 I want to welcome you to this workshop session. I'm in Cincinnati, the Fish and Academy. In Cincinnati, Ohio, this project was funded by the USGA Sustainable Agriculture Research and Education, a new educator grant in mind. Kevin, Gerard, thanks again for being here. And I want to go to the panel here. Thank you. Well, thank you all for coming. Just the format of what we'd like to present today is you see on the screen the working title for our project is Instruction and Community Outreach using recirculating aquaponics systems. We're using currently aquaponics to teach a variety of things in a classroom setting but then also using aquaponics as an outreach into the community in a couple of different things. So we'd like to share that with you today. The structure of what we've got to present is starting basically just with a quick introduction to aquaponics for those of you who might not know what aquaponics is, the way that we are incorporating it into a classroom curriculum, and then we brought three of our students with us that are involved in doing independent student research involving aquaponics. And the funding that we have from Sarah through the Youth Educator Program is helping to support the efforts that they've got and then the ways that we've been able over the last year to take the aquaponics stuff that we've been involved with out into the community in the greater Cincinnati area. We have a two-year grant. We're halfway through it. So this is kind of a progress report for us. Our funding runs through March of 2015. So you'll see where we are and we'll also provide you with a picture of where we intend to be a year from now as we finish this program. Just a quick background about Cincinnati Hills Christian Academy. We're a private, non-denominational Christian school located in the northeast suburbs of Cincinnati. If you are familiar with Cincinnati and you're going up I-71 towards Kings Island, you go right past the back edge of our school. In fact, our football field press box overlooks the I-71. We're a K-12 school of a little under 1,500 students total enrollment. High school is about 470. We have 31 international students currently from nine different countries and about 20% of our student body would be considered to be racially mixed. About 99% of our students do matriculate on to four-year colleges and universities. So that's just a little bit about the school. What is aquaponics? This is a definition that came out of the Aquaponics Association work group about three or four years ago. Aquaponics is the cultivation of fish and plants together in a constructed, recirculating ecosystem using natural bacterial cycles to convert fish waste to plant nutrients. It's an environmentally friendly, natural food-growing method that harnesses the best attributes of aquaculture and hydroponics without the need to discard water or filtrate or add chemical fertilizers. Before I go any farther, how many of you are at least a little bit familiar with aquaponics? Good. I can go through the next set of slides quicker than I have a kind of a common basis for understanding. Essentially, in aquaponics, fish via fish food being the input to the system provide fish in the form of waste that when we combine with oxygen and bacteria converts what's the fish waste essentially, ammonia through nitrites into nitrates that become the plant food. And if we look at this just a little bit differently we see the fish with the fish food fish giving off carbon dioxide as part of respiration that de-gasses goes to the atmosphere ammonia which then first gets broken down by nitrosomonas into nitrites and then nitrobacter into nitrates which become essentially the food that goes to the plants. And one of the things that we typically would do and have our students do when we start a new system is to monitor ammonia concentrations then nitrite and then nitrate to make sure that we're getting proper nitrogen cycling as the system starts up. The key parameters that we work with and this is not an exhaustive list but the things that we monitor very regularly are dissolved oxygen ammonia nitrite nitrate pH and temperature so those things get monitored if not daily a couple of times a week in the systems. The fish part of the system basically the same tanks of fish currently we have yellow perch and hybrid bluegill in the systems that we have at our school we've had channel cats in the past we discovered when we put the channel cats in the same tank with the yellow perch that by the end of the grow out time there were less perch and bigger catfish. We're looking to stock and we'll talk more about this new systems that we have under design and construction by our students right now we're going to stock with tilapia but in southwest Ohio it's tough to get tilapia fry until spring. So just the different styles of grow beds NFT channel right out of the hydroponics world this photo is taken in the Nelson and Page greenhouse in Wisconsin if you're familiar with them they basically use their NFT system as a seedling incubator they germinate their seeds in rock wool cubes transfer the rock wool cubes into NFT channels and these are standard crop cane channels but instead of 8 inch spacing with the holes they've added a hole in between because they're small, they're juvenile plants then they transfer those from the NFT system into their floating raft system so second type of system let me step back in this scenario water from the fish tank through a biofilter is input into the system from the flow of gravity to the other end the plants, the roots of the plant grow through the rock wool cube are exposed to the liquid draw up the nutrients and because it's exposed to the air the oxygen is already there one of the cautions with this is you do have to have a good filtration system where you end up with fish waste solids clogging the roots of the plant from their deep water culture or raft system their raft beds have about 12 inches deep of water water comes in from their fish tanks here processes down and the plants are harvested this is about 28 days from this end to this end in this greenhouse from these two beds they harvest 72 heads of lettuce a day 7 days a week, 365 days a year so they start with seedlings after about 7 days of seedlings go to the NFT channels they're in the NFT channels for about 7 days before they get transferred here so they're looking at about 35 to 42 days from seed planting to harvest in this system and we're actually looking to replicate the NFT system and deep water culture systems in the same way they operate it in one of our labs at school media bed system which is useful for plants that are taller require more structure provides a system for the roots to grab hold of we actually have a system that's under development with three grow beds three different types of media that our students are working on and the last system which is also a system that we have under construction are vertical towers these specific towers are called ZipGrow towers and they're produced by a company called Bright Agritech in Laramie, Wyoming they're 5 foot tall 4 inch square with an opening in one side there's a media in the middle that is made from non-BPA containing recycled water bottle plastic the water from the aquarium trickles in through the top this does not have to be filtered because one of the fun things you can do with this is you can put red worms in there so you can actually do vermicomp hosting in the tower and the worms move up and down and take care of the fish waste solids and provide additional mineralized nutrients so we have one of these systems under construction in our lab right now as well that will be growing kale, leafy greens and basil as a start so those are the four basic types of systems that we're working with and the whole goal or one of the things the kind of centerpiece of our grant application was we wanted to create a a sustainable agriculture curriculum with aquaponics as the centerpiece and the farther we got into it the more we discovered that there are components of aquaponics that are suitable for teaching the entire way through a four-year high school science curriculum so really what we're in the midst of and Gary's going to talk more about this in a second is developing modules with very specific lesson plans in biology which our students take as freshmen, chemistry which they take as sophomores physics as juniors and then environmental science and agriculture our senior students and microbiology is kind of just tossed in as a piece of a couple of different courses so by studying the aquaponics system we have our kids all the way grades 9 through 12 working with it hands-on on a very regular basis so I'm going to hand the microphone off to Gary who's going to talk specifically about what does it look like to implement this in one course sequence yes it's the channel which is simply like a rain gutter and so the roots grow through the rock wool cube down to the bottom of the channel and the water flows as a thin film like a rain gutter would and so the roots are actually down in that film of water but because it's open it's not sealed they also have access to upper structure of the roots have access to oxygen so you have to run it's a system you run continuously because otherwise the roots dry out but the oxygen isn't a problem because the tops are open and air can migrate back and forth and then the second question in that float bed system they are sitting on some kind of a polystyrene tray yeah they actually float on we use inch and a quarter rigid foam closed cell foam not like styrofoam but the real tight like you would buy it lozer home depot and insulate your house the holes cut through push the rock wool cubes through and the roots grow out at the bottom and you'll see some pictures in a minute that the roots we get root growth up to three or four feet long from individual plants down in this bed and we also then have air stones in that water that provide to dissolve oxygen that the plants need as well thanks for catching me on that I should have covered that my piece is that I'm a biology teacher chemistry teacher and I've also my goal is that I start off our students in ninth grade biology as we learn through the biology curriculum but I was trying to find a way to have a model that they can use in the class something a little bit more than the textbook something a little bit more than just the sort of cookbook labs that we've done in the past and trying to make it a little bit more interesting and sort of throw something that I can take throughout the whole year and part of this shift is originally started a year ago just sort of having it on the side aquaponics was a fish tank with a little raft and the plants growing on top and so that was off to the side and something I could point to as I discussed different topics since then my goal is this really this school year has been modifying those lessons and modifying them not just to use the aquaponics system as a setup as a great model but also through the tied to the state standards Ohio is considering adopting the NGSS standards those are called the next generation science standards have to think about that next generation science standards and those standards really have less memorization and more application here for the state of Ohio and in that component is to tie in hands on application and these are just some examples of the standards that I'm working to tie into my curriculum and talking from molecules to organisms, ecosystems genetics and then just biological evolution and within those those strands there's a whole lot of other I'm thinking other standards that I tie into my curriculum and so here I've got a sort of a year long course of biology and as you see we go through from the introduction is characteristics of life and what I found is just starting with the characteristics of life I can use my aquaponic system just from there and really the rest of the year as we look through this is a whole year of characteristics of life and we're studying out the different phases and different concepts in biology and so as we go through we see that there's DNA technology there's cell division there's looking at biological diversity genetics and just an example of a unit is transport of molecules across cell membranes and in this unit we're looking at selected topics like passive transport which includes diffusion osmosis active transport of how cells actively using energy pump the nutrients into the cells and through the aquaponics correlations I can really talk about ammonia that's being excreted by the fish that a lot of times the students think that it's coming out as urine whereas the ammonia comes out through the guilt and it's through diffusion we can look at osmoregulation about how different fish and plants are regulating the amount of water that's moving in by osmosis different activities to look at an investigation going on that they were looking at just in addition to regular labs is how that water or how those nutrients are moving in to those and tying it to the NGSS standards with some of the pictures up here but there's the plant root system having there these are the fish whether they live in freshwater or salt water and if you put those fish freshwater fish in the salt water we talk about what happens to the water that would be either moving into the fish or out of the fish by osmosis we have a lab that we use eggs so we're not actually throwing live fish into a different system but we use what we call a standard egg osmosis lab and we can use that lab then to model what would happen to the fish if their environment changed this is an example it's a poster presentation that as our students are doing water quality testing looking at a number of the different parameters whether it is in the biology class in a chemistry class or later on in the environmental studies class they're putting this together as looking at specifically phosphates in the aquaponics system and what's really good about this poster project is the students get to take a little bit more ownership of the parameters that they're testing and as that student then puts together the poster it goes up on the wall and then the students that as we change students to as they're testing different parameters throughout the year they can go to these posters and then look at what they're going to be testing so they other students have already done the work so it's a great opportunity for students then to have information and posters that they're putting on the wall and showing their parents and other students throughout the year this is a seed to harvest a project that a lot of my students have been interested in the biology class as I gave them seeds before we germinated them they gave their seeds names I said that's like your little baby this seed is your baby you need to keep it alive and we're going to track it through we call it seed to harvest and I don't think they're going to be able to harvest it so to speak they're going to take it home and probably plant it when we're done with it but looking through this activity we've been monitoring it looking at the height of the plants over it's been about three months we're starting with the growth looking at the root systems we're looking at the weight at the mass of the plant in the cubes but we're finding that some of the things you just can't measure once you get into the raft systems as the roots grow together and they sort of intertwine with the other plants that we can no longer use that so it's developing just ways to look at experimental design and what works and what doesn't work in the design of experiment using the microscopes and so here we're also now using microscopes they're going to be getting the data they're going to be graphing it out and that's something we're working on now as a quarter project in addition to that they're taking what we've been talking about throughout the year up until now and the different concepts and they're going to tie it in with this quarter project they're going to go back and summarize and see how what we've been learning in the class the concepts tie in specifically with the plants whether it's the fish or the plant growth and even talking about the biology because we tie in not just the plants and the fish but also the bacteria that is in there also so just to kind of reiterate where we've been or came from Gary shared with you about what it looked like to incorporate that in biology we have parallel tracks of things going on with chemistry chemistry of natural systems teaching about pH because pH becomes a very real consideration because as the ammonia gets oxidized to become nitrate we're releasing hydrogen and the sophomore chem students would know that as the hydrogen ion increases the pH decreases so now instead of doing pH with stock solutions we learn about oxidation reduction reactions and pH using water from the aquaponics systems because now instead of it being something that's just a number it becomes something that has to be in a range so the plants can survive and so the fish can survive so it's how do we take a basic chemical principle basic chemical concept and turn it into something that has reach outside the classroom because we find the kids have a much higher recall and are able to explain the importance of it much better as an example in physics having the kids do design with airlift pump systems to move the water from a fish tank to a grow bed using just a stream of air bubbles rather than a water pump why because we can run an air pump for about one tenth the amount of electricity that we can with the water pump and it can move water efficiently that way but that involves design of how much water do I need to move how big a pipe do I have what's my air flow have to be so we can pull in physics principles and things like Bernoulli in surprisingly into aquaponics and then what I'd like to share is what's our culmination of this going to be a year from now what do we want to be able to put in a final report to send to Beth and Joan and say here's what we did with the grant money that you gave us and hopefully it's something that looks like this a complete curriculum year long curriculum at the 12th grade level we're teaching the basics at freshman, sophomore and junior about how do we wrap that together at the senior level that would include a unit on global change make it broad brush agriculture including traditional family farm sustainable industrial pretty much agriculture in any form you can think sustainable systems introduce aquaponics then work through aquaponics basics and system design our kids are actually doing the system design component already nitrogen cycling and bacteria so as we go through this you can see those pieces that the kids learned in the 9th, 10th and 11th grade coming together in an application sort of sense seeding we discovered with our seniors three years ago that if you ask them where does our produce come from the answer that you would get from some of them was when you go in Kroger's you go past the Starbucks and past the sushi counter and it's in that back section and you said okay that's where we buy it but where does it come from before then and you would just get a blank stare so Gary alluded to having the seeds the kids start with seeds we made a couple of phone calls to our friends at Baker Creek heirloom seeds and a couple other seed company Southern Seed Exchange and we have probably three to five thousand dollars worth of donated seed stock in our classroom that the kids get to use because those companies love the idea of supporting open pollinated and heirloom agriculture in the classroom fish anatomy right before Thanksgiving we took a week with tilapia spent a day doing external morphology fin structures all the structures on the external part of the tilapia then two days of internal anatomy so where the kids are working with fresh harvested harvest meaning scoop it out of the tank and then hit it on the head and then pit it so they're working with live specimen you'd be amazed at the respect the kids have for the fish that they're working with when they've been the one who had to take the fish's life as opposed to pulling some formaldehyde soak specimen out of a bucket so two days of standard biology kind of dissection and then we took the last day with fresh fish and taught the kids how to filet them if it's an agricultural product we got to be able to get the protein from the fish and then compost parts of the fish that we don't use aquaponics system our operation and maintenance we're working towards a two bay greenhouse at our school where one bay will be teaching and research where we'll have classroom setups the second bay hopefully two years from now we'll have a functioning commercial aquaponics system that the kids once they're trained in the classroom will become the workers operating the farm where they'll get the business picture they'll see the financial side they'll be responsible for planting schedules harvesting schedules markets to get rid of our product so the fish harvesting piece part of the kids don't aren't as fond of and I will with no intention of being having a gender bias here the girls did much better with the fish harvesting part than the guys did in the class then plant harvesting seed recovery and seed saving and the two things that we're still trying to figure out how do we effectively implement at the high school level our biosecurity and food safety components so we're hoping that a year from now in our final deliverable for the project we'll have the core outline with sample lesson plans to go with that curriculum so that's our objective with the grant current aquaponics systems that we have we have and this is in Gary's classroom a 75 gallon aquarium with yellow perch that circulates up through a biofilter system first tank removes the fish waste solids by settling second container so the water flows from here to here is a biofilter where our bacteria are cultured doing beginning that ammonia to nitrate conversion a second tank here that's a mineralization tank that this tank actually operates on an anaerobic basis to help us off gas things that we don't necessarily want or to control the chemistry of the water going to the flow beds and then the last tank is the mineralization and an oxidation tank right before the water goes to the grow bed so in the middle of this this tower here is really here there's a grow bed here and a second grow bed on the side so the water comes out of the fourth bucket splits with a manifold and goes two directions so you can see the level of growth that we're getting probably about 40 centimeters from the top of the grow bed to the underside of the lights if it was a little darker in here you would see the solid root mass from those plants that basically fills the grow bed underneath it and it's to the point that as Gary said you would have a real hard time pulling one plant out and keeping its root structure intact you can get it out but you're breaking roots all along the way second system fish tank below the table this has hybrid bluegill this water because it's media we don't have the need to filter out the fish waste solids this is another type of bed that you would be able to add earthworms to and be able to do vermi composting because we oxygenate the water and as long as there's oxygen the worms are happy so the water cycles up to the top and then triple overflows down to the bottom these two tanks or these two beds this has a brand of media called rocks that don't roll this has a product called growth stone that's a recycled glass product and then a little baby wrapped system at the bottom so here's our insulation with net pots although we've discovered now we don't need net pots we just use the rock wool cubes and push those straight into the holes and that goes back to the bottom this is a classroom that we're in the midst of converting right now this classroom will have six different aquaponics systems functioning in it hopefully by the end of the school year a vertical tower system here this is a window bay that we have space to put the three bed media system our NFT system along the back wall this is a a research system that we have a student that's looking at the composition of food the chemistry of the food changes the chemistry of the waste that the fish produces and then two of the students that are here are doing flow studies and so the front lab bench will have the flow tanks that they're using as part of their research and then just for fun in the middle I have a group that's building a Travis Huey Barrel Ponics system just as more a demonstration of kind of a back room or hobby scale system so that's the conversion of this space is ongoing these systems are used for a combination of student research faculty research for Mr. Delano and I and a couple of them just for classroom teaching that don't really have a research application going right now just to introduce the student research we had our first aquaponics student a young man named Tyler Kirby that's two years ago and he wanted to look at what happened in a deep water culture bed if you put baffles we think about King's Island very close to us how do the nice folks at King's Island keep you in line longer those wonderful snakes that go back and forth they increase your residence time in their line so if we're all about the plants having maximum contact with the water to uptake the nutrients let's see if we can do a similar thing so Tyler looked at just very simple baffles foil covered bricks put water in at one end of a four foot by eight foot grow bed and put water out at the other end and what he discovered on the basis of just one semester that adding those baffles increased the residence time of the water in the tank by 30% and he also discovered completely by accident that if the temperature difference between the water that's coming into the tank and the water that's already coming in the tank to the grow bed and the water that's in the grow bed differ by more than a degree and a half centigrade you get thermal stratification if the water coming in is warmer that water stays at the top if the water is colder it stays at the bottom which has really big implications if you're looking at young plants versus old plants and where the mass their root mass is if it's in the bottom of the grow bed and all of your nutrients are at the top are they bypassing the plants if the water is colder and all of those nutrients are going to the bottom of the grow bed but Tyler graduated those two questions remain unanswered and I'm going to introduce you we have three of our students here with us Christina Del Greco David Humphrey and Nathaniel Hipsley Christina and David are going to talk next and they're each taking a piece of this. Christina is working with the baffle idea to refine what Tyler did and he's using the temperature difference to build on that so we actually it's fun for us because we have two students who are building on the work and what science about if not setting the framework for other people to come and either confirm what you did or tear it down and come up with something better so Christina so one of the biggest problems and you can't answer the question all but one of the biggest problems we've known so far is that when you run through water through an aquatic system it goes straight from one to the other so if you can kind of see here when the water goes straight through all the plants in the middle get a lot of the new nutrients coming in and then the plants in the corners don't get all that much sugar roots are a lot smaller than the ones in the middle so what Tyler did is he tried to fix that with baffles and to direct the water flow to curve it around maybe it hit more of the plants along the way and then you can see over here these are bigger than the ones in the corner because they're getting more of the nutrients so what I'm going to try is to see if we can direct the water flow the same way as Tyler did with the baffles except using bubble tubing so to run that through the tank and then have the tubing come out in different areas and then have it flow through the tank that way so it would potentially start a control testing at the moment but it would potentially solve two problems at once in theory it could solve the problem of this by making the water run through that way and then it would hit more of the plants along the way so you get better plant growth and it would also solve a problem not really a problem but it would be another solution for oxygen concentration in the water because most of the plant systems have either an air stream or a few air streams placed at different intervals sort of running throughout the tank so that way there's still oxygen in the water but then if you use the bubble tubing you wouldn't even need the air streams in the first place because you had the oxygen from the tubing and so that is what we started yeah it's actually it's a product that's commercially available that's been used for open ocean and lake and channel setting for controlling the spread of surface pollutants and it's a great thing because the air bubble curtain creates a barrier this stuff can't move through but it allows ships to pass back and forth because there's no physical barrier so there's actually part half where there's a company in the Wapakoneta that manufactures this that we're working with it uses bigger than air pump it's air compressor size may even create continuous air bubble curtains that are a couple hundred feet long that are restricted only by the size of the compressor that you have got today and can you repeat the questions what about fish? it's like whales it's a very similar thing and I have seen studies that are looking now at what's the implication in open ocean setting for the migration of fish except they tend to be used in very restricted settings you have a ship that's leaking you have a situation where it's more point source pollution so they'll wrap that point source with that in our system because the fish are in separate tank it really doesn't have any implications other than maxing out the dissolved oxygen that's circling back to the fish tank the right component so my section of the problem is whereas you would think of hers as more of the horizontal component of the thing mine would be more of the vertical component it deals with the temperature of the water coming in and how that would change the flow of it as it went through the tank we all know that hot things tend to rise and obviously it's the same way in aquaponics tanks so the hot water if it comes in more hot it will tend to rise for the top of the tank which can actually have some implications to the growth of the roots if you have roots that are growing farther down you don't want hot water to be coming in because it'll tend to go towards the top and away from the roots versus for young groups you wouldn't want cold water coming in so the first part of our goal is to figure out how temperature will actually impact the flow when we just put it in and just see how it moves so what you can see up there is putting in water with a red dye which would represent the nutrient rich water which would flow down from the entry tank to the exit tank on the right and we would see with a camera how the dye went through the tank as it progressed and the other part of this is to figure out how we could later after we understand that part of it which is I think what we're going to be doing for most of the part of this year we would want to do manipulating the temperature to see how we could cause it to go up and down based on where exactly the tank we wanted it to be and I think that would be part of what I would do for senior year being junior now yeah and I have done a literature review that's got a lot of documents on what this has already but it doesn't have any information on its implications in other formats which is what I will be adding to the research so I don't have questions so like that the water that's coming in to that has to be water that's suitable for the fish to live in so are you looking at that temperature? it would be it would be more of slight differences it wouldn't be so big of a difference that it would be harmful to the fish to be in cause it would be such a different temperature we're looking at with slight differences like a degree or two how that would impact it I guess what I thought was this was about the nutrients being in hot water and missing the roots and I'm just thinking about this this slide earlier there was a picture of the growth table and there were things on the edge that didn't grow this big so like you said there were two things going on there just that the water wasn't really around those plants or possibly the water was at the wrong level I'm just thinking about how plants grow in the soil and usually most of the nutrients in the soil are in the top 6 or 8 inches and that's probably something we have to address and one of the things that we talked about with both Christine and David is replicating plant roots especially when you see there's such a mass it's got to be not the ultimate step maybe before they graduate unless I can develop and keep them next year is how we replicate that and I think our first cut is going to be taking window screening and cutting it into strips and then we would suspend and put those down in and see what that root mass that's obviously huge under the grow bed has on the flow dynamics I think that's beyond what we can expect them to do in the next year and a half but it at least paints another problem so as you can see from the title here the whole goal of my experiment will be to see if I can maximize the efficiency of a grow bed to grow more basal in a time period looking at about probably a month or so and as you can as you're looking at the grow beds here that's the current method that you use to grow basal you'll see at the very end of it the far end there's a lot less plant growth there and it's because the seedlings are younger and they do this conveyor belt system that Dr. Savage talked about a little earlier but my concern is that as you're having water flow into that grow bed as it's flowing down the plants are going to pick up the nutrients that they want and by the time that the water gets all the way down to those young plants there will be next to no nutrients left in the water and so if we're trying to feed healthy growing plants next to no nutrients that isn't going to work very well and I'm going to try to be more efficient about that so when I sat down to think about this I came up with the design that you will see where I have a floating raft on the top filled with plants I'll have about 17 of them and I'll have a circular grow bed so that they're evenly distributed and then the water will come in here in three pipes, three levels so that you get the top young seedlings and the bottom as well so it'll cover even distribution and then the pipes will come in at an angle so that the water will swirl around and sort of vortex as it gets to the bottom and then drain out the side and so in looking at that a circular grow bed of 17 plants will function better than a square grow bed and that the 17 plants by the end of the experiment will have grown bigger and taller than they would have grown in a square bed such as that yes so from a usability standpoint from a growers perspective yes obviously there's some benefit to having things where you can actually physically reach the plants and then you can do it with lesser materials how would you see the benefit of having individual circular ones versus like these long beds that you have here really from a setup for the dynamic of actually the harvest and that makes sense really I haven't looked at it on an industrial scale too much because I'm thinking a little bit ahead but not so far ahead that obviously if we had a circular grow bed the size of this room it would be a little bit challenging to get the plants in the middle but I'm sure if I can come up with something like this for problem solving that way I can look at finding some solutions to reach something like that thank you for your questions those are all things that we're writing down curiously and putting on index cards so we'll address those when we get back to the classroom so you can see the point I didn't make is these students are all juniors who put together their research proposals last year as 10th graders presented their research ideas in front of a committee that included the head of school the high school principal, the head of guidance two faculty mentors and in a couple of cases parents so these are students that are juniors this year we're working on basically a two year small thesis kind of project so what are we doing with this in terms of outreach, we've hit the classroom part we've talked about student research one of the things that we're doing is sharing this aquaponics stuff with schools that are in the Cincinnati area this is a picture taken about three weeks ago at a Cincinnati public school elementary where students that were my high school students built a small system that has a 10 gallon aquarium with gold fish that pumps the water up into what's essentially a Tupperware tray filled with grow bed media and the kids are going to plant seeds we still have a grow light to install because even though there's a big window here it doesn't get much light so we built two of these systems at this school and it's a North Avondale Montessori and we have at least three more systems that we'll be building at other schools outside of our own school system this spring so that's one of the educational pieces is taking what we've got and sharing it with some of the other community schools that are around us last summer Mr. Delano and I had a chance to be a part of a project at the Cincinnati Zoo and if you happen to have a chance to go to Cincinnati Zoo they have an organic certified cafe called the base camp cafe and they wanted an aquaponics system to be able to grow produce that they serve in their cafe so we had a chance to be part of the team that installed and started the initial operation of this basically they have two there are about 300 gallon fish tanks one has channel cats and the other has hybrid bluegill the water gets pumped to the back where their biofilter system is runs into the first two beds which are media filled beds and then come forward to raft beds and drain back in this picture was taken about a week after the system was completed this is actually I think taking the day that most of those things were planted now this is crazy and the media bed actually has tomatoes and peppers that grow up and it's a place you can actually go to the zoo I don't know if you're familiar with the Cincinnati Zoo it's right across the street from the train station but you can sit on the patio deck around this and be able to look into the aquaponics system while you're having lunch so we were involved in the setup and doing all of the initial water quality testing and we're working with them to schedule to continue to use our students to go and do the water quality work for them second project was at the Crone Conservatory a Cincinnati park board kind of their centerpiece green house they did an exhibit last summer on sustainable agriculture that included aeroponics, hydroponics aquaponics and vertical gardening so we helped the deal with them is if it's the Crone Conservatory it's got to be aesthetically pleasing you think about a commercial aquaponics venture like the first few slides we had very sterile very stainless steel food safety biosecurity stuff at the Crone it's how do we make it look good how do we demonstrate people that we can do sustainable agriculture so again with my friend Gary climbing behind a rock wall this is actually a 4 foot by 16 foot grow bed this is looking end to end so where he is in this picture is kind of up on this stone wall they wouldn't let me up there because I was afraid I'd either knock the wall down or fall in the water but again they had lettuce kale even grew vining plants cucumbers that had cucumbers that were about 16 or 18 inches long by the end of the summer and then at the end there was a constructed pond that had hydrogelugial and catfish so we've gotten to be a part of a couple of big projects in our community and we've also had a chance to speak at the aquaponics association international conferences the last two years about what we're doing in the classroom so not only helping people that are really very commercial very farm make money profit oriented as well as backyard hobbyists to understand what we're doing in the classroom so really you know what can we do to we joke about poisoning the minds of our young people or having them drink the aquaponics Kool-Aid but what are we doing so in summary to wrap this thing up we found that aquaponics can be a really dynamic hands on environment or setting that lets us do classroom instruction where we can model natural systems as well as agricultural systems we can use it for independent student research as our three young people have shown today and outreach where we're doing sharing it with secondary and pre-secondary schools community exposure and service and disseminating what we're doing my goal is next years aquaponics association conference I haven't heard the city yet but it'll be in September my goal is to be able to take one, two or all three of these students to that conference to be able to share what they're doing with the professional community I think it's a great chance for exposure for them the fact that you're here in the audience to support what they're doing today so that's where we've gone with the youth educator grant that the SHARE folks were kind enough to bless us with and just our acknowledgements of people that have donated stuff starting first and foremost with SHARE for the money to the funding to support a lot of this but there's the rest of our sponsors that have helped us in some way shape or form in particular I'd like to recognize you're doing hydroponic or aquaponics stuff the Dayton hydroponics people here in Ohio have been phenomenal with us they've donated light beds they've donated media they give us a big discount because they know we're doing it in the classroom so if you're looking at classroom applications definitely ask if they're willing to consider educator discounts because we've had really really good luck with that our contact information is here but I know it's also in the program we're happy to share what we've got I'm the child of two teachers and if I wanted to really make money I wouldn't be in the classroom so we're happy to share what we've got, give you ideas on lesson plans, share with you some of the stuff we've done so you can get a hold of us our addresses, phone numbers and stuff or MD, the guide, yes the lesson plans that you guys are working on developing a lot of this is that something that all of these school teachers might be able to use wow, I know it's standards or something the reason for us and Gary is the driver behind the NGSS stuff I'm a second career teacher who came from the consulting world he has to explain to me words like rubrics and formative those are words that don't mean much to me so he's the mastermind behind that but my understanding Ohio is an adopting state of NGSS of common core standards that's the path that we're taking is to make our lesson plans fit those common core standards so that would be public school or private school should the private school choose to adopt them but that's definitely the path we're going especially the students here I think I'm a teacher here at the high school and to get the kids involved where they're actually doing this game changer the other thing is I teach taking environmental science so I don't know I know you had it on there I teach AP environmental also they're very specific a lot of time spent on certain things we had any issues with that we teach almost nothing other than a cursory exposure to aquaponics in AP environmental because of the set curriculum and time we pull it in a little bit when we're talking about ecosystems we pull it in a lot probably the biggest unit is nutrient cycling because you've got nitrifying bacteria we've got de-nitrifying bacteria so we can pull pieces of nitrogen cycle stuff and use this directly but other than that my AP kids say when do we get to do something with the fish and I say sorry it doesn't fit that college board AP structure which is tragic the other comment I want to make too is your next level going to a greenhouse or something are you thinking about the process in your school I know we've got a garden on back and we're allowed to bring that food into our cafeteria feed for our kids that's my behind the curtain I haven't shared with a lot my hidden agenda is to have an FFA chapter and to be able to grow produce that we can serve in our own cafeteria there's a school the name of the school is Olympia High School that I've been to that's in Central Illinois that they have a 60 by 120 foot high tunnel greenhouse that they grow the school gave them the $35,000 that they spend on produce to their program and they now produce 100% of the produce that they serve in their school cafeteria the to this point it's been hydroponics but just this school year they've added aquaponics as well but what that brings to the classroom then is biosecurity food safety all of those other pieces if you're just doing it in a small system in the classroom where you're not eating isn't a big deal but that's the next step but if you're really looking at somebody to go commercial you got to consider all that stuff yes okay so the question is how how to how does aquaponics in terms of harvest and the application of nutrients or fertilizer impact that I think the best agricultural practices for harvesting because the most commercial systems are raft based systems they're set up very well for that that conveyor belt system where you put your seedlings in at one end you harvest at the other and the boards just slide on top of the water is um you know do whatever you can to keep the water from the roots from dripping on the leaves of the previous plant which is pretty easy because you're going from the end of the tank out you're not generally passing them over so a three foot grow beds what most commercial people will do is cut their four by eight rigid board into four pieces so you're dealing with four pieces that are two by four so a single person can manage one board easily without to do a four by eight with the weight of the plants takes two people and your chance of breaking the board is pretty high anyway that's probably the single biggest deal is can aquaponics stuff be certified as organic or inorganic if you really wanted to jump in with that there's a company called Friendly Aquaponics it's in Hawaii and the gentleman there is a guy named Tim Mann if you jump on their website and his email address is there and you email him he will give you more information on organic and harvesting probably at some point you'll unsubscribe from his list he's a great very personable guy to deal with the Nelson and Paid folks in Wisconsin are very helpful a woman named Sylvia Bernstein with the aquaponics source in Denver, Colorado we can talk afterwards I can give you my email but I can send you a list of a half dozen people to talk to that are commercial people that's really nothing we've jumped into so I'm not as familiar with that yet alright well I'd like to thank you all for coming and spending some time with us and letting us share what we're doing