Mission Statement: Feeding our Future was founded to help schools and communities around Gauteng. The foundation was formed for 2 main reasons, firstly as an educational tool to teach their students the importance of agriculture, aquaculture and eco systems, how these can effect us and how we effect them as well as how we can make a difference with modern technology. The second reason is to do what we can to put a dent in poverty and starvation in our country. With the use of hydroponics and mostly aquaponics, we plan on physically showing youth of all ages how to build and run hydroponic and aquaponic grow systems. We plan on achieving this by asking the people of Gauteng to nominate schools they believe would benefit from a project such as this, after a school is chosen we will decide on an appropriate grow system for them and then we will build it and provide the education and training to keep the system running and to ensure their success we will return for monthly check ups. This will help the schools and community in the following ways:When you grow plants hydroponically (without soil) you cant help but learn what it takes for a plant to live and thrive, from the initial understanding of what plants need to live and how they absorb nutrients, to what nutrients and minerals plants need to live. If we do things the way we want we will build mostly aquaponic grow systems for the schools, when growing in an aquaponic environment the students will be able to see and learn first hand how to create an eco system and why its so important to maintain balance. Aquaponics works by having a fish pond or tank linked to a grow bed or beds roughly equal size to the tank, so basically if you have a 400L fish tank you will be able to have 400L of grow space. When you add fish to the tank and feed them they will produce waste, this waste dissolves in the water and due to the help of natural bacteria, the waste breaks down to nitrates, this nitrate rich water is then pumped up to the grow bed and runs over the roots of the plants. When the water reaches a drainage point it flows back into the fish tank keeping a closed loop cycle. The roots will then absorb the nutrient rich water taking out a fair amount of the nitrates, between this and the water flowing over a grow medium which is usually made up of expanded clay acts as very good filtration for the water so by the time it returns to the fish tank its clean. We believe this cycle of water can be used as a great teaching tool for many reasons. Firstly there is a direct connection to be made with how rain water cycles through our environment, this can help to teach geography and biology. This can also be used to show how keeping the earth clean, can help filter our rain water which can help keep our water clean. When the system is up and running with plants and fish growing there is plenty of opportunities to use the system to teach about the biology of the plants and fish and their life cycles. This will allow teacher to have a constant physical demonstration throughout the year on how this eco system survives. Next we can look at the benefit of not only farming plants and fish, but teaching the students to how to build and maintain these systems from parts they can find around their community, this will hopefully lead to these kids building aquaponic systems in their communities thus teaching their community these important lessons and best of all, feeding the community. How we plan on achieving this: During the last 2 years we have dedicated ourselves to building and experimenting with different grow systems and products. We feel we have learned invaluable lessons on how to build the perfect grow system. We have also made it our mission to find the best suppliers of important components we need such as pumps and irrigation and we have made sure we stock the very best equipment at the best prices. This puts us in a very beneficial position as we can acquire all kinds of high end products used for hydroponics and aquaponics and the very best prices, therefor allowing us to be able to build grow systems at very good prices. This puts us in a position to help others and we want to take full advantage of that so we decided to start building aquaponic systems at cost price and install them into schools and hopefully communities which will benefit from them. Unfortunately we are still a very young company and our cash flow does not allow us to take this step just yet and that brings us to how we plan on getting this project off the ground. If we can get the community involved and nominating schools and communities for this project, we can then start working with the schools to arrange fund raising to reach a goal amount of roughly R5000. More than that we will have our own campaigns running on our website and all social media outlets we can manage to create awareness and try get as many people involved as possible. Every time we reach our goal amount, we will install a grow system and provide all necessary training and education and as we have said before it will be on going training and education with the help of our website, forum and any means necessary.
Posted on: Mon, 08 Jul 2013 09:00:57 +0000
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