Sharing My Goal

Sustainability has been the focus of my life since 2012

Climate change has been at the heart of Pure Love Sustainability Inc. since before I decided to start this business. In 2012, a few friends and I restored an illegal garbage dump site that had existed for at least 40 years in our neighborhood in the Bronx (New York City) and turned the space into an organic flower farm that we named Pure Love Organic Farms.

An untold story of the farm is that our desire to grow organic flowers and have an organic farm came from our passion to make a difference in the health of the planet. It is why Pure Love Organic Farms used USDA approved organic flower bulbs, added compost to our soil and used only OMRI approved organic soil amendments because conventionally grown flowers (vegetables too) are typically coated with a pesticide, herbicide, fungicide or chemical fertilizer, and even if a conventional seed was not coated with these chemical materials, conventional seeds like had a pesticide, herbicide, fungicide or chemical fertilizer used on them and we were unwilling to add any chemicals to our soil. 

During our second year on the farm we learned about the sequestering carbon from the air into the soil and how we could train our soil o be able to store carbon and we set out to make Pure Love Organic Farms, a carbon sequestration hotbed.

During some intense work over the summer of 2013, I applied for a job with a Toronto-based startup company in the environmental technology space that made a food waste digestion machine that they sold to hotels, restaurants, commercial kitchens, stadiums, grocery stores, and any food producer that broke their food waste down onsite over and over again until the food waste became very small particles or water. The small food waste particles and water would leave a screen at the bottom of the machine and ultimately get sent to the local aster water treatment plant to be recycled for new water. It was an amazing process and after working my first 10 clients, I realized that commercial business are the challnenge when it comes to climate change. As I had a client that literally generated 2,500 pounds (1.25 tons) of food waste every time that they had a major banquet or event and let’s just say that this client hosted all of the event for the White House and other major NGO’s, non-profits and the such so they constantly produced massive volumes of food waste that would have been sent to the landfill to rot and emit methane and CO2 gases into the atmosphere.

In 2015, I started looking at the possibility of bringing the concept of Pure Love Organic Farms elsewhere and creating new acres of organic, sustainable produce farmland from “unusable land” like we had at our farm in the Bronx. I started searching throughout the country for cities that had more affordable land (yes it would make much more sense to have this business outside of a city and I am a true city boy at heart having been born and raised in NYC and having lived there for 33 years before moving to Boise) and one day a strong thought came across my mind to check out Boise, ID. 

I looked at land prices in and near Boise and saw that they were fairly affordable and decided to book a four day trip to Boise in August 2015, knowing nothing about the city besides BSU and its blue turf field and that potatoes were grown here (an incorrect assumption on my part) and I fell in love with Boise over my 4 days of being here as the nature, people and cool vibe of the city won me over.

Shortly after that trip I decided that I would be living in Boise in 2017 and would create Pure Love sustainability Inc. in Boise to restore the health of “unusable land” and rent it to young produce farmers at prices that were more affordable than they could buy land for. 

Although, I did not meet my 2017 goal, my fiancee (now wife) and I moved to Boise in Jan. 2018. 

While I have not gotten to work on creation new acres of organic, sustainable produce farmland and renting these acres to young farmers at prices that are more affordable than buying land (I may come back to this business in the future) I started to see huge opportunities to build Boise as the most sustainable city in the U.S. and a model city that other cities in the country look to when they are creating their sustainability plans.

I truly believe that we have what it takes and that we can make huge difference when it comes to being the leading city in the sustainability movement due to Boise’s size and rapidly growing population and I am committed working hard to make this happen. This has been my goal for much of the time that I have lived in Boise and yet, I have not shared with with many people as I have been afraid to be held accountable to this and today (09/30/2019), the universe told me that it is time to share this with the world. So let’s make it happen Boise, we have a lot of actions to take and I will be sharing more of the actions that we can take from here forward.