Inventor and entrepreneur Michael Garjian is thinking big — about economics, agriculture, the food supply, the environment, and the American dream, usually at the same time. Believing that the modern economic framework is broken, he has proposed a capitalist system that also spreads wealth to community needs, while giving employees more of a stake in their workplaces. Oh, and he wants to build a bunch of farms. Indoors.

Michael Garjian says a multi-story building in an urban downtown can produce dozens, even hundreds of times more food crops than a patch of farmland with the same footprint.

That’s certainly a different vision of farming than growing crops outdoors in an open field, but thinking outside the box is nothing new for Garjian, a local inventor and entrepreneur who has spent the past several years contemplating what’s wrong with today’s economic system and how to change it — first locally, then globally.

Which brings him to inner-city farms.

“We have to have a sane agricultural policy,” Garjian said, citing the high cost of shipping food products long distances, not to mention outbreaks of salmonella and E. coli in produce, as hindrances to that sanity — and reasons why food production and distribution should be as local as possible.

“For every calorie you put in your mouth,” he explained, “nine to 10 calories are spent on transportation and processing. And a lot of farmland is dead because of pesticides and herbicides over the years. Even organic crops are subject to acid rain, mercury, diesel soot, and other environmental issues.”

What ties these seemingly random concerns together, he said, is the need to get healthy food into cities, where a good percentage of America’s poor and undernourished reside. “Many people in cities, including children, live in poverty, and many of them go to bed hungry. In America, 20% of kids go hungry. That is unacceptable. In a country like ours, that’s criminal.”

That’s why Garjian’s company, Vee-Go (Vegetable Energy Group LLC), is at the forefront of developing technology to grow food indoors, in either new or retrofitted warehouses or high-rises, in a climate-controlled environment, using soil that’s free of contaminants and rich in nutrients.

It isn’t dirtless hydroponics he’s talking about, but a process he calls ‘terraponics’ in which quality soil is pasteurized to kill certain pathogens, then remineralized and re-energized with worms, fungi, and bacteria to produce the most nutrient-rich environment possible for growing produce — and reversing what he claims has been a 50% decrease in the nutrient value in food in recent years because of pesticides, herbicides, and other harmful soil impacts.

“The food that comes from these farms will be like no other food, and you’ll have the best, most powerful, and most medicinal herbs,” he said. And because plants grow quicker in ideal soil and rows of crops can be ‘stacked’ to maximize space, the yield per acre is considerably higher than on a traditional plot of farmland — not to mention the ability to grow year-round, regardless of the weather outside.

But food quality and quantity aren’t the only impacts, he said. Under the economic model he has developed (more on that later), these indoor farms would employ inner-city young people at living wages — say, $16 per hour — and provide money for health insurance plus profit-sharing in the facility, giving them not only an alternative to drugs and other illicit forms of income, but also a pride in ownership they can’t get working at McDonald’s.

Garjian, who is converting warehouse space on Circuit Avenue in West Springfield into such a climate-controlled indoor farm, has a lot on his mind, and enthusiastically jumps from topic to topic with the fervor of a true believer. In this issue, BusinessWest catches him talking about terraponics, vegetable oil, and economic fairness — all part of his modest efforts to, well, change the world.

Seeing the Light

Before thinking about economic models, Garjian was enjoying a bright — literally — career in neon. Among his many patents, he had developed a tubeless neon light source and launched Neon Technologies in Chicopee.

But by the late 1990s, the Asian economy was struggling, and a large Japanese corporation that had invested heavily in Garjian’s enterprise was forced to withdraw its support. Unable to make up that loss of cash flow, he liquidated the company, but only after helping all his employees find other jobs.

Those thoughts led him to contemplate the entire concept of capitalism and modern economies, and to an idea: a sustainable model he dubbed E2M, short for an Economic Model for Millennium 2000 — a concept he said has been vindicated by recent turmoil in the world financial markets.

“The things we’ve seen economically lately indicate that there are some serious issues with our current economic system — not only on a national basis, but globally — and people in business need to really open their minds to the idea that, economically, we might be on the wrong path,” he told BusinessWest. “The system is showing its weaknesses, and it’s going to get worse, because it’s not a sustainable system.”

Garjian, who isn’t afraid to speak in grand, philosophical terms, even suggested that humanity may be at an evolutionary crossroads, with current troubles a sign that people need to change course.

“We’re killing the planet and killing ourselves, all to produce more and more for fewer people,” he said. “We need to work in a way that works for everyone. Even the super-rich — we want them on board, too.”

Garjian said he’s not interested in destroying the old system — “it will kill itself” — but wants to build a new system within the current structure, based on capitalism and free markets, that encourages people to build wealth but also understand that communities need to be healthy, too.

To succeed, the E2M model requires equal participation from communities and corporations. Garjian is looking to recruit companies to become ‘E2M-certified,’ which requires that they contribute a portion of their stock equity to the community, and set aside an additional percentage for profit-sharing. These businesses can be existing companies, or newly formed by entrepreneurs to fit into the E2M model.

Alternately, companies can become E2M ‘sponsors’ by donating a percentage of gross sales, or E2M ‘supporters’ by donating a percentage of sales from a certain product line. That’s what Dave’s Soda and Pet City is doing with a locally produced brand of cat litter using material manufactured by Vee-Go, the flagship E2M company, launched in 2005.

Among Garjian’s products are Vee-Go Energy Pellets, which are made from converting inedible waste produced when processing grains — wheat, soy, sunflower, or rapeseed, for example — into fuel. He has forged partnerships with a number of local farmers in Massachusetts and Connecticut, using feedstock to create the pellets, and the new use for grain byproducts is creating a new revenue stream for the local agriculture industry — another plus.

Community Harvest

But just as important to Garjian as Vee-Go’s products, which also include biofuels (he heats his facility with vegetable oil), is the company’s place in the E2M network, a concept he speaks of in almost reverent tones.

“I decided this was a gift I had received, and my job is to deliver it, so that’s what I started to do. In January 2000, I penned the first words that led to the initial stages, and now a framework of this new system is in place in Western Mass.”

According to the model, the employees of an E2M-certified business may vote on which community agencies will benefit from 50% of the company’s donation. Of the remaining 50%, most is distributed across the region by the Regional Economic Council (REC), a non-profit organization created by E2M to manage the funds contributed by various firms. A smaller percentage of funds are donated on the national and global levels.

“It’s about creating a system where corporations and businesses donate a portion of their proceeds and also have profit-sharing with their employees,” Garjian said. “E2M’s job is to make sure consumers buy from these companies that donate to the community.”

Giving employees a stake in where that money goes is a crucial element, he added. “We’re giving employees more of a reason for their labors than just picking up a paycheck or making the boss money or the company rich. We want people to feel their work is meaningful beyond making money.”

Gardjian noted that the government spends trillions of dollars on what he calls “the most important jobs in society” — among them maintaining the food chain and rehabilitating inner cities — “but I’m not convinced that we’re getting value for the money we spend,” particularly when one considers the trillions being appropriated to bail out Wall Street and prop up banks. To him, a committed partnership between commerce and community makes more sense, and is more self-sustaining.

He said he sees no reason why the REC couldn’t buy up houses and condos and offer 50-year mortgages at 1% rates to people who can’t afford home ownership under the current system.

“You could own your own house for $100 a week or an inner-city condo for $25 a week. Why do we need to have homelessness?” he asked. “So many our our problems are created by our economic system, which always needs more and more profits that result in more and more resource consumption and waste, and more and more production of stuff that exists only to make more profit.

“This constantly increasing treadmill creates ill health and stress,” he continued, “not only for workers, but for executives beholden to invisible investors who demand more and more. This whole rat race is driven by the need for maximum profits and growth for a few people.”

That, he said, is what makes the E2M model so attractive. By keeping the focus local, it gets people thinking about community needs and creates huge amounts of employee-controlled money that can be used to build infrastructure, invest in alternative energy, and do massive cleanups — in other words, the jobs government often stumbles with because of its inherent inefficiency.

Hunger for Change

At the center of that is food production, which he sees as the most important job in this new economy — and one almost anyone could participate in.

“You don’t have to know how to splice a gene to be in this workforce; you don’t even have to know what a gene is,” Garjian said. “We can have high-quality food grown by people who are unskilled.

“The Bible says the last shall be first,” he added. “There are a number of people involved in this who are driven by religion or spirituality, who see that it makes sense. This is about no one having to be last, but everyone having a dignified lifestyle and thriving local businesses supported by the community — and vice versa.”

Soon he started talking about a fast-growing strain of algae that can be cultivated indoors using waste lights to produce biofuel — another concept he’s working on these days to change the way the world works and consumes resources.

Somehow it all comes back to farming — and to that figurative neon lightbulb above Garjian’s head, giving him yet another big idea.

Joseph Bednar can be reached atbednar@businesswest.com