 So, this presentation has been revised three times today already because I could have swore Joan told me I had 90 minutes so we were running our training session and then I revised it again and then I revised it again and then I heard what was going on in the room over there after lunch and I revised it again. Just to talk a little bit positive stuff. So, what you're going to see today, we're going to talk about our serigran a little bit and then I'm going to talk to you about some of the systems that we built. I'm going to show you some different examples of what you could possibly do. We've convinced this thing to about 45 minutes so there's a lot of information. Be happy to answer questions afterwards as well if you have questions as we go along but there's a lot to this and I will tell you right away if you've been looking at aquaponics or aquaculture online there are 10,000 different ways to do this, okay? So if anybody tells you there's only one way to do it, then they're lying to you, right? Because you're going to see some different examples of how to do it. So there are many ways to do it. I'm going to show you a way that we did it with our serigrant and what our kiddos do in the classrooms. I'm going to show you ways that work and then some options and then I'm going to show you what it's going to look like in the future. It's good? All right. So let's go. So what's for in Roots? 501c3 non-profit. I also run Midwest Freshwater Farms which is aquaponics, aquaculture. We do consulting work. We do training work as well in the community. We work with a lot of community colleges as well and we teach there and we teach different classes in the community as part of like Do Space in Omaha. That's our web address, what's for in Roots.org. That's my personal phone number. That is my email address. So if you have questions or anything drop me an email, okay? I can't say that. I'll answer you the next day or the next day or the next day but I will answer it. Do I have cards? I do have cards as well. Okay. All right. So Whispering Roots. What was our serigrant viability of small scale aquaponics and urban and rural underserved communities? That is our number. It just gives you a couple quick shots of what we do. These are live systems. These are systems growing healthy food using fish poop, right? You know if you say fish poop to a third grade of your hero. So if you're ever in classes and you have a problem just say fish poop. The kids will love you. But these are systems growing some nice healthy food. This is actually in Auburn, Nebraska that some of our kids in the elementary or the high school put together one of their aquaponics systems. So you can already see different sizes, different shapes, right? So we use that to engage kids. We use it to teach STEM, science, technology, engineering and math. We could say STEAM now, science, technology, engineering, ag and math or science, technology, engineering, art and math, whichever way you want to say it. We use ag to teach all these different principles. A little bit about my background. She did cover that. You know my degree is in management information systems. I'm a computer guy. You know I just love growing food and helping people. You know I ran talent acquisition. I built my first aquaponics system in 1999. We were doing aquaponics when people weren't even thinking about aquaponics. I had fish growing in my basement. I had plants growing in my living room. I grew or built a little greenhouse inside my garage and had fish and plants out there. So you think it's 1999, right? It's Nebraska. It's January. It's snowing outside. I open my garage door and people see a little greenhouse in there. Do you think anybody thought I was growing lettuce? Yeah, 1999, right? Yeah. So I've been doing this for a while. Some of the different training, University of Arizona, greenhouse crop production and design engineering course. We did some work. We still do work with Cornell University for our aquaculture engineering design. I'll show you why that's important soon. I also sit on the board of directors for the Center for Rural Affairs, a chair of the farming community committee. So I spent a lot of time in rural areas. Urban ag planting and then, you know, there's that again for Center for Rural Affairs. Some of our friends are out there. They have a table out there. So let's get right to it. So what is aquaponics? Basically with aquaponics, we have some fish that are swimming. We feed those fish. They produce waste in the form of ammonia. That ammonia gets pumped up into a grow bed of some kind, biofilter. And there we have beneficial bacteria. It's the ammonia converts it first into nitrite, then into nitrate, which is food for our plants. Roots from our plants, then suck that nitrate out of the water, which cleans the water for our fish. We dump that water back into our tank nice and clean. So basically, to help people think about a lake, you have all those fish women in that lake. You have all that nice green growth that's around the lake that's helping filter the water for the fish. We take that process. We bring it inside. We put it into a tank with some plants, and we let nature do what nature does best. We didn't create this. The Aztecs were doing this. The Aztecs were doing this. It took us this long to figure out that the Aztecs know what they're doing. So we've basically taken what the Aztecs were doing, and now we're using it to grow food and feed hungry people. In my other presentation, I talked about where we operate. Not only do we operate here in urban and rural areas, but we're also up in Native American tribes. We're doing a lot of work on reservations now. We're also over in Haiti in Madagascar. I'll be in Haiti in a couple of weeks, but we're showing people how to grow food sustainably and feed their communities and do it in education peace. I walked away from a really good job to do this work. That's how important I think it is. You know, my background in the military and things like that, but I walked away from a good job in July of 2010 because this stuff's important and how we feed ourselves in the future is very, very important. I told my wife, don't worry. It'll be okay when I walked away. So it'll be fine. We'll figure out how to make money. I wonder what she's doing these days. No, I'm just kidding. Just kidding. My wife's a teacher up in Nebraska. Okay. So what are the advantages? The advantages of aquaponics. We use only approximately 10% of the water that's required. Approximately 10%. We save 90% of the water to recirculating system. That's how we do it. We don't dump our water. Only when we're flushing occasionally. We don't have any soil required for growing plants. We use no soil in our systems. We're aquaponics. We're perlite. We're different types of pea gravel depending upon where we are. That doesn't mean that we don't use soil at all ever because we also do raised bed gardening. On one, there's no one way to feed everybody. What we look at is what's the best way to feed this given customer? If it's in Haiti, if it's in Auburn, Nebraska, if it's in an urban city, what's the best way to do it? And then we take those techniques and we apply the best solution for that group. That's how we do it. Year-round production. We are controlled environment ag. As we all know, if you're growing vegetables and things like that, outside right now, we're not really growing too much outside. But our kiddos in the classroom are still growing. No pesticides. We can't use pesticides in our system because it'll kill our fish. So we can't have pesticides. So we have to be very clean in how we operate. So good agricultural practices. IPM. We're dealing with control in our pests. We have faster, high-growing, high-quality vegetables. If you have a head of lettuce, let's say it normally takes 42 days, 45 days to get to harvest. We can get it there in 35 to 42 days. So we're saving multiple days. We use really good quality seed. We get seed germination in 24 to 48 hours. It's pretty good stuff with our kiddos. We can harvest plants every 7 to 10 days if we're doing microgreens. Anybody ever hear microgreens? Yeah? So we're going to show you what that looks like. If we're turning microgreens, we can harvest our plants 7 to 10 days sooner if we're using lettuce and things like that. But if we're doing microgreens, we can harvest microgreens 7 to 12 days and turn those crops continuously. And we're not talking about needing a lot of space. Someone was at our table during lunch and we were talking about growing things in our basement. My basement is like a big lab. It's a big farm. We have fish growing. We have tilapia. We have bass down there. We have lettuce. My wife sells lettuce in her school that we grow in our basement. She gets pulled over by the police. She's got all these bags of lettuce in there. She's a lettuce seller. That's what she does. So people and they pay a premium for that, by the way. We have a waiting list for people who want to buy the lettuce that we grow in our basement. It's not too bad. So you do whatever size fits for you. Plants can be spaced closer together due to the constant nutrient replenishment. We're recirculating that water and it's a closed system. We don't discharge into streams, lakes, etc. And this is important when we're in the city because the folks, when we're looking at any type of clearances then we have folks who want to re-dump in anything into the municipal system. And we don't. Our water is very, very clean. What's a basic system look like? It's a basic system. We have a tank of some kind. We have fish that swim around in there. We have a small wattage pump. It doesn't take a big pump. Pump that water up into a grow bed of some kind. In that grow bed we have some type of grow media. River rock, pea gravel, hydrogen, which is expanded clay pellets, something like that. That's where it becomes our large bio-filter. Plants grow. Clean water gets dumped back into our system, just like that. A closed recirculating system. I'll show you some examples at the end. You don't have to have a lot of room to do this. But that's it. Some tanks, some plumbing, some grow beds, some grow media, some plants, some fish and light source. When we do this in schools, our kids build from scratch. So we'll bring lumber in. We bring pipes in. We bring in tank, things like that. And the kids have to cut, drill and assemble. We do not let our kindergartners use circular saws, however, though. Could you imagine that? Kindergarteners put down your circular saws. It's nap time, right? We don't let the kindergartners do that. But our kids build from scratch. So we start using ag for all this different type of education, hands-on experiential learning. In addition to growing food, they're cutting, they're drilling, they're measuring and assembling. You'd be surprised some of our kids don't know how to use tape measures, right? That skill's gone away when I say I need four pieces out of 33 and a half. If kids are going to... Don't say 33 and a quarter. Get them going. So we teach them how to do all this in the classroom. And you start thinking about that from an agricultural perspective. Next generation ag, we have kids that are going to be building our systems. We have kids that are going to be writing computer code that are going to control the drones, that are going to be flying over the crops to do all the sampling. Yeah, we have to engage these kids. Basic system overview. So this is a basic system. We saw that one, but this is kind of what it looks like. You can have a 100-gallon tank, small wattage pump. This is very important when we're in places that don't have access to power. Some of our locations are 100% solar, like we're all being a couple of weeks. The mission that I'm going to in Haiti, 100% solar. So we have to be very careful in terms of how much juice we're pulling off of them. So a small wattage pump to move our water, pump that water up into a grow bed. This is the flood and drain system. The water will flood to a 6, 7, 8 inch level, depending upon how tall it is. There's a drain in the middle that causes our water to go back. We put a little PVC bell over the top, creates a bell siphon, which creates siphon effect and sucks all that water back into our tank. That's how we get away with one pump. We pump once and allow gravity to do the rest of the work for us. Very important. One small wattage pump. And we're not talking about a pump that pumps 1,500 gallons of water if you're doing a small system. We're talking about pumps that do 200 gallons per hour, 150 sometimes. It doesn't take a lot. And then of course, can you do this? These are some of our kiddos on the upper left. On your upper right. Those are some of our seventh graders. See that system behind them? That's one that they built. They're growing lots of fresh lettuce back there. Lots of healthy crops, and they do that consistently. And these kids, they're very good. And this is another system that we built in one of our community colleges. You can see here, this is just an agricultural tank that you can buy at your local ag shop. It doesn't have to be fancy. Some of our kids have glass tanks. Glass tanks, they're hard because you have to clean the things. Keep the glass nice and clean. It's a showpiece. But if you're just growing for production, a little ag tank is just fine. Thank you for that. And then I can see some of our kiddos up here. These are just standard full-spectrum fluorescent bulbs. Nothing fancy, straight off the shelf. Hold them deep home in our slows, wherever you buy your stuff, with standard full-spectrum bulbs, full-spectrum fixtures. It's designed, this is all construction lumber. Nothing expensive, okay? So that's how you can do it. But you can also be bigger. So Aquaponics, what does commercial design look like? You have your fish tanks, your plumbing, your filtration, your grow beds. You have these nice large tanks here, you know, about 800 gallons or so, 1,000 gallons, it's been up on how big. It's got a little window in it for the tilapia when they're swimming. Tilapia, get to know you. You feed them every day, just like anything else. They'll recognize you. They'll come to be fed. But that water's getting pumped. Remember, we talked about moving the water. This water gets pumped over into these grow beds. This is called floating raft. We're actually floating these crops on water here. So we use little styrofoam sheets, drill holes in it, put little net pots, where we put our seedlings from our crops. The roots grow down into the water. They get nice, big, green, and healthy. You can get into a rotation, put your seedlings here, and then move everything forward as they grow. And then if you look outside, of course, there's snow, and this is in little greenhouse, okay? And any of you ever heard about the NCRS, Greenhouse Hoop House program? Start thinking about that, because if you're wondering if you can afford to do this, it doesn't have to be fancy. You can get money to put a hoop house on your farm, put an aquaponics system. It doesn't even have to be like this. I'll show you some examples. It doesn't have to be this fancy, but you can use a hoop house. And they're allowing you to do different things in those hoop houses now. So adding heat and things if you need to. What grows well in the system? All of these things grow. Anything that I'm going to talk to you about are things that we've personally grown. So I know they all grow well and our kids grow them. If our third graders can grow it, we can do this, right? This all grows well. Lettuce, basil. Herbs grow really, really well in the system. Cucumbers, tomatoes, cabbage, peppers. In this system we had cabbage. We had different types of lettuce here. And over on the side, that's what you're starting to see here is a strawberry plant that was growing. This plant or this system also eventually was growing cantaloupe in it as well. All grows well in the system, right? All depends on how much nutrient you're putting into that water. And the nutrient coming from how many fish you're growing, okay? And then this is hydrogen, expanded clay. You can see we don't have the soil. And these are PVC. This is drip irrigation. One of the ways that we can do it. But this all grows well. Your heavy feeders like your tomatoes, your cucumbers, et cetera, they're going to require a well-stocked system. And if you just turn your system on for the first day, you can't grow tomatoes and peppers and cucumbers like that. With the system, you're going to be growing things like lettuce that don't require a lot of nutrient until your system matures and you're producing more nutrient for your plants. So you'd make a mistake if you think you're going to grow tomatoes day one when you turn your system on. We say keep it easy. Lettuce, basil, stuff like that. Give you an example. Our basil grows like bushes. We had a basil plant that was probably from my chest all the way down to my knees. And restaurants, it's very, very clean when you grow this way. It's very clean. We had restaurants. We went into a restaurant. I had a meeting with one of our groups of friends. We were just talking about the potential to scale up. We had a bucket full of basil growing aproponically. The next thing we know, the manager came out or the owner came out. He said that his waiter said there was something out there that he needed to see. So the owner came out. He sat down. We talked to him for about 40 minutes. He looked at the basil. He said I'd buy everything from you if you could supply it at scale. And he'd play premium because it's very, very clean. And when you grow this way, also it's very, very intense. The flavors are very, very intense. So from a chef perspective, you don't need as much when you're cooking because the quality is so high. And then we had let him take the entire bucket. His chef just had a ball with it. So, and it works. That's one of the ways that we sell. We just show up in places and we bring the product and we let the product sell itself. Works. And I'll show you some pictures of what our kids grew later, too. What type of fish? The fish doesn't really matter unless you are trying to grow the fish for production, right? We've got tilapia, bluegill, trout, goldfish. Some of our kids grow goldfish. They just want the plants. Here's a little example. You know, people want to know what's a ratio. If you have about an acre of fish tank, you can grow about 14 acres of crops off of that. One acre of fish tank, 14 acres of crops. That's kind of the ratio. But you have to decide what works for you. You know, we grow a lot of tilapia because it grows really, really fast. It's an excellent converter of feed to flesh about a pound of feed. Get you a pound of flesh on a tilapia. So they're about one to one, 1.2 to one. And they can take a beating. They can take poor water conditions. You don't want your water to be dirty. But you can kill a tilapia and our kids have done it. Yes. You are giving them some feed, too? We give them feed as well. So, and it comes down to, we're going to talk about how quick they grow. They grow rather rapidly, 7 to 9 months to full growth, depending upon what you're feeding them and how often you're feeding them. If you just want them to grow at a leisurely weight and you want to give them something like duckweed, sunflower cake, stuff like that. If you're just growing them and you're not trying to get them to harvest very quickly, you can do that. Or you can go with a commercial feed and try and get them to harvest in 7 to 9 months. Some places that we go, they don't have access to commercial feed. So they'll do duckweed, sunflower, moringa, which is a really good crop. If you don't know about moringa, you should take a look at that. But we'll feed them that, and then we'll get them, you know, to harvest. So they're very tolerant of poor water conditions, feed weight, good filets, and an excellent protein source. You know, you get chefs that like tilapia because they can take pretty much any flavor on, right? So then you start to think, what type of fish am I going to grow? Depends upon your market. You know, who's going to buy it? If there's a lot of tilapia out there that's being sold very cheaply, you might want to think about growing something different, maybe growing a perch or something like that. You know, for us, we do a lot of tilapia, but I'll show you what we're growing in our main facility when we're done here. But if you're focusing on growing the crops, then the fish don't really matter, right? The fish are just providing the nutrient for you so you can grow anything in here, bluegill, whatever, because it's just the nutrient that's going to the plants if you don't care about the fish. We want to harvest both, fish and crops, we want to sell both. So how much can you grow? Depends upon the size of the system and the type of plants you're growing. I'm going to show you a model of what you could grow. Typically, you can grow 10% to 15% more plants than what grows on the same size, traditional plot, right? But you can get up to about 30% more production with an intensive system. If you're really good, once you master it like anything, you have to be a farmer. You have to figure out how everything works, but once you get it going, our folks that are really good at a thing get about 30% more production. But you're not going to do that day one, right? Some people think they're going to do that day one, put like 1,000 fish in a 100-gallon tank, and then they call and tell me that their system's out of balance. You got like 1,000 fish in a 100-gallon tank. That's not going to work. But in a standard 4x4 grow bed, that'll hold about 30 to 40 head of lettuce, about 30 to 45 days to maturity, longer maturity dates. If it's in winter or low light conditions, if you're inside not using grow lights, then of course they're not going to grow very fast. But that kind of gives you an idea. 4x4, 30 to 40 heads of lettuce, 30 to 45 days of maturity. How do I know? Because we do it every day. We do it consistently. And it does work. Different types of systems. You got a flood and drain system. This just shows you that if you want to try this, you don't have to get really complicated to start. If you just want to test it out. And you've got a flood and drain system where the water is flooding in. That's what we showed you that 4x4. It doesn't take a lot. You put a little PVC drain in the middle. And I'll show you how we make our drain systems. But then some gravel, gravel, whatever you're going to do. This is called floating raft, where I showed you where we're floating the crops on top of the water. It's a little bend where you can do that. And this is called nutrient film technique where we're running a thin film of water underneath our crops. So you can learn how to do that. But nutrient film technique, that's basically rain gutter. You get rain gutter turning on its side. We drill holes in it. We put a little net cup in there that we buy and mash. You can buy those online. And then you can practice the nutrient film technique. Because a dangerous nutrient film technique is if your water stops running, you have no residual moisture in your system and your crops start dying. So I wouldn't suggest starting with that. I'd suggest starting with something like a flood and drain system. A little more forgiving. But as you can see, it doesn't have to be big to test it. So those are the basic techniques. And so, you know, floating raft, deep water culture, they call that as well. So here's your floating raft system on a little larger scale. I talked about the Styrofoam. This is a floating raft system being run off of about three foot, four foot wide. You know, you want to stick with standard sizes so you don't have to cut as much as possible. But then you can see that run. That's a good 40 foot run. Look at all these crops. That's growing off of fish water. They have their aquaponic systems. It's a larger system. They have their tanks back here. And they're pumping their water into their deep water culture system. And they're floating those rafts. Look how clean those roots are. Now, the technique behind that, much more detailed when we're training, but this gives you an idea what's possible. And let's say you're running a floating raft system. You're running tilapia with nice warm water. You know what you can throw underneath your crops there. You can throw underneath some fresh water shrimp. They'll live under there. They love it. Maybe some crowd add something like that. Yeah? Australian Red Claw, a lobster. Throw those in there. They'll eat all the stuff that goes to the bottom. They'll live underneath your plants, and they won't eat your roots. So you could do that as well. You can get a couple crops out of there. So now you're growing your fish in one tank. You got your crops that are floating on the water. And then you got some fresh water shrimp that are swimming around underneath. Harvest those guys out. If that's not your main crop, just throw them in there and let them grow. Okay? Because sometimes they can be a little cannibalistic, right? You can throw in 500 little ones and get one big one out at the end. Yeah? Okay. Yeah, that happens. But so this is, these are things that you can do. You can be very creative with the system. Remember, this is a serigrant that we ran. We got $2,900 to do this. We built four-by-four grow beds, 150-gallon tanks. And they were very successful. We grew a lot of food with that. You need about 10 to 12 inches. So, nutrient film technique. This is what we talked a little bit about. Where we're running that thin film of water underneath. You could do something like this. You have room on your farm. You know, get creative. You get a tank of some kind, right? And then we just put a little filtration system. This is that flood and drain system. We can put a little one on top, which acts like our bio-filter. And then we take that water. We push it over here to our nutrient film technique, which is nothing more than rain gutter sitting on top of some construction lumber. And you can practice all those different techniques in one small system. And you can do this if you have a shed. You can do it in your shed. Or if you have a greenhouse, do it in the corner of your greenhouse. Okay? Don't spend $400,000. Do something like this. And if we're handy, you can create this by buying materials right from your local lumber yard, construction site. Someone will give you free stuff. Maybe you have something left over. We use, like I said, construction grade. It doesn't have to be fancy. But, you know, things about nutrient film technique requires additional filtration. That's why you have this, because remember we talked about converting the ammonia to nitrate? You have to have a bio-filter in there somewhere. So this is your flood and drain system. You just sit it up on top of your tank. And then what can you do with this? You can put tomato plants in there, pepper plants, and they'll grow. And they grow very nicely in a system like that. Now, we talked about all this fancy stuff. But what about this? Your designs are based upon your available funds. So let's say you don't want to spend a bunch of money. Maybe you have horse trough. That's something like that. Some PVC pipe. This is actually hydrogen. Now, hydrogen, the expanded clay, that's a little more expensive. We like it because it has a lot of surface area, which means we can grow more bacteria, which means we can handle more waste coming out of our fish tanks. But you don't have to do that. It's more expensive. You can do a river rock or a pea gravel. It's heavier. And you don't have as much surface area, but it works just fine. Our kiddos use hydrogen. They use a lot of expanded clay. But then if you look like up here, there's nothing fancy here. This is construction lumber. This is a liner that's lining the system. And what they're doing, they dug a hole. So their fish tank is actually down here. They pump up to the top. And then they let the water, gravity feed, back to their tanks, which are down there. So you can do something like this. And you don't have a huge investment in there. If it doesn't work for you, then you haven't spent a lot of money. You haven't lost a lot. Because people have PVC pipe around. That's not expensive. Construction grade lumber. So you can try it. Or an old horse trough. These crops look like they're herding. I don't think so. And remember what I said. This is only one way to do it. I'm not pretending that we're going to tell everybody they have to grow this way. We're going to take everybody feeding and growing food to take care of all the people that are going to be on this planet in the next 50 to 100 years. And then there's something like this where you can have solar. There are grants out there now for solar, especially if you're on farm. And people say, oh, Greg, you don't know what you're talking about about grants. I'm going to show you something at the end that's going to say, yes, I do. Floating raft, wood, things like that, styrofoam. These are actually IBC totes. I'll show you what those look like here in a couple of slides. But you could do something like this if you're handy. Get some grants for putting on solar. Run your water. Grow some crops in a greenhouse that you got with the NRCS funds. But people always want to know what are your expectations? Now, look at this system. These are all, I mean, these are high quality vegetables. So you're saying, so what's the rub? How do I differentiate myself? This is all very clean. So when you're talking to your suppliers, you're talking to the restaurants, you start bringing in this crop that's so clean that literally if they didn't want to, they wouldn't have to wash. We always say wash your stuff. But there's no soil. There's nothing on it. We keep our bug count down. So the restaurants love it because it's very fresh. It's very clean. Our shelf life is very good. So we're talking crops here. We used to do a trick when we were working with the community college before we moved on to the community college site. We'd have them come to my house. We had our systems down in the basement. We'd have one group that would harvest the lettuce and we'd put it in Tupperware and stick it in the refrigerator. We'd wait for the next class that was going to come through in about three weeks or so. Then we'd pull out that same lettuce and we'd feed it to them. And then we'd tell them it's like three, four weeks old. We used to freak them out. And so what they're seeing, what you're seeing now is a lot of scientists are starting to try and figure out why is the shelf life so good? Why does it last so long? There's something that's going on. It's nature doing what nature does. We don't manipulate this at all. It's just nature doing what it does. But we're getting excellent shelf life off of that as well. So what type of expectations? 1,500 square feet of gross space gives us 1,500 gallons of fish tank, 11,000 gallons of total water volume, approximately 500 pounds of fish. Remember, you don't need as much fish. 40,000 heads of lettuce per year. That's what you can do. Once you master the technique, you're not going to do this day one. And you might even decide that you don't want to do it. But the results don't lie. Right? It doesn't lie. The system works. Okay. Thank you. So flood and drain system looks like this. It's a flood and drain system. It's a large system here. These are our kids that are growing. Some of the tomatoes that they were growing in a small pond system. We talked about the bell siphon. That's how we drain our water out. It kind of looks like this with PVC. This is how the system works. Water floods in. Bell siphon in the middle. Kicks in. Gravity sucks it all the way water out. Let's air in. Breaks the siphon effect. How do you do it? Do you do it like this? This is just straightforward stuff. PVC pipes. These are little uni seals that you can buy online. So you drill your hole through your plywood. You put in a little stopper. Put your stamp pipe in to control your water. And then you can use pea gravel, river rock, clay balls. This is what we talked about before. This is what a little 4x4 looks like. Little drip irrigation system full of hydrogen. And you're growing things like cucumbers, peppers, all in that system. All works well. That's a flood and drain system. Some of the liners that we use in the system. For ours we use EPDM liners. Don't use roofing materials. They're treated. They're treated to stop fungus and things like that. So EPDM, these are basically pond liners. You don't have to spend a fortune. Buy them in bulk online. Cut them up. Make your own. Be careful with used tarps. Some people use tarps. Chemicals. It's a food system. Different types of air pumps. It doesn't have to be expensive. Buy them online. Buy them at Petco, PetSmart, whatever you have. So you get oxygen in your system. Water pumps. It doesn't have to be expensive. Small pumps. Buy them online. Amazon.com. I say these things just because you can go and buy them during Black Friday or whatever. Get them cheap. So pumps should cycle your total tank water once every hour. If your pump is on for 15 minutes, 15 minute timer should move your tank volume in 15 minutes. There are calculations for this. Just so you know. Make sure that you're moving the water in your tank. That's what you have to do. Filtration. You can use different types of filtration with us. You buy these different types of filters. You buy all this stuff online. You can build your own little filtration system. Or you can just take a little sponge and stick it on the outflow from your tank into your grow bed. Put a little sponge underneath there. And it'll get all those solids that are coming out of your tank. About 25% of what you put into your tank comes back as solids. So if you feed them your feed feces, you're going to get about 25% back as solids. Put a little filtration thing on there on the front end. Capture that. If you put compost worms, anybody familiar with compost worms? Put compost worms in your hydroponic system. The compost worms will come up and they'll eat the solids that are in your filter pad. That's what they do. They love it. Now you have compost tea. What types of lighting? If you're growing outside, we say sunlight is best. Sunlight is best and it's free. So if you can grow outside, if you have some type of greenhouse, do it. If you don't have that option to use sunlight, like when we're indoors with our kids, we use standard fluorescent fixtures, full-spectrum fluorescent bulbs work well. What you see here, these are standard full-spectrum bulbs off the shelf. They're growing peppers. They're growing basil. We have cucumbers and lettuce all in this system. Or you can spend more money. You don't have to do it, but you can spend more money and buy expensive grow lights if you need to, but you don't have to. Timers as well. Once again, it's just to show you this stuff doesn't have to be expensive. Don't spend $1,000 on a timer. Go to your local hardware store and buy them on sale. So basic system design. You want to determine the type of system. Assume a media base for this example. You determine the square footage of your grow bed. Use your ratio of one pound of fish per square foot of grow bed space with the grow bed being one foot deep. This is just for an example. You calculate your fish tank volume using roughly five to seven gallons of water per pound of fish. That's what we do and that's what we teach the kids. So here's your example. Four by four grow bed, 16 square feet, 16 square feet of grow bed, 16 pounds of fish. 16 pounds of fish requires about 80 gallons of water. That's your calculation if you just want to estimate. Okay? So cycling your system. You know, this is what I'm teaching, but we don't have time to go through all of that. You know, we start with the process of growing enough bacteria. Just know you can't turn your system on day one. And if you want to know more about it, let me know. We'll talk to you about it, but you have to grow the bacteria first before you can start really growing your fish. And you grow the bacteria by adding a little ammonia to the water. Nature will do the rest and that's where that beneficial bacteria will move in and start colonizing your system. You can't stop it, you know, unless you're adding chlorinated water to your system. Yes. Can you, if you have a pond on your property, can you pull the water out of that pond? I sure can, and I'm going to show you what that looks like here in just a minute. And if you have a pond on your property and a reason why you shouldn't be doing it, all right? It's great. We don't need to worry about cycling diagram. When I'm teaching, this shows you how the bacteria grows. You know, we talk about pH as well. This is when I thought we were going to have more time, but if you're growing, you know about pH and the nutrient uptake. We have to balance that with fish. We've run about 6, 8, 7, 2 in our system because we want our bacteria to continue to grow. We want to give it enough for our plants to uptake the nutrient volume and we want our fish to be happy. So we're typically 6, 8, 7, 2 in pH. Since we don't have soil, we use things like coconut husk, rock wool, rapid-router cubes. This is stuff that we use during our SAIR grant. When we're growing our crops, we start everything in like pretty much coconut husk or rock wool, okay? So when you're growing seedlings, once again, you don't have to get fancy. You can make your own seeding starters, construction lumber. You know, this is a three-tier system here. It looks very similar to this. This is a commercial type one. Or you can make it yourself out of wood if you're very handy. Or you can buy online. Or you can just do a small one like this or a small one like that. It doesn't have to be expensive. And this is what we do in our classrooms. Our kids build them. This is what I do in my basement, okay? Feeding your fish. 1.5% of their body weight daily. 50 pounds of fish. 50 pounds times 1.5% gives you 0.75 pounds of fish feed daily if you're buying commercial feed. It also tells you based upon the type of fish that you're growing, how much you should be feeding them. So you can get that right off the bag if you're not familiar with growing fish. Okay? Poor duckweed sunflower cake. You can do that as well. So considerations. Location, the type of materials. You know, liners, pipe frames. Are you indoors or outdoors? We're in the Midwest. Winter, you want to be able to control that environment. Types of fish, food, as plants receive nutrients, the access to electricity, access to water, sunlight, time available to take care of the system. Right? And your budget. Budget for a small system. Less than $1,200. You can do it cheaper if you have the materials around the house or if you're buying from your Walmart or wherever. Medium systems, you're about $1,200 to $10,000. You can be as much, spend as much or as little as you want. You can buy expensive materials or you can buy construction lumber. Large systems, $10,000 plus. You know, this is growing basil and a four by four basil and lettuce in that system. And we can get really, we get really good prices for a basil. Okay? Things to watch with this, what we found out. Chlorine and chloramines, if you're on municipal water, if you're on well water, pretty much good. Water quality dissolved, oxygen, solid pest management. We talked about the feed. You have to remove your solids before they enter the hydroponic portion, especially if you're going to be doing drip irrigation. You want to get your solids out of there and it'll, by the way, your solids at fish poop is really good natural fertilizer for your crops if you're doing gardening or raised beds. Okay? And then decomposing solids consume oxygen. You don't need to worry about all that today. But then you say, where do you market your stuff? So restaurants, grocery stores, microgreens. You can sell all these. This is called the Grey Plume. This is in Omaha. This is one of the most highly rated restaurants in the country. It's a green restaurant. We had our kiddos growing solids. We had them growing microgreens and we had Clayton Chapman, the owner, test them in his restaurant. Fantastic results. And the kids were turning their microgreens in every seven to 15, seven to 12 or 15 days depending upon what you're growing. And this is proven. This is not something we say we're going to do. Our kids, we had Clayton Provid in one of the best rated restaurants in the country. That's what you can do in your basement, in your garage, in your living room, if you're me. And the quality is very high. So you don't have to start very big. You can do small microgreens and you have to see what your market wants. Solid greens, various sprouts, and then your specialty crops. Figure out what works for you. Or you can do something like this. It doesn't have to be really expensive. This is only about 22 to 25 minutes from here. This is called Greenfin Gardens. They're about 25 minutes from this location. If I had more time, I'd have stopped in to say hi to them. But this is what they do. They dug holes and this is kind of a model. The model that they're following is the same model that we're going to be using in Haiti. Okay? And then, look, this isn't expensive. PVC. You just got plastic over the top and they're doing things like figs and bananas as well in addition to growing tilapia. So you can do this. Right? And then if you look back here, they're trying to grow like corn and vegetables and things, taking the water out of this pond and pushing it back to their growth section. So those greenhouses are sunk down into the ground. Yeah. So they're like three or four feet below ground. So, you know, and I just, whenever I'm going to present, I like to see what they're doing locally. This is local. Okay? And then there's also something that's called Greenhouse in the Snow. That's out in Alliance, Nebraska. Got by the name of Russ Finch. He's been growing citrus in like sunken greenhouses and he just, he's been doing it for like 28 years. Right? So take a look at that too. That's what's possible. And the thing is, notice, you fit it to your needs. And this is just, this is just a barrel, 55 gallon barrel, recycled barrel that he's using as a swirl filter. We do that too. We teach the kids how to do this. Okay? Or you can do this. This is Wagner, South Dakota. This is one of our Native American tribes. This is what they're doing. We started with a four by four grow bed and a 50 gallon tank. And with all this farmer rancher stuff that we were doing with our kiddos, those kiddos took it and they ended up building this geodesic dome greenhouse with these four by four, four by eight grow beds, four of those off of a 3300 gallon tank. And now they want another greenhouse next to this one. And I hear now they're building like a mini lake on their, on their campus as well. I don't know what's wrong with these kids. But, you know, you're only limited by your imagination and your budget, your funding. But this is what our kids did. These are high school kids, middle and high school kids did this. They had some help with this. They didn't build that by themselves. IBC totes. You can get one of these, cut off the top, flip that, make this your grow bed. This becomes your fish tank. Right? You can get those. Yes, ma'am. Well, you'd mentioned several times about growing indoors. Mm-hmm. And I'm thinking, well, what about humidity? Is that a problem? Or do you control that somehow? Yes. You can control humidity by moving air by using a dehumidifier or by growing a fish that doesn't require warm water. But if you're growing a warm water tilapia, like in my basement, then you want to move that air because you can run into humidity issues, especially if you have a lot. You can also cover your tanks to keep the humidity up. Yep. Good question. Or you can do this with barrels, barrel ponics. Right? We can find these 55-gallon recycled barrels. This one becomes your fish tank. This one becomes your grow bed, just like this. You can do this. Or you can get really creative and do this. Like this. Right? Food grade, recycled. Or if you can't do it, you're afraid of it, just do this. Anybody, right? You can practice on that. Anybody can put one of these little things in there. Okay? All right. So what's possible? I talked about all this stuff. We got our $2,950 Ceregrant. I think that's what it was. But this is what's possible. We took that. We started in July of 2010. That's when I started this organization. We got our Ceregrant 2012, something like that. But now we're building this. This is an 1,800-square-foot facility with a 5,000- square-foot greenhouse. Class is on the mid-floor space. This is going to be an Omaha that's under construction right now. And remember I said I changed up my presentation a little bit based upon what I was hearing there. We took our Ceregrant and our idea and what we were doing with the kids and we turned it into this thing. And we just got a $315,000 EDA grant, $150,000 Farm Credit Service of America grant to start building this facility, which is bigger, more education. This is going to be our community of aquaculture facility. This is our educational floor that looks down into our aquaculture facility. This is all around education. This is all commercial-scale. This is all going to be for the Midwest as a regional training center so we can get more people into this since we're getting so many questions. And you might be saying to yourself, does anybody else care? Yeah. This is whole foods. You're wondering if anybody wants to buy they're building greenhouses on top of their stores now because they can't get the quality that they want. Whole Foods is also a supporter of ours as well. I mean, they have grant programs for people who are interested in doing these types of things. So you got to talk to Whole Foods or like this on top of apartment buildings. I get lots of calls. This is actually one that's up in Chicago, I think. One of the largest small greenhouses, things of that nature, there's room. Right? And if you don't realize this from an aquaculture side, the majority of our seafood's going to come from recirculating aquaculture systems. That's a fact. We've reached the tipping point in the oceans. There aren't enough people in the pipeline to know how to grow. I didn't put it in this presentation, but there's a small farm, single family farm, version of an aquaculture facility that we're trying to teach people how to run it. So it can grow things like salmon, stuff like that. We're working with some really good people on that. But it provides options for you as a small farmer. We talk about small farms, family farms, things that can be run by a family or by one or two people so you can get that extra income, that extra revenue, perhaps save the farm, continue farming, make a living. So that's what we focus on trying to bring in. So everything that I've showed you stuff that we've talked about, what's possible and show you options. So very successful SAR grant. We're about out of time. Any questions? If you're wanting to use standard sunlight, in the winter time, when the angle dips low, can you put reflective material on the north side of the plants and maybe bounce a little additional sunlight down to them? Yes, you can. If you're not growing for production, if you're just growing for fun, then yep, you can put in reflectors, things like that and that helps anyway. For us, if we're growing commercially, which we will be, we'll be running lights during the winter as well to make sure that we can keep those crops growing. But if you can settle for slower grow times due to lack of light, then go ahead and do that. With us and our system, we'll be running grow lights because we need to keep pumping those crops out because remember, we're urban and rural underserved communities so we're providing other problems as far as quality of the produce do you run into? Yes, our pest count is actually very low because we try and keep everything very, very clean. We like to do biosecurity. But what you'll see with some people, you see just the little typical gnats and things like that. We don't have anything that's very heavy. But integrated pest management, if you're open to anything that's coming in, then you run into some issues that you run into traditionally. Occupying your system here because there's no soil in your system. And they typically don't like to hang out in our hydrogen or expanded clay or perlite or anything like that. So that also helps keep your pest management down. So it's surprisingly, what's that? Aphids or something like that on the farm. We don't see a lot of that either and then you can be very smart about that if you're on a farm and you have other crops that are growing, then you can start thinking about different types of planting around that. The holistic approach to managing, keeping the bugs off of your crops here because you can't use pesticides. So if you get anything in there, then you're looking at natural pest management as well. Ladybugs and things like that, which our kids love Ladybug Day in the schools. That's a great question. I know you've been talking mostly about fast paced growing greens and things like that, but has anyone ever tried using one of their more mature systems to grow tomatoes or cantaloupe, strawberries, yep, flowers. We even do edible flowers. Do edible flowers and sell those to the restaurants. You can do them like raspberries, for example, or something like that. We haven't personally done raspberries, but people have done raspberries. But we've done any of your big things, your tomatoes, your cucumbers, all that stuff. And it grows surprisingly well in the system. We have one of our kids, they did one of their systems. Tomato plants that were typically eat your own fish and that kind of thing. I mean, how many... Yeah, they're not pits. I mean, are you like 85% homegrown fish eater now or what? If we wanted to, we could be 100%, right, but we grow enough fish to do that. And we don't buy lettuce and stuff from the store. We eat our own and then we sell our excess to my wife's friends and people and things like that. So it comes down to how much room you have and how much you need to grow. If you just want to grow for yourself, you can easily put in a four by four grow bed and have tilapia and greens and things like that and be perfectly fine. You know, as long as you're turning the crops the way that you should. You can do it. Okay. Other questions? No. Thank you very much. I appreciate you being a tentative audience. That's us if you have any questions.