping on the living room floor**Cardboard, a marker and a pencil. Working out that three centimetres off the bottom box costs you 1.63 litres — before anyone cut any timber.

Dimensioned design drawing of a GIY growing unit — **Designed to be made**Dimensioned for local manufacture, so units could be built where they were sold.

Lettuce growing in a white hydroponic channel — **The product**Lettuce at harvest, in a channel that fits a domestic kitchen.

Two women tending plants on a multi-tier hydroponic rack under grow lights — **Vertical racks**More growing area than floor area — which is what makes cities work.

A row of hydroponic growing units on a tiled floor — **Production**Units assembled and planted, ready to be delivered and commissioned.

A hydroponic unit packed into a blue carry bag for delivery — **Delivered by motorbike**If it does not fit on a scooter in Manila traffic, it does not scale.

Lettuce seedlings growing in a GIY box on a windowsill above the Makati skyline — **A windowsill in Makati**Twelve plants, thirty storeys up, in a city with no room for a garden.

Timber trough racks of romaine lettuce growing on a sunny terrace — **Rooftop and terrace**The same idea at household scale — timber troughs, full sun, no grow lights needed.

A grower lifting insect netting from a large outdoor bed of romaine lettuce — **Netting, not spraying**Outdoors in the tropics the pest answer is physical. Cheaper, and nothing to explain to the person eating it.

Sohail Hasnie and a grower holding up a cucumber grown on site — **Not just leaves**The first cucumber. Some days the job was very simple.

Proved in working hotels

Crimson on Boracay, Ascott in Manila

The hardest test for a growing system is not a laboratory. It is a resort kitchen on an island, where the staff rotate, nobody has spare time, and the greens have to arrive on the plate whatever else is happening that week.

We installed at Crimson Resort & Spa on Boracay and ran a full training programme with their team — four workshops, ending on 6 October 2023 with nutrients, plant care, and certificates for the people who would keep it running after we left. We did the same for Ascott in Manila, whose staff trained in their own aprons and left with planted trays. That handover is the whole test. A system that only works while its designer is in the room is not a product.

~6,000 Plants growing across the Crimson property by October 2023

5 Separate locations, from staff quarters to the café

4 Training workshops, ending with certification

The largest was a wind-exposed garden running around 3,100 plants; a single corridor between two buildings carried another 1,700. The rest went into the staff house, the general manager's garden and the corner of the café — lettuce, arugula, dill, coriander, Thai basil and tomato. Nothing exotic. Things a kitchen uses every day and would otherwise fly in.

What that proves is not horticulture. It is that a resort with no agricultural staff, on an island, could run six thousand plants across five awkward spaces using systems bought off a catalogue and skills learned in four sessions. That is the thing worth transferring.

Poster for the fourth and final GIY hydroponics workshop at Crimson Resort and Spa, Boracay, October 2023 — **The fourth and final workshop**Crimson Resort & Spa, Boracay Island — 6 October 2023.

Ascott Somerset staff in aprons holding trays of seedlings after a GIY training session — **Training at Ascott**Every participant left with a planted tray of their own.

Presentation of certificates of participation to hotel staff — **Certificates**Deliberate. It made the skill theirs, and gave it a value they could carry.

Around twenty Crimson staff from kitchen, housekeeping, engineering and grounds holding their planted trays after training — **The whole crew**Chefs, housekeeping, engineering, grounds. Deliberately not just the gardeners — that is how it survives a roster change.

Sohail Hasnie presenting a session on transplanting basil into GIY boxes — **Transplanting basil into GIY boxes**Most of the work was teaching, not engineering.

Commercial propagation racks under pink grow lights — **Propagation at scale**Seedlings raised centrally, so the customer never had to start from seed.

Rockwell residents and children gathered around a community hydroponic garden bed in Manila — **Rockwell residents, Manila**Neighbours, children, one grow bed. This was always the version I wanted.

The version I actually wanted

Saturday morning at The Rockwell Club

In January 2023 we ran a free workshop in the Palm Grove garden at The Rockwell Club in Makati. Everyone who came took home a box: lettuce seeds, arugula seeds, horticulture foam, a nutrient pack. Ten in the morning, limited slots, and it filled.

Thirty-odd people turned up — couples, grandparents, teenagers, children — and spent the morning planting basil at a trestle table under the palms with residential towers behind them. That photograph is the business case. Not one of those people was a farmer, and none of them needed to be.

Poster for the Grow at Home with Hydroponics free workshop at The Rockwell Club, January 2023 — **Grow at Home with Hydroponics**Palm Grove Garden, 14 January 2023. Box kit included.

Around thirty-five workshop participants of all ages in the Rockwell garden with planted trays — **The whole workshop**Everyone holding something they had just planted themselves.

Two workshop participants laughing while planting basil seedlings into a GIY box — **Planting basil**Twenty minutes of instruction, then it is yours.

A row of bamboo-framed GIY units with grow lights, planted with basil seedlings — **The take-home unit**Bamboo frame, integrated light — the design that came out of the MIT life-cycle work.

A dense basil plant grown by a workshop participant at home, photographed by their poolside — **What one of them grew**Sent back to the group by a participant, weeks later, from his own garden. This is the only outcome that matters.

A box of mature loose-leaf lettuce growing on an apartment balcony ledge — **And what another grew**One box, one balcony ledge, enough salad for a household.

A grower beside empty timber trough racks with grow lights, ready for planting — **Built locally**Timber racks made to our drawings by a local workshop — the point of designing for local manufacture.

Senator Kiko Pangilinan visiting the GIY grow room in Manila, with basil growing under LED racks — **Senator Kiko Pangilinan visits the grow room**Chair of the Senate Committee on Agriculture, and former Presidential Assistant for Food Security. Where the seedlings for every workshop and installation were raised.

This is the model that scales, and it is why I stopped enjoying the hotel work. A resort buys a system. A neighbourhood learns a skill, and then thirty households want one, and one of them wants to run the franchise. The economics are almost identical. The second one changes something.

The people who actually ran it

None of this was me on a balcony. There was a team — growing, propagating, delivering, maintaining and teaching, most days without me there.

Three uniformed staff members beside a long trough of basil on a terrace — **The growing team**A single trough of basil, maintained daily. This is what the job looks like.

Sohail Hasnie with a group of women involved in the community growing programme — **The livelihood side**The version of this business worth building — women running growing as an income, not a hobby.

Sohail Hasnie holding a propagation tray of seedlings in the grow room — **Propagation**Every installation started as a tray like this one, a fortnight earlier.

A dense tray of basil seedlings under pink LED light in the nursery — **Two weeks later**The same tray, ready to go out to a customer or a workshop.

The argument I closed with

Hydroponics is solar, with leaves

This is the slide I finished on, and it is the reason an energy person spent three years growing lettuce. Put a hydroponics system and a solar system side by side and they are the same class of object. Small, modular, sited where the thing is consumed rather than where it is produced. And — the part that matters — they cost almost exactly the same per unit of capacity.

$0.50–$1 Per plant of hydroponic capacity

$0.50–$1 Per watt of installed solar capacity

A 10–30 plant unit is a 30–100 watt panel. A 100–25,000 plant community system is a 5–100 kW community solar array. The ladder is identical, and so is the financing problem at each rung.

Which matters because we already know how that story ends. Australia put 30,000 MW of rooftop solar on its houses in fifteen years — the highest capacity per head in the world, about 1,200 watts for every one of 25 million people. Not through a technology breakthrough. Through unit economics that worked at household scale, financing an ordinary family could actually use, and a trade that knew how to install it. Every one of those conditions is available to hydroponics.

What scaling up actually looks like

One household A $500 rooftop system — 500 plants
20–30 kg of produce a month, worth $100–150, on thirty hours of labour and $5 of supplies. A side income, not a job.
One neighbourhood A $50,000 community garden — 50,000 plants
Two hundred square metres serving a hundred households, run as a small business by someone local.
One city A $2.5 million cluster — 50 community gardens
Two and a half million plants, and employment for more than a hundred women.
One country $50 million — a cluster in each of twenty cities
Which is the number that made me want to build it. Fifty million dollars is not a venture round. It is an ordinary development finance operation, of exactly the kind I spent twenty-two years preparing.

Three-dimensional design drawing of a large-scale hydroponic growing facility, with human figures for scale — **The version that never got built** A commercial-scale layout, drawn to the ten-metre bed. Two figures in the drawing for scale — because the whole point was that it takes two people to run, not twenty.

Four team members with a large harvest tray of basil — **A basil harvest**Masks and all — this was built through the pandemic, not after it.

Three team members in the GIY workshop with racks and components — **The workshop**Where the units were designed, built and packed.

A lettuce plant growing under a grow light — **Ten days from seed**The part customers actually cared about.

Where it stands

An expensive MBA in entrepreneurship

The capability is real and proven: taught to myself in a lockdown, refined through a design course, tested across four pilots, and handed over working in an island resort. On its own terms it worked.

Two things took it off the front burner. Selling growing systems to hotels was never the point — what I wanted was the developmental version, community gardens run as small businesses, changing household income for the women operating them. Hospitality was the market that turned up; livelihood was the market I was after.

And then the honest answer: solar, batteries and electric vehicles had a far stronger hold on me than hydroponics ever did, and I could not sustain both. Something had to go to the back burner.

My co-founders Lorraine Wang and Chesca Ramirez and I have said the same thing to each other more than once — it was an expensive MBA in entrepreneurship. We learned it by doing it: design, supply chains, manufacturing, pricing, and how people really behave with something you put in their kitchen.

For me it was also something more specific: a hands-on transition from the public sector into the world of startups. After twenty-two years inside a development bank, that is not a small thing to learn, and there is no way to learn it from the outside. Then I went back to my old job. Energy.

So it is paused, not finished. The designs, the product catalogue, the supplier relationships, the training material and the operating knowledge are intact and transferable. If you are in the Philippines and this is the business you want to run — particularly the livelihood version — I would much rather it existed than stayed in a drawer. What it needs is not another pilot. It needs scaling, and scaling is a financing problem before it is a farming one.

And one day it comes back. When I eventually settle somewhere with room for it — rural New South Wales, or a country town in Victoria — there will be a system in the ground again within a month.

Get in touch

Close-up of green and red lettuce leaves

The lesson transferred. The technology was never the constraint. Distribution, financing it in a way people could actually use, and having someone competent on the ground — those were the constraints. They are the same three constraints in the energy work I do now.

Salad, harvested in the kitchen that serves it