1 MILLION pounds of Food on 3 acres. 10,000 fish and 500 yards of compost!

I'm sort've new and also from Bakersfield, CA. Yep, the armpit of the world.

Anyway, just wanted to mention that there is a Hydroponics distributing farm here. I barely noticed it yesterday when I was driving to Costco. When I saw it I figured I would post it here because I was reading about this previously in the day on ATS. Are there other locations out there?

Its about time we need to start growing for our neighborhoods! Seriously been dreaming and trying to do some stuff in my back yard...
im still stuck trying to make alot of compost lol

The part of this video that I really found amazing is that it is non profit. And with just enough money to get this going you could have it up and running, and heck you could even sell your own food stores and make profit to not only keep going, but EXPAND.

reply to post by TV_Nation


Thats how rainforests do it. It only makes sense that a more basic version would work for us.
Very cool! Everyone should have a smaller version in their backyards.
Im star-ing that.

this is a ggreat feet kudos

police will come a raid it in no time..

Another method of ultra high crop output vs. minimal space and effort is the "food forest" method of permaculture farming.

These methods go back hundreds and even thousands of years in some cultures and there are food forests in Vietnam which are still producing the various crops according to the plan and work put in by someone centuries ago even with long periods of no one "tending" the crops. It's truly strategic and intelligent farming where the crops are chosen to support each other's growth, protect itself from insects and predators, and renew itself each season with no seed planting, fertilizers, chemicals, etc.

I'm working with a small team of people to develop cheap / free "kits" for setting up food forests, aquaponic gardens and extremely space and resource efficient hydroponic systems which are making use of cutting edge designs (the development of which is driven by the medical cannabis "industry"). Eventually we will have a tool for people to enter their location, available resources, growing space and select from a database of produce / protein sources according to their personal desires, balanced nutrition, etc and it will generate a set of detailed plans and instructions for them to follow to create the sustainable garden / farm.

It's taking a lot of time and research as we want to be able to make this available to people anywhere in the World, especially in impoverished communities and not only come up with the best solution for each person but ideally provide "kits" to them for no / low cost depending on their circumstances. This same project is also working towards other "products" such as alternative power, clean water, refrigeration and economic "seeds" which will consist of open source products and the facilities, methods and tools to produce them with the goal being to stimulate economic growth, self sufficiency and more.

Unfortunately, we're finding our efforts blocked at every turn by the usual resource providers but it's slowly and steadily moving forward.

Our best bet as a global society is to develop community resources for our needs which use sustainable, safe and intelligent methods. When you can get everything you need to live and be comfortable from local sources (the village economy restructured for sustainable / ecological methods) not only will you be safe from big corporate everything but you will also be independent in ways most of us have never experienced.

reply to post by ecoparity


Sounds great. You should not wait till you have every part of the world covered but should start immediately putting out the info and kits for the areas you do have and then just add to them as research allows.

double tap

Originally posted by hawkiye
reply to post by ecoparity

 

Sounds great. You should not wait till you have every part of the world covered but should start immediately putting out the info and kits for the areas you do have and then just add to them as research allows.

edit on 16-7-2011 by hawkiye because: (no reason given)

You make a good point but our goals and plans are to build the web portal for the project all at once. Because the coding will overlap it will be cheaper for us to code the entire application at once rather than break it up and then go back and re-work it again.

This portal will also function as a type of kickstarter for "charitable" work where people can invest in projects aimed at bringing sustainable quality of life to impoverished areas, create "village economies" in places which have been hit by lay offs, outsourcing, etc and the development of the tools, open source products, methods, legal paperwork, etc.

We want people to be able to contribute financially or by donating time, talent or materials to these projects in addition to investment / micro investment. We also hope to offer an X-prize to help develop affordable solar / wind power devices, water generation, food storage and cooking alternatives to charcoal.

I'm funding the project completely by myself so it's slow going. We've approached kickstarter and other similar websites which claim to support this type of work and been turned down, financing was denied despite perfect credit and pre-approved offers of financing for just about anything else you can imagine (cars, homes, credit cards, etc). My conspiracy mentality thinks there are vested interests out there who do not want to see something like this succeed. We've even run into every red tape scenario you can imagine when we tried to set up the registered non profit for this.

It's OK, though. We want to do it right even if it means a slower process. This includes our own experiments with food production (which is really exciting, even a backyard sized system can feed an entire town w/ sustainable methods). There are a lot of companies who do not want to see this kind of thing catch on...

reply to post by ecoparity


I will buy your kit now , at any stage of its development, and sign any legal waivers i need to to get it done. I want to do this, but I'm not very creative. I am afraid with a somewhat limited budget and limited knowledge it it going to take too long.

Originally posted by eazyriderl_l
reply to post by ecoparity

 

I will buy your kit now , at any stage of its development, and sign any legal waivers i need to to get it done. I want to do this, but I'm not very creative. I am afraid with a somewhat limited budget and limited knowledge it it going to take too long.

edit on 16-7-2011 by eazyriderl_l because: grammer police said so

Wow, I appreciate the offer but I don't know how to describe the huge level of effort going into developing the design tool and why it's not ready at this time. Right now we're still gathering data for the back end, this involves researching the avg temps, rainfall, solar potential for each compass point of each coordinate, the growing needs for each plant, which plants double as defense against the insects normally found in area x, growing arrangements (part of the strategy in food forest layouts is arranging the various plants so they support each other in pollination, provide seeds for livestock / fish, break down into fertilizers which are best for these plants - it's enormously complicated and then add in the various data for fish, chicken, goats and non animal protean sources.

If you're interested in building your own aquaponic / hydro and/ or food forest system I'll be glad to assist you via email, feel free to send me a message and I'll see if we have data for your location already and if not, work on getting it and point you to some resources. I won't lie and say it's easy, but the level of effort is mostly on the front end. The day to day care for these systems is much easier than our modern farming methods and the better you design it up front, the more self sustaining and simple to care of it is over time. You can also build the equipment needed very cheaply, there are some amazing hydro designs which use cheap PVC pipe and maybe 20.00 worth of equipment.

This is a quite interesting post.. I liked it..

I am trying to figure out what kinda garden I wanna do now and going to start the fall this yr/spring next yr..

This gives me something to ponder on.. Looks interesting and neat.... I like the idea of it...

Originally posted by Lolliek
As long as my children don't name the talapia, we're good to go.

Starred! I was just trying to think of some good fishie names when I saw your post. "Mommy please don't eat Nemo!!"

reply to post by ecoparity

You make a good point but our goals and plans are to build the web portal for the project all at once. Because the coding will overlap it will be cheaper for us to code the entire application at once rather than break it up and then go back and re-work it again.

Why cant you have the sections for all areas set up but just not complete information for all of them and add the information in as you get it? Shouldn't have to rework it but just add to it.

It's OK, though. We want to do it right even if it means a slower process. This includes our own experiments with food production (which is really exciting, even a backyard sized system can feed an entire town w/ sustainable methods). There are a lot of companies who do not want to see this kind of thing catch on...

This is why you need to open source it and put it out as fast as you can as you do it. Helping Villages in 3rd world countries is a noble cause however they usually do not have access to internet and thus information like this. It will have to go to the first world first then when we free ourselves from the food and energy cartels we will physically go and teach it to the 3rd world.

Sometimes you can over analyse things when you really need to just get started and then all the doors seem to open. Just some thoughts...

Why not try this in the desert. Have a closed system where no water can escape and grow plants ?
Turn the deserts into greenhouse's ..

Originally posted by ecoparity

Our best bet as a global society is to develop community resources for our needs which use sustainable, safe and intelligent methods. When you can get everything you need to live and be comfortable from local sources (the village economy restructured for sustainable / ecological methods) not only will you be safe from big corporate everything but you will also be independent in ways most of us have never experienced.

I believe the only way to break the stranglehold that big companies and their puppet poiticians have on us is to learn to produce your own food and ideally power too.

As things are at the moment, we are only consuming the chemical filled, poor quality , nutrient starved produce , all designed with profit in mind, not the health and wellbeing of the consumer.
We all despair im sure as we hear yet another " food scare" headline, usually caused by mass farming methods where profit is king.

To produce your own food is to be independant of all this - YOU control the quality of your produce, and you stop giving money to those big corporations who are already too corrupt and powerful to bring down without a revolution ........ a food revolution?

I get immense satisfaction from watching my children happily tuck in to a meal that we have grown and cooked ourselves - knowing every little bit is packed with goodness and vitamins .

This is a great post and idea.
\
I'm so sick of these people whining on here about reposts. I've been on ATS 6 years and never saw a thread on it. Just because you read a thread on it 6 months ago doesn't mean I have or the next member.

Spectacular. These kind of things make me appreciate life to it's fullest. If and when this is allowed and pushed for on global scale, it will be a bright future ahead for mankind.