The cost of the Groasis waterboxx

Is the waterboxx expensive or is it not? The answer to this question depends on the costs in comparison with the expected advantages. Using a car is more expensive than walking. However, in many cases the extra costs are accepted compared to the extra advantages of the car. So the majority of people prefers a car instead of walking although on first sight a car is more expensive than walking.

The same is valid for the waterboxx. When using fertile land the waterboxx is not necessary and one can plant seeds or trees without its use. However, fertile land can be used for annual crops that offer a higher IRR (internal rate of return) than trees. So we prefer to use fertile – expensive - land for these kind of crops. Fertile, more expensive land, makes the cost price of tree planting too high: the capital costs (capital and interest) of a high investment in land for the long period between the moment of planting until the moment of harvest of the trees make it almost impossible to have an interesting IRR with trees on expensive land.

This is where the Groasis waterboxx starts to play its important role. The instrument offers great savings as it allows us to plant trees on presently almost worthless land. This means that planting trees with the waterboxx investment on cheap land is cheaper than planting trees on expensive land. The waterboxx advantage is even triple: the investment is lower, the IRR is higher and an interesting part for every user is the (mostly untaxed) capital growth of almost worthless land to expensive land once there is a good and promising crop of trees coming.

Besides the above advantages that already make the box such an interesting investment, there are more advantages. The cost of the box, if bought in interesting numbers, is around 10 euro. Because of it’s ten times re-using capability, it means a costprice of around 1 euro per tree. At the moment we are testing even two plantations per year and it seems possible to do this. So the cost price might even reduce to only 50 cents per tree or bush. If you plant seeds with it, you save the costs of a sapling so you already plant cost neutral. If you plant saplings, you don’t need a 2 or 3 year old one, what is normal nowadays, but you can use a cutting or a hardened plant from tissue culture. The saving on the plant cost is more than one euro, so the use of the waterboxx is then already a money making business model at the start. Another big advantage is that you don’t need irrigation while using the box as a planting method as it stimulates the development of another type of root system: deep penetrating radicle roots instead of superficial remaining secundary roots. This means that you save yourself the investment in an irrigation system, an electricity network and you use no energy. At last pricing of water as a way to stimulate the sustainable use of it begins to be normal in many countries. Drip irrigation uses each year – eternally - approximately 1,500 liters of water per tree – don’t think that drip irrigation is efficiënt, it isn’t - compared to the Groasis waterboxx a one time 20 liter use - and as long as these annual 1,500 liter per tree is for free, you don’t calculate the costs. But it is expected that around 2025 each grower world wide pays for each liter of water that he is using in his production. Starting to plant now with Groasis waterboxxes is therefore really intelligent, as it means that you are having trees producing fruits without the use of irrigation in 2025. All together the Groasis waterboxx offers so many cost advantages, that it’s use is in most cases cost neutral and on the longer term it saves huge amounts of money in this way reducing the production costs of our food.

So, is the waterboxx expensive or not? The answer is that in most cases it is more interesting to plant trees with the waterboxx on cheap land than to plant trees without the waterboxx on expensive land.