 This is Think Tech Hawaii, Community Matters here. Welcome to Think Tech Hawaii. I'm Glenn Martinez of Olamana Gardens, and this is Natalie Cash, our farm manager. Say hello. Hello everybody. Yeah. She's wearing her Christmas colors today. That's right. It's all Christmasy. Yeah. Everything but a ribbon in the hair today. So, got it. We're doing really good. Well, we're having a great season coming up. Wanted to share with you that our friends down in the Big Island, we got some slides we're going to show you later of how they're coming along with their course. Today's the last day, YWAM, and the YWAMmer's down in Kailua, Kona, and so they had nine students take the course, that's nine days long and that, and today's their final day doing presentations. But they've been sending us pictures through the week in that teaching their students how to build my, what we call hands-on training, hot training. And so, and it's MAD, MAD, so we call it MAD Hot, and then the MAD stands for Make a Difference. Yes. So, the big question to all these students is, did it make a difference spending this nine days doing what they're doing, okay? And the standard response they get is they learn more in that nine days than they did in the whole semester coming up, okay? Because they did all the academics, so they know why it should work, but they've never seen it work. So it's kind of interesting. And talking about education is Dr. Benny Rahn used to be with the Vice Chancellor's office here at University of Hawaii, and Natalie and I have worked with him quite a bit. Where have we gone, Natalie, with Benny Rahn? Oh my gosh, we've been to the Philippines several times, America Samoa, Western Samoa. Yep. We've been to different parts of the mainland for conferences and Hawaiian Islands too. Right. So in many ways, Dr. Benny Rahn really put us on the map. Yes. So we got to put more stars on the map where we've been, what we do. And so we do, we lecture for them, and Natalie and I are only two people on the staffs of 18 people for the ATOL program, which what is that? Literature, training, online learning. There you go. You'll learn that very well. ATOL. ATOL. ATOL training. And so ATOL training is online done. It was funded by NOAA, and NOAA did it because they have a responsibility to education to the Pacific Islands and the trust territory. So does University of Hawaii. So they spent some sizable money, I mean hundreds of thousands of dollars to do this online course, and Natalie and I were invited to participate, and we did about 18 films for them. We got paid to do it. It was a good gig. And then they showed it online. Well we're in our fourth year, and they're still showing. And now with the University of Texas and other learning institutions. And so it's online so you can go up and see it. So we're going to show you the introduction that Natalie and I made for this course. It's a short little 15-20 minute film. And so we're going to roll that and then I'll answer some questions right after that. So if we go ahead and show that, the ATOL introduction. Conversation with you about aquaponics. This is not a lecture series. This is more of a show and tell, and it's hands on, my hand, and hopefully at your end, your hand, for you to learn the basics of aquaponics. Our intention is to teach you where it came from, who started it, how much progress you had made, who are the leaders in this thing, what systems work, and then to show you some possibilities of what you can do. We'll start off with a aquarium in a house and then having a garden outside and we'll go from there. Anyway, I hope you enjoy this journey. Aquaponics is a fine art of using the fish waste water to fertilize the plants, letting the plants clean up the water and recirculating it back to the fish tank nice and clean. This is a basic aquarium setup, 55 gallons. All you have to have is anywhere from 6 to 10 fish in it. And you've got what you need to do your garden. Your garden can be right outside there on the tables, out in the sunlight. One of the things I really like is I can come from inside the studio or inside my townhouse or my condo, step out on the lanai, and here's my little cinder bed with my aquarium fish water coming into it. It's going to fill up to here, hit this level, going to go down. That's going to set up a siphon. The water is going to go past and it's going to vertigate all my plants, vertigate, fertilized irrigation. So, like hydroponic, but it's organic. Big difference, and you can certainly tell it in the taste. One of the neatest things in aquaponics is that something called barrel ponics, or aquaponics in a barrel. A fellow named Travis Huey came up with this in about 2005. He gifted it to the world. If you're just making it for yourself, he's happy to share his plans with you for free up on the internet. Basically, he has a 55-gallon drum on the bottom. That is your fish in there. That's your aquarium. He pumps the water up here to the top, comes up to the top, running all the time. Up here, you have your cinder bed or your bio-filter, and you have a siphon. This is kind of a neat thing. This is the Australian Bell Siphon. The water goes up, flushes, goes down. We're going to teach you all about that. That goes in there. The water's going to fill up to about this level, and it's going to flush. It's going to come out the bottom, and it's going to come through. And what you're going to see is things grow hydroponically without any soil. And you'll also see that we have cinder beds here, two 25-gallon cinder beds growing rooted crops, or we can go with the leafy lettuce, our choice. But it's something anybody can do if you get access to a couple of barrels. You'll enjoy this. This is kind of a cute little system we designed right here at Olamana Garden. It consists of three trays set up on top of a luau table, table 30 by 60 inches by six feet long, three little trays from Home Depot filled full of cinder. The water's flowing up here constantly. Where does the water come from? It comes from the fish tank. Down here we have 110-gallon fish tank. Fish are swimming around it. Water gets pumped up there. The water goes through there. This is your siphon. When the water fills up here, hits this level, overflows, comes down, and then we have what? Our aquaponics bed, right? With all the plants growing like that. So, come through here. The last one is our zola. This is where we grow our own fish food, and I can feed my fish by doing that. That'd get much simpler than that folks, and it really works. If you're talking aquaponics, and you're talking sustainability, well you gotta get rid of the food we mentioned that. The other thing is energy. Solar really plays in. This is a small little system that you can put together for a couple of hundred dollars. And the solar in here is 80 watts. We'll run one of these systems. Every now and then we have somebody say, well you know why I just don't want a whole bunch of ugly black plastic tanks in my backyard? Well it doesn't have to be that way. You can have all the nature you want, and you can have it with that scenic as possible. So this can be your fish pond. This pond is five feet deep. That brings up a healthy bounty of fish force every year. In this forest we're gonna show you, you're not stuck with doing an aquarium or a plastic tank. You're gonna be in a very natural pond setting. You're gonna be raised in beautiful poi fish. We've got some guys in here two and a half, three feet long. We don't eat these guys, totally ornamental. But you know what, my plants don't care. So we're gonna show you many different ways to do this. Now you saw the fish in the aquarium, see a fish in a tank. But the best way to actually see a fish is in your landing there. These are some of our nice guys here. I'd like to show you here is how we get dinner. This is our dinner. We can catch them. You can walk over here at any time. Just come up with a whole pot full of them. So these are great tasting guys. We'll show you how to catch them. We'll show you how to raise them. And the best part, we're gonna show you how to cook them. Now tell you what, these little beauties cook up very well. This is a 1200 gallon tank. What we wanna show you is every time we move water that we aerated. We're gonna show you several different methods. Now this tank is 1200 gallons and we have over a thousand fish. It's not too hard to come up with a net full of it. Okay, this is a tea maker. We're gonna show you how we don't just limit ourselves to the fish food, but we actually make tea in these 55 gallons. We make it every day. And it's a simple thing. We're gonna show you how to take a sack of worm casting, put it in the bucket, pop it around here, run it for 24 hours. And when you top off your system, we're gonna teach you how to use worm tea. It's a miracle stuff. This is the kind of spray action we get out of the water coming down the hill, dumping into our siphon tank. I think you'd be quite surprised at how much aeration. We keep our air up at 7 to 7.2 parts per million by this method. We run very little pressurized air in our system. This is the clear water from the bottom of our siphon tank. And from this, you can see just how clear the water is. When we start talking about sustainability in aquaponics, how sustainable can you be if you have to go to store it by your fish booth? So we're gonna show you how to raise a Zola on other crops like duckweed so you grow your own food to feed it. Not only do we feed our fish this in aquaponics, we put it here on the farm, our goats, our chickens, our pigs. We're gonna show you duckweed. We're gonna show you many different ways of doing it. Of growing your own food. Some of the things we're gonna share with you is that we grow from everything from sweet potato, a little ornamental flowers keeps the bugs confused. But the most important thing is around in our beds is we raise worms. Here are my worms. These are Indian blue worms. We're gonna show you how to grow them and they keep everything smelling sweet. There's a rumor in aquaponics that about the only thing you can grow is lettuce. But we're here to tell you you can grow yourself a forest of collo. This stuff is fantastic, extremely nutritious, and a favorite around the Pacific Islands. You always wanna think about your herbs. You get your herbs, you get your chives. It's really nice. We're gonna go over and show you some mint right after this. If you're into the cooking arts, aquaponics offers you a special treat. You can grow so many of your herbs. One of my favorites here is I like a cool drink in the summertime. So I grow four different kinds of mint in one four by four foot garden. I've got spearmint, peppermint, orange mint, and my all time favorite, chocolate mint. Life is good. Sweet potatoes are all time favorite all over the world. We grow them not only just for the potato, but also for the leaves. We use it in many, many dishes. Particularly proud of this, tapioca. This is a staple crop when you go down to Tongan, Fiji, and the Pacific Island. Big, starch-eating plant. You eat the roots of it. This plant, towering over five, six foot tall, is only five months old, and it's already bearing seeds. This is some kale. Stuff goes big and strong in here. What we're most proud of in our ebb and flow system and using the cinder beds to filter the fish water, it gives us a special treat. We get to grow things like asparagus. Takes two years to get your first crop, and after that, you go eight to 10 years. This is some great eating. Water hyacinths just add a little beauty to any water garden. You can't eat them, but they sure clean up the water and they add a little beauty to the garden. Well, if you're gonna be in Hawaii, one thing you gotta do is grow a little bit of pineapple. It's a two-year crop, folks, but this pineapple is only about four and a half, maybe five months old, and it'll be eaten here maybe in another month. It's doing all right. This is coyote squash. The real particularly interesting thing on this is, all of this is from one vine. Just one plant. Right now, we got about a count of 58 fruit up here. Now, very often, yeah, people bragging about mine is bigger than yours or mine grows faster. Well, I wanna put a claim out that ours is growing more fertile. This is sprouting right on the vine, and you can see many more in the background doing very similar. I thought you might get a kick out of this. White ginger. We're multi-media. You got sound. You can hear me. You got visual. But you know what? You can't smell it, and it is beautiful. Here, we teach brand new technology. It's only 2,000 years old, pretty much developed by the Romans. And we just unearthed some ancient scribe scrolls, and we found out that if you take two inch by two inch by two inch block, and you stamp it out, there are soil blockers you buy on the internet. You can learn to stamp these out. And what do you do? You take this little block, and it's sitting here in your hand like this. When it sprouts up, the roots will not jump out into the air. We take this, and we simply put it inside of a net pot. The net pot then, when this is a little bit grown, and say about this size, now it's ready to go out in the field. The roots are just wanting to start to come out. We take this, and we go drop it inside one of our float beds, and then, wow, the roots are gonna shoot out, and this will be harvested about two weeks from this stage right here. Anybody who studies aquaculture or aquaponic, they sooner or later have to come to grips with chemistry. It's not too bad. You learn to do pH tests. You learn to do nitrate tests. They're all very similar. You have an instruction book, tells you how much chemicals to put in a little test to, put a sample of water. You learn to put it in here. You learn to read the chart, and to tell good from bad. Basic stuff, but you need to know it. We're not gonna drown in it, but we're gonna certainly cover the basics. The other one, aquaculture and aquaponics, is a deometer. That's dissolved oxygen, and you're gonna learn what's good and when you're getting in trouble. Without this little magic wand, it's just a guessing game, folks. This we don't live without. What I'd like to share with you and teach you in this course is how to build your own siphon. This is a practice one, it's a five-gallon bucket. We're gonna have you go get a bucket, drill a hole in it, you're gonna get some PVC pipe, and you're gonna make it up like this. You're gonna discover the magic how this bucket can control a larger garden over on the side, and allow you to drain that garden all the way to the bottom. The secret here is, the water will be coming in from the bottom, when it fills up to here, it hits this point, it will overflow and come out. Three to four times faster than it's coming in. It will keep coming out until this pipe here is an airflow. This is the air release, and when the water gets to the bottom of that pipe, then it will break the siphon, you'll hear a gurgle, the water will stop coming out of here, and it will continue filling back up. So this will take 10 minutes to fill up, and then it'll go down in two minutes, controlling a garden much larger than this bucket. The second siphon we're gonna show you is the Australian Bell Siphon. This is neat, it could be used in a bucket, you would remove all this white piping, you'd have one pipe coming up on the inside about that tall, this would sit over the top of that pipe. When the water came up in this bucket and overflowed into the stand pipe, it was set up a suction, and it would suck out the air on the top third of half of this siphon. When it sucks out the air, that will trigger a siphon, it will then flush like flushing a toilet, the water will rush out. When it rushes out, it'll rush out until it hits down to here, and this is your air break. This tube goes all the way up to the center inside here. And so we're gonna teach you this, we're gonna give you a little diagram of it, we're gonna have you go build it, and you have your practice on a little five gallon bucket. Once you get this down, you're set. I believe the best way to learn aquaponics is build yourself a small system and get started. But it's kind of a neat thing if you have an idea of where you might end up. So what I wanna show you now is some pictures that I've taken around the big island and Onowahu here in Hawaii, a different system to give you a little concept of what you might wanna do, okay? And I'm gonna give you some links. And in this course, we're gonna send you to people like Will Allen at Growing Power and over to the Virgin Island University with Dr. Rikosi. We wanna show you what the other people are doing. So anyway, hold on, and we'll give you a little tour around the islands. We'll start a little tour off David Stark's place up in Waimea. He's taken a suburban backyard and made it into a food forest. He's just doing great with it. He's also been very innovative in his methods of doing vacuum seed boxes, the way to drill out your float beds, just a genius. And this is a simple system anybody could build. He's wonderful. This is YB's place. This has started off as being Tim Mann plan from Friendly Aquaponics. A lot of it's very similar. He's taken right off the plants and then he's modified things. Welcome to Debra and Rik's fun ponies. This is a home in Lonikite up on the side of a hill, difficult piece of property and they've done something wonderful. They've kind of levered off their aquaponics system and have it cascading down the side of the mountain. This is Alexis and Chris Smith of Coastview Aquaponics overlooking the Kona Airport. This is Dragon Eyes Venture. This is just a wonderful place. They call it a little Disneyland. They milled all the wood that you see here and they built everything up. The bottom foot is cinder of the bottom. Then they put in a food grade lining and then they put in the plywood on the top, drill the holes. It's just fantastic, great production out of it. Wonderful Puna Big Island environment. You get down there, this is their cinder beds. It's a flushing system. It's just great. You gotta go see it if you can go on the Big Island. So what we tried to show you in this little brief introduction is some of the things we're gonna cover in this course. You're gonna have a lot of diagrams. You're gonna have a lot of scientific information. We're gonna have a little bit of chemistry. But we wanna kind of keep it light. We wanna encourage you to get out there and get it going. But the most important thing is for you to have a basic understanding of the basic principles on it. Doing the siphons, the ebb and the flow. Dr. Rikosi's method at Virgin Island Institute of doing solid removal. These things, once you know them, you have this little introductory. And then I wanna encourage you to go out and visit any aquaponics farms in your area. You learn so much by talking to the very people. If you can't get out and visit them, I'm gonna encourage you to Google them. Get up there and Google aquaponics, put in the name of your state, your country, and find out what's going on around you. Email these people. You'll be quite surprised at how much they're willing to share. Well anyway, folks, this is your introduction. Now we're gonna get down to business in the course. Thank you for listening. There you go. Okey dokey, how did you like that? That's awesome. So one thing we wanted to share with you here for the tool of the week is this electrical tool. This one happens to be a Klein brand, but they all kind of brands on them. What's really neat about something like this is that it tells me where the electricity is on. We work around a lot of water, a lot of electricity. So this little device, if I put it here, can you hear that? It'll not only work on a cord, but it'll tell me which side. This side is dead. That side is a live site, so that I cut the right side of the cord after I turn off the power, right? So you always test it on a known live circuit, and then you pull it off. But this is really neat. You can carry it in your pocket. It's so easy to do. They're inexpensive. I mean, I think we're talking under $20, different brands. Some hardware stores have them, you know, in that or electronic store, like industrial electronics here in Honolulu. They carry a line of these different brands, or you know, and that, but all very similar. But this to me is a lifesaver. When we're working around pumps, I can put this next to the pump. On the outside of the pump, if it goes, did, did, did, did, did, like you had turned it back on here. If it goes like this, I don't touch the pump. You're gonna get shocked, okay? And we're doing submersible pumps where you set them in the water. If you ever see oil on top of the water, turn the power off, get the pump out of there. That oil is inside the pump to keep it insulated. And when they go bad, when they crack in that, and of course the worst thing I hate to see is somebody pick up a pump by the electrical cord. They do that too. They do. You always pick it up by the hose, yeah. But fantastic. Well, we wanna share a few slides with you of what's going on down in Kailua, Kona. Why, well. Here we go. Now this is the course that they're teaching down in Kailua, Kona. They had nine students. This is Dr. Park. He is a fantastic guy. He's a retired child doctor, what do you call it, pediatrician. And he is now a big advocate of the South Korean natural farming with Master Cho, and where she's an interpreter. And these are my teachers that I taught down there. I teach teachers. Yeah, the tall fellow in there. The tall fellow. Yeah. They're students. And then that's his wife, Cindy, right in the background and the stand. And these are their different students. And notice they're filming it. So whatever they're doing, so they can expand it, like we shot that little film for you, is so much you should be able to share. So here they're teaching people how to make the bucket siphons, like you saw in my little intro film, how to drill them out, how to use the whole saw. It's called HOT, hands-on training. Hands-on training. So you notice everybody's wearing safety glasses and they're wearing earmuffs and that. So we try to teach them safely too, not just jungle rules, right? And hey, is that young man proud or what, huh? That's a good smile. That's what you like to see. It made a bell siphon. So we have students from 18 to 70 years old, all over the map, you know, in that. And so you can get information about YWAM. Just go up on the internet, YWAM Kailua Kona. There you go. They teach them the chemistry, how to use the water test kits in that. These are the folks, Natalie and I went down and volunteered 10 days with them to teach them, to help them get ready to teach this course. And they're doing a bang-up job. The students are given to rave reports on what they're learning. And this is Terry Boss. Vernon. Vernon, Vernon. And Vernon, the boss became a student. How's that? Yes, he did. Yeah, it's hard. Notice the block of wood. They drilled it out so the test tubes don't fall over. It's a practical thing. Very, very practical. But they did all the basics. How to level all their tanks in that. That's important. They teach them to build a two by four box, throw it on the ground, put the gravel in there, level the gravel, everything else will be okay. That's something I learned from Murray Hallam. So you see the young lady there with a hacksaw. She's taking an IBC or what we call a tote. How to take it out, cut it, cut it one-third off, and flip it over. The bottom half will be a fish tank, and the top half will be the cinder bit. A fellow in the Philippines did this, and we coached him on it. And he won very equivalent of the Nobel Peace Prize in the Philippines. He got $175,000 a miracle. He sure did. He was really happy about that one. And he used an IBC tote to do his aquaponics project. And so it's really nice when you can help people with some light. So here's the bottom of the IBC tote cut off, and see the top half is set up there on the board. Look at the smiles on those students, huh? Yeah, those are some happy guys. So they got that all built, and they sent me pictures of it. It's they're already, they got fish in it, and they're going for broke. I mean, they're doing great. This is a big 5,000 gallon fish tank. So this is not just a little backyard gardening, but they're taught how to go to Nepal or somewhere and build a garden to feed a village and that. And they're bringing those fish up. Those are about two and a half to three pound tilapia in there. Really nice big fish. So that will feed a couple, you know? And look at the lettuce. Now all this food goes to the YWAM cafeteria. And that's what we try to encourage is put an aquaponics in a learning institution where you have somebody to eat all the food. And now the people that are going to Nepal, right down the road, a fellow named Wes loaned him some property and they built a test system from scratch. You had to clear the land, build that frame, put all the beds on it and plant it out. Totally turned key. When they're all done in January, they're heading off to Nepal. So here's your group of students and teachers. Just a really healthy thing. When we are there, we fed us lunch every day. We ate out of the garden. That would offer to take Natalie down the road to her restaurant. She said she'd rather have a salad rather than own garden. Yeah, so good fun. Well, we hope you all got something out of this. If you'd like more information on the Aquaculture Hub program, go up on the internet aquaculturehub.org. And you'll see Benny Ron, he's doing great stuff. Well, we look forward to seeing you again. Thanks for being coming and watching Theme Tech Hawaii and thank you, Natalie, for being here. Aloha.